Maybe it's your age Watford (with all due respect) but one of the biggest changes in this countries history was that under the Blair government. Seriously before you come out with a statement at least know what you are talking about. I could go on all day about 'New Labour" and the "Blair years". It's like saying what has the suffragettes got to do with woman's rights to vote?
Well, the people insinuating that are the idiots. When we had the first referendum in the seventies only about 5% of the population went to university, compared to well over 40% now. Does that mean my generation is more stupid than the youngsters? Of course not. And of course most of the uneducated people who voted in that one wanted to join. Time passes, hairstyles change etc etc Of course I could say that the frequent insinuation that not voting Brexit and criticising our government makes me unpatriotic and ‘hate my own country’ is insulting too, but it really doesn’t bother me that much because I know it to be untrue. There is the chance that you two are a bit thick, but that has nothing to do with your qualifications or the way you voted in the referendum........ JOKE.
Is it wrong for people to try and protect their own interests? Are the ‘London elite’ less British than you? Towards the end of last year I needed a chippie. We got 3 round, all British, all promised to send quotes and dates when they could do the job, none bothered. If they didn’t want the work, why not just say so? I know for a fact one of them rarely moves his van from the front of his house. Eventually we did get someone in, also British, who was brilliant, did the work on a Saturday and was very reluctant to take the extra bit of cash we gave him on top of his very reasonable bill. Generalising about these things doesn’t help. Post the statistics on how British trades have suffered from competition so we can look at some facts. And anyway, haven’t you won this argument, the inflow will stop soon and has already slowed down a lot? There seems to be a shortage of all these trades at the moment. My son is a builder and has been told by his little firm that they will pay for him to train in any trade he wants - brickie, plumbing, carpentry, plastering, electrician - he does a bit of all of them except electrics,which terrifies him, at the moment, probably going for carpentry. Which makes me immensely happy, and not only because I won’t have to find a chippie in the future. All of my paternal ancestors have worked with their hands, except my Dad (though he was a draughtsman) I am the inept freak in this department, and it’s good to see the skills and inclination are still in the genes.
Lol, thick as **** me.......wouldn’t have it any other way . Definitely take your point that some ‘vocals’ on the pro-Brexit side look at the non-Brexit side as unpatriotic etc etc. Quite honestly, along with the ‘remoaner’ and ‘brexitards’ nicknames they have for each other, it makes BOTH sides look like a complete bunch of ****s.
And this is what has genuinely upset me most about the whole thing - not the staying or leaving, but the huge divisions and dislikes, even hatreds, within this country that it has exposed. They were there already of course, just brought to the surface now, but I see no way that the gaps will be closed. Certainly not by the current crop of politicians of all flavours. I’m sure it’s the same in other countries too. I had dinner last night with a great friend and his sister in Chicago. He voted for Trump - because he is a small c fiscal conservative and couldn’t stand the idea of Clinton. He’s a bit shamefaced about it now. His sister voted Clinton, and I had to ask them to calm it down in the restaurant as it was getting very heated. I must have been pissed, usually like a good argument, even as an observer.
You want to try get a French tradesman to do a job. Like your story I had 3 builders come around all French who looked at the job, priced it up and said they would send me the quote and not one did. We were talking £4K of work. In the end I found a retired English bloke, top notch who did the most amazing work. Funnily we talk about protectionism in the US but France is one of the worst countries for it. No sooner had I had the work done I had people saying because he didn't sign off this and that, because he wasn't registered builder in France, it has implications blah blah blah. What a load of BS. Nearly as bad as the chimney sweeping scam.
Couldn't agree more - on both sides too many are playing the man rather than the ball. But I would concede that leavers are getting it worse. I certainly prefer being called a lefty remoaner who can't accept democracy than a thick racist. It really needs to stop (the latter more than the former to be fair) as it isn't helping anyone. I have a lot of friends who voted out and actually get offended myself by the way some describe them as it's complete bollocks.
Not less British, but it goes to motive for Remain. Elite Remainers don't care if a British worker is hugely undercut by a worker from a poor economy (as the economies from the ex-Soviet states were). Just so long as they get a good deal. The Leave argument is that if we need chippies or sparkies, and they are available from another jurisidiction, they can be invited in. No problem. That would apply in your case, if a British worker wasn't interested. I heard a Bulgarian chippie say on the radio a week or so ago that a British chippie told him he wouldn't work for less than £20 per hour. The Bulgarian could do it for about half, and felt that the British chippies are their own worst enemies. But a skilled man surely deserves £20 ph. The disparity between economies is creating the difficulty, which was not a factor when the UK first joined the Common Market.
As someone in their late 40s, if my nieces and nephews are anything to go by, I would say your figure is 10 years too high!
I actually apologise for saying that you were unpatriotic. I was wrong. I've never thought you "hated your own Country" but if I said it, I apologise for that too. I agree that the worst thing about this whole EU vote is the way the Country has ended up so divided, so much so that I almost wish the vote hadn't happened. However, I am optimistic that the Country will eventually pull together (as far as is possible) once we've left and the dust starts to settle (could well be a good few years mind). I would say that the people who voted to join in the 70s thought they were voting for a trading partnership, not the elitist, undemocratic political monster that the EU has become (sorry............let's not go there again eh?).
I think we all sometimes take things personally which weren’t necessarily meant personally. It’s a tense atmosphere everywhere, not just on this (still excellent) thread. But the QPR and England ODI results which I have only just caught up on make things a bit better. It’s -12C here now and somehow I lost a glove last night. That has to be top priority, don’t want frostbite before breakfast! PS apology accepted but uneccessary. We usually work things through, don’t we?
This is it in a nutshell, I'd say a minimum 80% of those who voted leave were of this opinion. The problem with the Behemoth the EU has become is as it gains ever more powers and control it wants even more, it has taken on a life of it's own that now is not in the UK's best interests...
had they carried on ther would have been less idiots to vote leave Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's close Socialism's one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable please log in to view this image William Beveridge, who argued that those with 'general defects' should be denied not only the vote, but 'civil freedom and fatherhood'. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images Genetics Opinion Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet please log in to view this image Jonathan Freedland Socialism's one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable Does the past matter? When confronted by facts that are uncomfortable, but which relate to people long dead, should we put them aside and, to use a phrase very much of our time, move on? And there's a separate, but related, question: how should we treat the otherwise admirable thought or writings of people when we discover that those same people also held views we find repugnant? Those questions are triggered in part by the early responses to Pantheon, my new novel published this week under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. The book is a thriller, set in the Oxford and Yale of 1940, but it rests on several true stories. Among those is one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite, a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left. It is eugenics, the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts. Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber". Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood". Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes – honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 – was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the "hordes of defectives" be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on "the fit". Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild. Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German. I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp. According to Dennis Sewell, whose book The Political Gene charts the impact of Darwinian ideas on politics, the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit" was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, "that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor. Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too "drunken and ignorant" to keep its numbers down. We could respond to all this the way we react when reading of Churchill's dismissal of Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir" or indeed of his own attraction to eugenics, by saying it was all a long time ago, when different norms applied. That is a common response when today's left-liberals are confronted by the eugenicist record of their forebears, reacting as if it were all an accident of time, a slip-up by creatures of their era who should not be judged by today's standards. Except this was no accident. The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their leftwing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, leftwing reasons. They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak. What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it. Eugenics went into steep decline after 1945. Most recoiled from it once they saw where it led – to the gates of Auschwitz. The infatuation with an idea horribly close to nazism was steadily forgotten. But we need a reckoning with this shaming past. Such a reckoning would focus less on today's advances in selective embryology, and the ability to screen out genetic diseases, than on the kind of loose talk about the "underclass" that recently enabled the prime minister to speak of "neighbours from hell" and the poor as if the two groups were synonymous. Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as means rather than ends. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.
Ok, you're all very clever, and statistically only 33% of you are racist. I've lived and worked in the EU for quite a long time too, Ellers - 44 years to be exact.
I can almost hear the sneering smugness in your post there Stroller. Keep it up fella ‘cos you just emphasise the points being made.
I think the people who didn’t bother to vote remain are feeling pretty thick at the moment It allowed a protest vote to win over understandably The clever people have already left
Get over it, 'fella'. To be perfectly honest, I typed that bit and was going to post it with a winking smiley as a joke, but decided against, because I thought that the sensitive types on here wouldn't see the funny side. I then replied to Ellers, forgetting that it was still there. Oops! If you want sneering smugness, check out Ellers' reply to Watford (West Windsor).
Not sensitive and I’ve really nothing to get over.....just pointing out how smug and arrogant you came over....sorry if I offended your sensitive self (You see I put a smiley)
I used to like my local chippie even though they were Italian. They did a great piece of Cod and the Rock Salmon was pretty good as well!
