Jeebus, but project fear rolls along. Apparently, when making our vote, we have to consider what Putin and ISIS might want.
Isis would welcome Britain leaving the European Union, David Cameron has claimed.
Taking questions following a speech at Mansion House organised by the World Ecomomic Forum, Mr Cameron said he suspectedAbu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the terror group’s leader, would be happy with Brexit.
So what?
However, he added that Russian PresidentVladimir Putin would welcome Brexit, adding “I suspect al-Baghdadi” would, too.
As I said to Jackart when he raised the spectre of WWIII following Brexit, I won’t be considering what Putin wants when I cast my vote. Indeed, it will be the last thing on my mind. All that matters is removing the EU from our legislative process. Sure, Westmonster is bad, but at least we can vote to get rid of them…
Jackart’s argument – when he isn’t suggesting WWIII (which isn’t going to happen) – is primarily economic. Economists, frankly, are about as reliable as Michael Fish, so, er, I ignore that one.
To quote my comment to Jackart:
Economics is pretty much finger in the air guesswork at the best of times, so it does not enter into my rationale. And I am not paranoid about the EU – I’ve seen it in action for over forty years and I don’t like what I’ve seen. I do not want political union.
So, no, I don’t give a flying one what Putin thinks or wants.
My response to Cameron on the subject is precisely the same.
To be perfectly honest, when the referendum was announced I fully expected project fear to work. But who could have counted on the utter graceless arrogance, the mind numbingly infantilised scares, the complete and utter lack of humour (very important that and not to be confused with sneering condescention) and above all, the sheer number of them. I am watching, genuinely fascinated to see what fabulous tales these degenerate gurning half wits concoct next.
The bogey man is used to frighten children. With adults, some degree of subtlety is required.
It might still work for them, I for one certainly don’t discount the possibility but with each passing day I get the feeling more and more that the people might awaken and do the right thing.
Of course, if they do, then we will get the outright fraud. I did see somewhere some political whore say that if the out vote was by a narrow margin on a lowish turnout they would ignore the result.
I think there’s going to be trouble – I can’t imagine either side winning by more than a narrow majority. Farage has said that if remainers win narrowly the leavers would want another vote otherwise the Tories would descend [further] into chaos. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy people no matter who wins.
I think there’s an undercurrent of real anger in this country now. Personally, I saw the other day on the news one of our noble peers trying to defend the feting of the Malaysian president with whom UK PLC wants to do a deal only a week after Cameron had spoken out about corruption and it crossed my mind that we’ve descended into a banana republic in all but name. Then there was the allegation that HMG is promising to award lucrative contracts to businesses who promise to vote remain. Bribery in all but name.
“All that matters is removing the EU from our legislative process.”
+1
To me, wanting to be ruled over by another layer of ever-expanding, unaccountable government that by it’s very nature cannot work for the UK’s best interest is utter madness.
Voting to let these people keep ruling over us is less sleep-walking towards totalitarianism and more jogging towards it, smiling and waving.
That alleged conservatives support it, only shows their true colours.
Can’t they see there’s something fundamentally wrong when our Prime Minister has to go begging and scraping to the German leader if he wants to change something.
That people would bring up the prospect of war is disgraceful. Wars have been fought for hundreds of years to stop this, to stop foreign rule.
That they’d willingly give our sovereignty away is just insanity.
If we have to fight a war after leaving the EU, could it not be the Germans again this time? They’re really hard to beat. Perhaps the Italians?
Back when I was learning to be a scientist, I was always taught to state my assumptions before proposing a theory. The Remain camp thus far have not, so I’d better do it for them:
1) The EU will carry on forever much as it does now.
2) The EU is a good thing for it’s member states, as opposed to normal international relations.
The first assumption is incorrect; Italy has a steadily worsening debt to GDP ratio, which try as they might the Italians have been unable to fix. Parts of the Italian way of doing things are broken at quite a fundamental level (this is shown by the huge number of legal cases waiting to be heard by their highest courts) and their financial system is one of them. In the past, they have periodically devalued their currency after inducing great galloping inflation to fix the problems; in the Euro they are unable to do so and will eventually collapse.
The second assumption seems wrong, too. Comparing Western European countries in the Euro to those in the EU but not the Euro, and the latter seem to perform better economically. Comparing these two to similar non-EU countries demonstrates that even hampered by endemic Socialism, non-EU countries out-perform EU countries.
Italy’s problems are complicated. They’re very big on saving here; most of the debt is owned by the government itself, not the population.
A key issue is unlocking the southern half of the country, but this is very, very expensive and difficult to pull off due to the geography. And, until the infrastructure down there is decent, it can’t even begin to pay its own way.
It’s easy to forget that the northern Italian industries include FIAT, who rode out the credit crunch so well, they ended up bailing out *Chrysler* in the US! They couldn’t have done that if the Italian economy had been as bad as is often suggested.
The key issues are the sheer expense of providing and maintaining decent infrastructure south of Bologna, due to the mountains, and particularly between the two long coasts, which are effectively cut off from each other along that range.
The biggest problem is the lack of natural energy resources. Italy imports almost all her electricity from France and Switzerland, as well as gas and oil from elsewhere. Running high-tension power lines over 800+ miles beyond Rome and Naples wastes a lot of electricity as those power lines aren’t 100% efficient. It also doesn’t take much of a price hike in any of those energy sources to tip the precarious balance of an SME from profit into loss, especially as you get further south.
The country is in a holding pattern, waiting until a new energy production technology goes mainstream. Solar energy isn’t much use at night, but fusion or geothermal may tip the balance and finally allow southern Italy to finally become a net contributor, rather than a constant drain on northern Italy’s economy and resources.
The above is why I find vague, hand-wavy assertions of a nation’s economic viability risible at best. It is NEVER that simple! It’s also why the EU is inherently doomed: economic policies and laws that make sense in industrialised, well-connected, and resource-rich Germany make absolutely no sense at all in countries like Italy, which have the industry, but need to make allowances for its lop-sided economy and poor resources.
One size does not fit all. Institutions like the EU, that persist in chasing the idiotic goal of “greater political union” can never possibly work for precisely this reason. Whatever other reasons the Brexiteers may have to support their cause, that “One Size Fits All” philosophy that underpins the EU is all the reason we need to pull out. The EU is just too flawed.
I suppose it all boils down to whether you prefer to be governed by an unelected bunch of self-serving, incompetent, third rate politicians or a bunch of elected self-serving, incompetent, third rate politicians. What was it Pte Frazer used to shout in ‘Dad’s Army’?
The reason for leaving the EU is simple: Democracy doesn’t scale.
It works best at the local level. Like money, individual votes become intrinsically less valuable the more voters you have.
The less valuable an individual’s vote becomes, the less inclined that individual will be to vote at all, resulting in wild swings from one party to another as candidates appeal increasingly to the more obsessive fringes — the only people pretty much guaranteed to actually get out and vote.
Keep it small in scale, and you get a greater sense of involvement and your vote is literally worth more.
Which is how Switzerland have managed to somehow avoid all the major wars, famine, plague and pestilence threatened by the Remain campaign, despite having never joined the EU, or the Euro. If they can do it, there’s no reason whatsoever why the UK cannot.
I do believe that that nice Mr Cameron is palpably certifiable.
And to quote my comment to Jackart:-
“…And mine, Longrider, is based on Pounds shillings and pence…”
So I presume that means that your vote, your ideals and even your freedom are for sale to the highest bidder.
On the face of it Dave doesn’t need to use scare tactics. Certainly the money people are quite convinced we’ll obediently vote to remain.
On the other hand it does show just how weak a currency the Euro is, that it lost so much in one day based on a poll.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-18/u-k-pound-rises-as-opinion-poll-boosts-lead-of-pro-eu-campaign
The FT on the other hand isn’t quite so upbeat. They’re at 46% stay and 40% out – and having seen what happened at the Scottish referendum, it’s still far too close to call.
https://ig.ft.com/sites/brexit-polling/
Just noted, the FT is usually behind a paywall, so this must be their idea of a public service – just as long as it says the right thing presumably.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the outcome. The status quo is hard to beat.
My main fear is that by making the “debate” (such as it is) so puerile and uninspiring our politicians are, in effect, discouraging all those people who currently don’t even bother turning out to vote in the General Elections not to bother turning out to vote in the referendum, either. Because every non-vote is effectively a vote for the Remain campaign, and we’ll be stuck with the EU for God knows how many more years. I think that the Remain campaign know this full well, which is why they haven’t bothered to make their campaign anything more than the “same old, same old” scaremongering because, quite frankly, we’ve had so much of that over the years about every subject from the tiniest policy change to the big issues like immigration or the economy, that most people simply switch off the moment any politician opens their big mouth. Which, of course, is precisely what the Remain campaign want. From their point of view, the more people stay at home watching Big Brother, the better. What’s rather more irritating is that the Leave campaign haven’t been a great deal better. As per normal for our useless politicians these days, it’s been the same kind of tit-for-tat (“My dad’s bigger than your dad”) squabbling that we hear in Parliament pretty much every day of the year.
However, ironically, the inability of the Leave campaign politicians to seize the day and raise the argument to interesting levels and (in their case) point out all the positive things which could well accrue from our leaving is, to me, indicative of one of the best reasons I know for leaving – that the quality of our politicians (once they actually had to run the country, rather than just being, effectively, “administrators” for edicts handed down by the EU) would improve. Not for the first few years, obviously, because we’d be stuck with the current incumbents at first, but at the next election I’d suspect that we’d see a massive clearing-out of the present politicians once they’d proved how utterly ineffective they were in doing the real job of an MP, and by the time the election after that came around I’d guess that the “new” ones who hadn’t fulfilled their functions well would be swiftly replaced, too. Which is, of course, how democracy is supposed to work. So we may have a few years of uncertainty and chaos whilst we evaluated who was doing a good job as an MP and who wasn’t, but in the long run the standard of our MPs would inevitably rise – because, with a “real MP’s job” to do, it would have to. Without all the spare time they have on their hands now, politicians simply wouldn’t have the opportunity (as they do now) for pushing their own little personal hobby-horses around Westminster. They would simply be too busy, which, of course, is just as it should be.
Yes the stayers do sound desperate but what are they so afraid of? As a leaver, I don’t for a second expect the leave vote to be carried and, even if it is, there are plenty of unwritten get out clauses that the stayers can use to pretend that it wasn’t. Do they know something that we don’t? Maybe they are so much more afraid of losing than we are. If we lose, I feel that a sort of resigned shrug is the appropriate reaction. If the stayers lose I imagine that there will be some kind of terrified panic, oh noes, we have disconnected ourselves from Eutopia, whatever shall we do?