im not moving the goal posts, im saying that none of the executive part needs be nominated anywhere. For instance in the current dutch government the top guy from one of the parties in the coalition didnt join the executive part. That there is a difference in how formation works (due to both national and party concerns amongst others) doesnt mean that its still a vote to accept and no other legal basis. You are just trying new arguments over and over in hope that one sticks
The reason this is such a big deal to Shock Linwood is because if Britain leaves the EU, it has to start paying for it's own cell phone every month
I have no idea what you are even trying to say here. Of course a party leader of a party in government may not join the executive. But there are members of the Dutch executive that have been directly elected to Parliament by the people, as in almost every parliamentary democracy. There is not a single member of the European executive, who is elected by the people to any position. That's a huge difference, and I'm bewildered that you can't see it, when even most of the most ardent pro-EU people acknowledge the democratic problem exists and needs to be rectified.
i dont get how you dont get that as long as the executive body isnt elected as a whole but only approved by parliament it really doesnt matter if there are people directly elected in there. Either executives are directly or indirectly elected. If they are elected indirectly people leaving the job they were actually voted for to become executive is to an extend undemocratic in itself
probably better for a PM but where/how did you develop your interest in British politics? remember you being very attentive with Cameron's reelection as well. I def care to the extent it touches our nation + my gf does lloyds litigation in the states so how it impacts her job. Do you tend to focus more on intl politics than american?
I did the whole political science and history thing before law school. I initially gravitated to European history as my focus on that major and then ended up doing comparative politics with a focus om European politics with the political science major too. And I enjoy following their stuff more I guess bc it depresses me less, as it doesn't have the same impact on me, as the idiots we have here. I keep up fairly closely with all the European counties, but have just always had a special interest with Britain.
I studied economics at Oxford in 2012 (during first Greek crisis) for one summer and endured one lecture a day from a very pro-EU professor followed by one from a very euroskeptic professor. Was fascinating. I can say I'm resolutely on the "leave" side of things, though both sides vastly overstate the negative outcomes of the other.
Doubt anyone is interested, but if wanting to know a little more about the reasons why this debate is raging, here's a very interesting film by Peter Hitchens (Christopher's traditionalist brother) on the history of British euroscepticism. It's slanted that way of course, but very interesting and enlightening.
If uk leaves, how long before Texas? I'd be for it if all the crazy Christians, gun fetish, trump supporters, tea baggers move there
What Is ‘Brexit’? A Look at the Debate and Its Wider Meaning The Interpreter By AMANDA TAUB JUNE 20, 2016 Spoiler Photo Britain will decide on Thursday whether to leave the European Union, and voters are deeply split. Credit Hayoung Jeon/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — With a landmark vote approaching on Thursday on whether Britain will leave the European Union, two recent events highlighted the stakes and the unique Britishness of the “Brexit” debate. Last Wednesday, in what Britons took to calling the Battle of the Thames, both sides sent flag-waving flotillas down the river to advertise their cause. The “Leave” campaign blasted the theme song from “The Great Escape” from Westminster Bridge, and Bob Geldof, a prominent campaigner in the “Remain” campaign, bellowed facts about fishing from boat-mounted speakers. The next day, a man fatally shot and stabbed a member of Parliament, Jo Cox, who supported staying in the European Union. The man shouted, “My name is death to traitors! Freedom for Britain!” at a court appearance on Saturday. Shitty AMC Show has shocked the country and drawn attention to the increasingly heated national debate. This is much more than a vote on membership in a 28-nation bloc. It is about national and social identity, Britain’s place in the world and the future of the European project. 1. What is Brexit? A portmanteau of the words “Britain” and “exit,” it is the nickname for a British exit of the European Union after the June 23 referendum asking voters: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” Photo Boats campaigning to exit the European Union sailed by the British Parliament during the Battle of the Thames last week. Credit Niklas Halle'N/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The debate leading up to this week’s vote is playing out, however, as a broader choice over what national values to prioritize. Pro-Brexit advocates have framed leaving the European Union as necessary to protect, or perhaps restore, the country’s identity: its culture, independence and place in the world. This argument is often expressed by opposition to immigration. “Remain” supporters typically argue that staying in the union is better for the British economy and that concerns about migration and other issues are not important enough to outweigh the economic consequences of leaving. The debate has also cut along the country’s famously deep class divides: Voters with less money and education are more likely to support leaving the union. Robert Tombs, a historian at the University of Cambridge, said this stems from a sense of abandonment among poor and working-class Britons. The Brexit debate has become a vessel for anti-establishment and anti-elite feelings directed at the leaders of mainstream British political parties as much as at Europe. Neither side is defending the European Union as a meaningful or admirable institution. In part, this speaks to particularly British views that the rest of Europe is somehow alien. This also reflects a Euroskepticism, or opposition to the European Union, rising across the bloc as the union veers from crisis to crisis. In this way, the Brexit vote is a particularly noticeable manifestation of a sense that European institutions have fallen short of their lofty promises and have created burdens, such as absorbing migrants or bailing out troubled economies, that many Europeans are tired of bearing. 2. What is the case for leaving? A lot is implied in one of the campaign’s slogans, “Take control.” Britain’s loss of full authority over its economic policies and regulations has so rankled many of the country’s citizens that it has spawned an entire genre of urban legends over the years, called “Euromyths.” These stories usually feature some aspect of classically British culture that is supposedly under threat. One claimed that double-decker buses were to be banned, while another suggested that fish and chips would have to be written in Latin on menus. The subtext is barely subliminal at all: Gray-suited Brussels bureaucrats are the enemy of Britishness, a threat to Britain’s identity in all its deep-fried, double-decker glory. “There are two things at play here,” said Brian Klaas, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. “One is the cultural nostalgia for Britain’s lost place in the world. This idea that Britain used to matter, Britain used to be able to do things without having to consult Brussels.” Then there is immigration. “There’s this feeling that we’re losing our cultural identity and our national identity,” Mr. Klaas said, “at the same time that there’s this influx of people who are willing to work for low wages.” A 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey found that more than three-quarters of Britons want the country’s immigration policies reduced, and about 56 percent said they should be reduced “a lot.” Though Britain has accepted a small number of refugees relative to other European countries, British tabloids have implied the country is being overrun by an uncontrollable “swarm” or “tide” of foreigners. Labor migration, particularly from Eastern Europe, has often been painted as economically threatening. Terrence G. Peterson, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said there is “a sense that Britain has lost something, that it has lost its sovereignty.” Opinion Room for Debate The Consequences of a Brexit JUNE 20, 2016 Opinion Roger Cohen Jo Cox and Britain’s Place in Europe JUNE 20, 2016 Opinion Editorial Nationalism and the Brexit Vote JUNE 20, 2016 Stay or Go? E.U. Referendum Divides British Families JUNE 21, 2016 E.U. Countries Warn Britain on ‘Brexit’: You’ll Pay if You Leave Us JUNE 19, 2016 “It can’t close its borders in the way that it wants,” he said. “It can’t have the economic policies it chooses.” 3. What is the case for staying? What is most striking about the “Remain” campaign is what it has not done: countered the arguments for leaving. Rather than defending the European Union or immigration as good for Britain, the campaign warns that leaving would be disastrous for the British economy. Photo Supporters of remaining in the union on the Westminster Bridge as a flotilla of boats campaigning to exit sailed up the Thames in London last week. Credit Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Most economists agree with that claim. Europe is Britain’s most important export market and its greatest source of foreign direct investment, and union membership has been crucial to establishing London as a global financial center. A British exit would jeopardize that status — and the high-paying jobs that come with it. The mere fact of the referendum has already affected the economy; the pound is at its lowest valuation in seven years. But it is telling that those who want to stay, including Prime Minister David Cameron and the leadership of Britain’s two main political parties, have not expressed much enthusiasm for the European Union itself. Instead, their arguments are focused narrowly on British self-interest. Their message is not that membership in the bloc is an exciting opportunity so much as a basic economic necessity. That is a sign of how unpopular the union has become throughout Britain, according Mr. Klaas, partly because of bad public relations. “If you get funding from Europe for a road, you take credit,” he said. “But if you can’t get funding, it’s Europe’s fault.” 4. Why are Britons so wary of Europe? Spend enough time in the United Kingdom, and you will hear people refer to “the Continent.” Travel agency windows advertise flights and package tours “to Europe,” as if it were someplace else. Photo Prime Minister David Cameron sips from an “I’m In” mug during a visit to a television company in London last week. Credit Gareth Fuller/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images As Mr. Peterson of Stanford put it, “Britain has always kept Europe at a distance, even when they were favorable to the E.U.” Britain initially refused to join the European Economic Community when it was founded in 1957. It became a member in 1973, only to have a crisis of confidence that led to a similar exit referendum two years later. (The pro-Europe campaign won that round with 67 percent of the vote.) A strain of populist opposition to Europe remained in the decades that followed. Britain has never joined other countries in using the euro as currency, for example, or participated in the union’s Schengen Area open-borders agreement. 5. O.K., so why now? Recent challenges within the European Union have given Euroskepticism new urgency. “There wouldn’t be a referendum without the eurozone crisis, which made the E.U. look badly organized and dysfunctional,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based research group. “The refugee crisis hasn’t helped either. It made the E.U. seem out of control.” Photo Prime Minister David Cameron, left, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, leave flowers near where Jo Cox, a Parliament member, was killed last week. Credit Nigel Roddis/European Pressphoto Agency Mr. Peterson said the deeper issue is that the union remains an unfinished project, which allowed these economic and migration crises to become so severe. The European Union never developed centralized political institutions strong enough to manage its diverse constituent countries. Individual nations have little incentive to make sacrifices for the common good, and European unity is weakest when it is needed most. 6. What will happen to Britain if it leaves? Projections differ significantly over the precise economic effect, but there is a consensus that leaving would hurt Britain financially, at least in the short term. Without access to the union’s open markets, Britain would probably lose trade and investment. And while the influx of migrant workers has created anxiety over British culture and identity, losing that labor force could lead to lower productivity, slower economic growth and decreased job opportunities, a study by Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research found. A Brexit could also quickly spawn, err, a “Scexit.” Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, has said that if Britain votes to leave the European Union, she will hold a new referendum in which Scots could vote to exit Britain — and then rejoin the union as an independent nation. Scotland’s voters rejected such a measure by nearly 10 points in 2014, but analysts say a Brexit could change that because the Scots overwhelmingly support European Union membership. If Scotland were to leave, that could dramatically alter Britain’s political character, as Scotland’s members of Parliament lean to the left. 7. What are the wider ramifications? Britain makes up about a sixth of the European Union’s economy. A Brexit, Mr. Klaas said, “would be akin to California and Florida being lopped off the U.S. economy.” That destabilization could affect the United States’ economy: Last week, the Federal Reserve in Washington cited the possibility of a Brexit as a reason to not raise interest rates. There could be political consequences, as well. If Britain leaves the union, that could give momentum to the nationalistic, anti-migrant message and policies of populist, far-right parties that are already rising across Europe. The implications for the European project itself are unclear, but that uncertainty may be the greatest threat to the union, which has helped bring Europe 70 years of peace and is already under growing strain. It also undermines trust between member states, whose commitments seem less reliable every time one of them toys with leaving. “Members of the eurozone will realize that things can come unstuck,” Mr. Grant said. “Entropy can happen.” In his view, Germany already has too much power in the bloc, and a British exit would make that imbalance more pronounced. It would undermine the European Union’s legitimacy and make it more difficult to respond to internal crises, like the Greek economy or the migrant influx, and to outside security threats, he said. Mr. Klaas said, “A more unified Europe is a powerful counterbalance to people like Vladimir Putin.” “Putin has stayed silent on this,” he said of the Russian leader. “But he’s probably silently cheering the pro-Brexit side.”
On a scale of "I just sharted while boarding my cross-atlantic flight" to "My exposed dick is within striking distance of an open bear trap", how concerned should I be?
Pavilion Opinions @pavilionopinion Apr 29 History of Europe: War War War War War War War Arguments about bananas. To be honest, I'll probably go with banana arguments. #remain
Leave seems like lunacy. Brits just need to accept they're no longer a world power and know their place. Starting with soccer/football.
Do they actually allow the Welsh to vote? I will lose a lot of respect for Britain if that's the case.
Be interesting to see what kind of turnout there is. Higher it is, the better for remain. I'm thinking it's going to be something like 53-47 remain.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc...itain-votes-leave-brexit-eu-referendum-2016-6 http://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/news/Brexit
From Vox: Brexit isn’t about economics. It’s about xenophobia. Updated by Zack Beauchamp on June 23, 2016, 10:10 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp [email protected] Spoiler (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) When my girlfriend and I were in London last week, a drunk man accosted us at a pub. That’s pretty par for the course there, in my experience. But this one — a middle-aged, dark-haired white guy we’ll call "Bob" — was different. He didn’t want to talk about soccer, or real ale, or his feelings on Americans. No, Bob wanted to talk about Brexit, today’s referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU. Bob wanted Britain to leave, and he was very open about his reason: immigration. The Muslims and the Eastern Europeans, he believes, are ruining Great Britain. "We’re letting in rapists. We’re letting in shit," Bob told us, repeatedly. "I have four children. How are they supposed to get jobs?" This scene isn’t unique. It’s playing itself out in thousands of pubs across the United Kingdom. Britain’s Bobs are the driving force behind the campaign to leave the EU. And the force driving them is xenophobia. Britain is experiencing an immigration surge (Scott Barbour/Getty Images) Anti-Polish immigrant graffiti in London in 2006. To understand why Brexit is, at its heart, about immigration, you need to understand a little about the history of immigration to Britain. Before the European Union was created in 1993, immigration wasn’t a huge deal in the UK. Net migration — the number of people who move to the UK minus the number of people who move out of it — was less than 100,000 annually. After that, however, things changed. "Between 1993 and 2014 the foreign-born population in the UK more than doubled from 3.8 million to around 8.3 million," Oxford researchers Cinzia Rienzo and Carlos Vargas-Silva write. "During the same period, the number of foreign citizens increased from nearly 2 million to more than 5 million." This can’t all be laid at the EU’s feet. India and Pakistan are the first and third largest sources of British immigration, respectively. But the EU played a major part, as EU rules restrict the ability of member states to bar migration from other EU member states. Between 2004 and 2014, when immigration to the UK really took off, the percentage of migrants entering the UK from Europe spiked. It went from a little over 25 percent to a little under 50 percent, which means that Europe has driven a lot of the recent rise in the UK’s immigrant population. There are basically two reasons for this. First, the EU starting expanding in 2004 to include mostly post-Communist countries in central and eastern Europe. These countries are poorer, which means that when they acceded to the EU, their citizens were more likely to move out of them to find work in richer countries such as the UK. Indeed, Poland is now the second-largest source of immigrants to the UK, just behind India. These "accession" countries were a major driver of European immigration to Britain in the past decade, as this chart from Oxford’s Migration Observatory shows: (Oxford Migration Observatory) Second, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent eurozone crisis impoverished some historically wealthier countries, such as Spain, Italy, and Portugal. As unemployment rose in those countries, their citizens started to look to other EU nations for employment opportunities. The British labor market was relatively easy to break into, and lots of people across Europe speak English, so it was a natural target for these southern Europeans. This, together with the continued influx of people from the "accession" states, resulted in the number of EU-born people living in the UK reaching over 3 million by 2015. It also resulted in the EU becoming inextricably linked with immigration in the minds of a lot of Brits. They weren’t used to mass immigration, but since joining the EU they’ve been getting a whole lot of it. And not all of Britain’s citizens, as it turns out, are happy about this state of affairs. Anti-immigrant backlash is driving support for Brexit (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Xenophobia exists in basically every country on Earth. The UK is no exception: Polling data shows high levels of hostility to immigrants going back decades before mass immigration began. But the huge increase in immigration in the past 20 years made this sentiment politically potent, fueling an anti-immigrant backlash. Over the course of the past 20 years, the percentage of Britons ranking "immigration/race relations" as among the country’s most important issues has gone from near zero percent to about 45 percent. Seventy-seven percent of Brits today believe that immigration levels should be reduced. As a result, anti-immigrant demagoguery has become politically potent. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by a Donald Trump-style populist demagogue named Nigel Farage, began life as an irrelevant anti-EU party in the early '90s. But in the past 10 years, UKIP’s poll numbers have soared: It got 4 million votes in the 2015 election, the third-largest national vote total in the country. UKIP has done this by focusing, obsessively, on the threat from immigrants, both from inside the EU and out. Muslims are a favorite Farage bugaboo. Since the European migrant crisis began, he has warned that EU membership will force the UK to let in large numbers of Muslim refugees. "There is an especial problem with some of the people who’ve come here and who are of the Muslim religion who don’t want to become part of our culture," Farage said in a 2015 interview. "People do see a fifth column living within our country, who hate us and want to kill us." But UKIP is also perfectly happy to target non-Muslim EU immigrants, particularly those from eastern Europe. UKIP treats these people essentially the way that Trump treats Mexicans: blasting them, as our new pub friend Bob had, as criminals stealing British jobs. In 2014, for example, Farage warned of a "Romanian crime wave" in the UK. He has also proposed a law that would allow British employers to discriminate against non-Brits in hiring, calling for "British jobs for British workers." At the same time, the center-right Conservative Party has also grown more hostile to the EU and the increased immigration it represents, out of both genuine conviction and a sense that catering to anti-European sentiment is good politics. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who supports remaining in the EU, is opposed by about half of his own party’s members of Parliament. Perhaps the most famous "Leave" supporter, aside from Farage, is Boris Johnson, the Conservative former mayor of London. Farage and the Johnson flank of the Conservative Party are the reason that the Brexit vote is happening. Because they believe (correctly) that Britain can’t radically reduce immigration without leaving the EU, pushing Brexit is one of their top priorities. As immigration has grown, so has their influence. This, along with broader Euroskepticism fostered by the Euro crisis, allowed them to push Brexit onto the political agenda and ultimately force Cameron to hold a referendum on it. Hence why the Brexit vote is happening now, as opposed to several years ago. "There are two main political reasons [Brexit is coming to a vote]," Will Somerville, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, writes. "The internal politics of a governing Conservative Party that has become increasingly Euroskeptic, and the anti-immigration-fueled rise of the UK Independence Party." This immigration rhetoric has, without a doubt, dominated the pro-Leave side of the Brexit debate. Rhetoric from this camp’s supporters, over and over again, returns to the need to reduce immigration levels. "Many campaigners in favour of leaving the EU see immigration as their trump card," the Financial Times writes. It is also, according to polling, their strongest issue with the public. A May 2016 poll found that 52 percent of Britons believe that Brexit would improve the UK immigration system, while only 21 percent said remaining would do the same. Anti-EU voters tend to come either from the ranks of UKIP supporters or the right wing of the Conservative Party. "The political leverage generated by UKIP and its successful construction of a narrative that blames deteriorating living standards on an ‘open door’ immigration policy — which, it asserts, is a condition of continuing EU membership — motivated Cameron to call the referendum," Ed Rooksby, an researcher at Oxford, writes in Jacobin. "They have … transformed the referendum into a proxy plebiscite on immigration." Brexit has routinized anti-immigrant sentiment Somewhat depressingly, the official "Remain" campaign hasn’t chosen to make a defense of immigration the core of their case. Instead, their main argument has been that leaving the EU would be an economic disaster for Britain, cutting it off from trading partners and triggering a recession. This is probably correct. The EU is by far Britain’s most important trading partner, and losing the privileged access to its markets granted by membership would likely be major shock. But this framing of the debate — keeping immigrants out versus protecting Britain’s economy — is concerning. It means that the question at stake in Brexit isn’t "Immigration: good or bad?" It’s "Immigration: is it so scary that it’s worth risking a recession to try to curb it?" Harsh anti-immigrant sentiment has become normalized and routinized by the Brexit debate, making it simply a fact of British life. Perhaps if Remain wins in a blowout this evening, then this trend will be weakened. But the fact that the polls have even been as close as they are shows that it’s a powerful organizing force in Britain, and one that politicians are unlikely to stop exploiting. The Bobs of Britain are not going away.
That's not true. They have exit polls all the time. The release of the exit poll in the 2015 election was when everyone realized the polling had been so bad off. There's no going to be one tonight because nobody wanted to pay for the costs associated with one.
No exit polling? WTF? Separately, I enjoy the insults hurled by our brothers across the ocean. So polite, yet so scathing ... It's beautiful.
Pretty simplistic article. Lot of people with anti-immigration beliefs that have boosted the Brexit vote share, but pretty asinine to say it's at the heart of the movement. UKIP, admittedly, is the vehicle for those people, and they got a whopping 12% of the vote share in the last GE. At a minimum, the leave side is going to get in the mid 40s I would think today. To say that's based primarily on immigration is foolish. Immigration is a part of the equation, but there's a strong history of Eurosceptisim from people who were the absolute antithesis of racialists, like Tony Benn.
I remember reading about how one of the main pro-exit guys was basically the Brittish version of Trump.
Considering a somewhat pricey purchase from a UK based online retailer. I guess I should wait until after this vote to see what happens to the Pound sterling. If these idiots actually vote to leave, the Pound should drop like a stone against the dollar, atmo.
I'd like to see a breakdown of how the EU helped Britain make these gains. I still don't know which side to "support" some would say it's pretty obvious based on 45% of the exports going to EU countries, but aren't we in a world market today, way more so than we were in 1973? would Germany, one of the strongest economies around (and main EU importer of British goods) just stop working with Britain? seems unlikely
Yeah, the group that normally does it, and is very accurate, said that with there not being a nationwide plebiscite in 40 years to do comparables/analysis/voting trends with, that it was too much of an unknown to spend the money on when it could be so bad off.
the world market is what it is today because of the EU, trade deals. It didn't just magically happen. Germany would not stop working with Britain. They would likely just re-negotiate trade deals but require them to be on the same operating terms of the current EU relationship; so it really wouldnt be of benefit/change to Britain. As for your support - depends on if you're viewing it as a Brit or an American. And if a Brit, where you are positioned in British society. The more educated and income....more likely you want to Bremain. The more blue collar, white then you're more likely to Brexit. So its not as simple as a Left v Right issue. Short Term this seems bad for the USA. Long term, this could be very good for the USA (but not a given). IMO, I dont want economic chaos as we are still recovering from the 2008 disaster. Timing is not right.