I would have thought that the border issue guaranteed by the Good Friday agreement, regardless. Therefore, both Governments are duty bound to keep an open border. Another border that may become an issue is that between Gibraltar and Spain. With both being in the EU, the Spanish cannot close the border but post exit expect the Spanish to become a lot more belligerent. This will be a pity as the Gibraltarians voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU.
If someone doesn't like the verdicts by our own high court judges they can go to Europe to get the verdict overturned. Also the human rights court..........some of their decisions leave a lot to be desired too and yes they too can over rule our judges.
OK, here's one that immediately leaps to mind. Not so long ago the car manufacturers used to charge a much higher price for cars sold in the UK. A million reasons were raised by the manufacturers to tell us why it had to be so. You're old enough to remember the times when guides were being sold on how to call a dealer in Belgium, order a right hand drive car there, wait awhile (the manufacturers were trying to make it hard) then go and personally import it. Tens of thousands of people ended up doing it. Then the EU created a "law that other countries had to abide by" to prevent manufacturers doing it. Now we pay the same as the rest of Europe for our cars. I'm interested to hear why that was a bad thing. Vin
No they don't - they go to the Court of Appeal - then to the Supreme Court. It only gets referred to Brussels on an issue of interpretation of the Directives that the EU have laid out. I think there is a conflation of two very different legal procedures by many, not necessarily you, on the LEAVE side: The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), based in Brussels, deals with interpretations and referrals relating to specific Directives and Legislation enacted by the EU, and Member States can refer cases if they are unsure of their application. The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, deals with Human rights cases, and applies legal reasoning which is compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights. That can be related to the deportation of Terrorists, the right to privacy, and all those things. To me, it seems most people on the LEAVE side, have a problem with this court (I don't as it happens), but leaving the EU does absolutely bugger all to this. We remain a party to that court, and that will not change.
Vin mate...you know as well as I do not all laws are wrong and I never said they were. But why should they have the right to over rule our laws? Good or bad they are our laws. If they are bad we have a democratic way in our own country to get them changed.
From my perspective, I hope this remains open as things political will move on. This could be a window to discuss the serious domestic and international issues such as the NHS, Education, tax, the Middle East. Things may have got a bit heated regarding the EU debate, but I think most people on here do seem to respect an alternative view. A fine example are Beddytare whose comments are well thought out and measured, regardless of his own convictions. Beddy for PM!!
You asked "please explain why they should make any laws that other country's have to abide by and made by non elected people?" I've given you a case where they did, where it was a good thing that what German, French and British car manufacturers would have classed as "our laws" were overruled. If you accept that the result of that change was a good thing then, in my opinion only, you're accepting that sometimes it's a good thing for EU rules to hold sway over local rules. By the way if rules are bad in Europe we did have a way to get them changed, just nobody went to the polls for MEPs. Vin
Just on thought. I have my passport in front of me that says I am a holder of one that says: European Union United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... As a citizen of the UK and EU, surely the Government has to honour that pledge in issuing such as passport otherwise it has issued me and millions more under false pretences? Just to twist things a bit, surely the Government has no right to implement Article 50 under the Lisbon Treaty until all such passports have expired, so that could be 10 years down the line. Maybe I should write to somebody like Peter Mandelson who will know a lot more about this matter.
Thanks for posting that . My Dad bought an Alfa Romeo in Belgium for about £5,000 less than the UK dealer price, which was around 20% less. He voted Leave so I'll enjoy reminding him !
thanks I'll find a new job it's a big city but it'll be tough for a little while as we just moved to woking and were saving to buy a place. Got no choice but to get on with it, I'm angry and sad about the result but what can you do.
I agree (not necessarily the bit about Beddy for PM), I have found some of the arguments really interesting and thought provoking. As a result I do not normally respond immediately, preferring time to think about what has been said. I don't think enough of this type of discussion takes place anymore. The result is people say politics is of no interest to them (often middle ground thinkers) which leaves those with extreme views to hold court. Eventually this leads to a divided society - as evidenced not only by the vote, but also the entrenched views of those representing each side. Strangely I have more time for politicians committed to their viewpoints (as much as a may dislike what they stand for) than those who sway with the wind just to be popular and get votes.
I agree with the suggestion that this thread remains open. It's up to the posters to keep it civil and to respect other people's views and opinions. I am extremely concerned with the impact this vote will have on the NHS, especially as the three most high profile Tories, that led the Leave campaign, and the most likely to be near the top of a reformed Cabinet, following Dave's departure, all have history for wanting NHS reforms that range from payments at the point of service to an insurance based care system, as in the USA.
This will be my last post on this thread and probably on this forum until this thread is closed or maybe there is a way to offer a "hide this thread" option. I have no wish to talk politics on here and the temptation to read a thread that is there on a subject I am very passionate about (which is politics as a whole) is too strong for me to able to just ignore the thread so it either goes before the season starts or I will follow Saints on my own. I will make no apologies about what I said because it is true. I will however apologise if people like Fat Le Tiss thought I had directed it at him because he has been really measured even though he is obviously very concerned and upset. However it is not sufficient for anybody that generalises people as idiots to then politely say it was directed at those few that do not understand the subject and not those of us who have a pretty in depth knowledge of the subject or indeed follow politics and its internal workings as closely as I do. I am an accountant by trade, not qualified because I am useless at theoretical learning for reasons that will become obvious in the following paragraph. I am amazing at practical on the job training but that is not something that would be of any use on a CV. “Give me the job and I’ll learn it please believe me.” I am incapable of working in the modern office environment having to talk face to face with people or communicate things or present things. The internet is my life saver and it may sound strange to people that do not understand autism of any severity that the internet gives me an outlet where I can talk to people without turning into a dumb mute that cannot get out an coherent word in conversation with anyone I am not comfortable in the presence of. What is laughable is that the same people that have generalised Tory voters as right wing are now doing the same with leavers. It is laughable when people are warbling on about left wing and right wing when what you will find is that the majority of this leave vote as well as the majority of the last UKIP vote is what people used to call the "traditional Labour vote." You have to understand that Left/right in politics is nonexistent in the modern world in the way it is used. I hear people describing a pre EU UK with 3 day weeks, dirty beaches etc. This is nothing to do with the EU this is purely describing 1970s western countries. The world has moved on not because of the EU but because the world itself has moved on. When I talked of neo-lib university educated people I am describing a large portion of those on social media and flashing up on telly like Will Self's disgusting aggressive snarling performance last night on CH4 news where he was almost in the face of Dreda Say Mitchell frothing at the mouth and his saliva going everywhere from his hatred of someone who had a different opinion to him. John Snow did nothing to stop him, which is expected because he himself is of the same neo-lib leaning that when interviewing a selection people in Peterborough last year where one of the public in the panel described a factory in Wisbech where her son had worked that made virtually the whole of the shop floor workforce redundant and the following Monday the minibuses started to arrive. He moved quickly on to the next person and seemingly hadn’t taken it in because his next question was about people just coming here to work and Lazy British. It is this refusal to believe that millions in the East Midlands and other areas have been experiencing this phenomenon that has driven a huge working class vote and not racism or xenophobia or bigotry. People may talk of immigrants this and immigrants that but they are not educated as highly as other people and that is the language they use. They are describing their experience. They have lost their jobs to immigrants. Jobs that they were doing. From 2004 to the present day there has been a mass cull of the bottom of the pile British worker and we have been piled up in the same group with the scroungers and dossers and the establishment has built up the “lazy Brit” myth and the large employers have jumped on the bandwagon. It suits them to have this cover. The Brits are not lazy we just cost more. We did not ask for the disastrous minimum wage because it meant employers now had a base to reduce our wages to. We were paid higher than the minimum wage in our crap jobs and we were graded so that in some of these jobs people could work up the grades and still be doing what you would describe as a rubbish job but be paid as much as £2 an hour more than the NMW. All of those jobs are now NMW. All of those gradings are gone. How do I know? Because I trained up a lot of these migrants between 2004 and 2005. I married one of them. I socialised with them then and I socialise with them now. I am more comfortable with them than with many Brits that have a superiority complex at my level of aptitude and intelligence. I get on with my mates who are similar characters to me but I find it very very hard to make friends with upwardly mobile strangers because they have an utter contempt for anyone who doesn’t use the language or words or opinion that they do. I find myself more comfortable with people that talk freely about the real world even though their vocabulary is limited and can be construed as racist when the majority aren’t, they just voice their anger in a way that sounds that way. If these people were all racists and bigots and xenophobes they would not have quietly sat back for a decade with all this happening, voting and hoping that changed something. There would have been huge amounts of violence and unquestionable amounts of visible racism on the streets directed at the “immigrants.” There isn’t because people are moaning about the immigrants but it is directed at the government. It is the government policy and establishment (including media) that these comments are directed at. Of course the establishment are happy to take the language at face value and label them rather than analyze the meaning of what they are saying. “They are moaning about immigrants” Ahh they don’t like foreigners. Ignore them they are racists. The result that you can see is that all the areas that have factories or farms have had large turnouts and large leave votes. Steel workers that have lost their jobs see that car manufacturers and others are importing cheaper steel from the EU rather than using British steel. Yes some car manufacturers have openly given figures where they do use some British Steel. One of them used 40% or so British Steel and said they have to import the rest because British Steel doesn’t manufacture the type of steel they need for other processes. No problem with that but why did many other car manufacturers refuse to state if they used any British Steel. So steel workers have seen that as a betrayal and voted out. The government itself paying lip service about protecting British Steel have blocked higher tariffs on imported Chinese steel as well. It is common sense that protecting British Steel counts for much less jobs than are involved in industries that use cheap imported steel but the government did not say that. Is it any wonder Wales vote to leave? Farms, factories, Steel? They are scared to be honest about these things because of the way politics these days gets jumped on by virtue signallers and Socialists pretending to be looking after people but ending up looking after one set of people which then triggers another problem and they then have to look after them and this is what has driven Britain to an almost state of collapse in terms of productivity. A weak Tory government that is scared to offend and an opposition that doesn’t care about the consequence as long as they can get on a platform and make this week’s hardship their live party political broadcast. When you all talk about fascism and far right you are describing something so small you would not believe it. The same 1000 people of the EDL marching through different towns might give the TV the chance to say that the country has a problem but these are the same group of people with a few locals added in each town not a local mob and what do these people do? They find a square or a monument to war heroes and chant football songs and drink. That is called freedom of speech my friends and they have their right to speak their junk, however who are the real fascists? The real fascists are not skinhead jack boot wearing thugs. They are the hard left (if they can call that) with their direct action and vicious tongues. They are the mob that marches against capitalism smashing windows of businesses. They are momentum camping outside Tory conferences and spitting at MPs. They are the UAF who follow UKIP and EDL around and are violent in defence of “their views”. They are the keyboard warriors that champion free speech yet anything they disagree with they want to close down and SNP are no better than anyone. As for Nicola Sturgeon. She might talk some sense but it is all front and what lies behind the SNP is not what they are promoting. You might say the same of UKIP but then UKIP are “right wing” and hated where SNP are an acceptable “left wing” party and it’s OK to vote for them. So when I typed “you can keep your lefty ideas” I am describing the way you are conducting what should be a debate and not your leaning. Just that the tactics mirror that of the lefty Neo-libs. “Idiots voted leave, racists voted leave, bigots voted leave, xenophobes voted leave, Little Englanders voted leave.” It is what that hard left element of the recent era have continually done. You disagree with their viewpoint and rather than debate, insult them as a collective without any caveats to limit the argument. It is why people like me find myself having to write posts with brackets everywhere and commas galore because when anything could be controversial I find myself having to make sure as little as possible causes offence and it is tiring because people should have the intelligence to just accept another opinion or decision without feeling the need to start attacking a group or statement. That is not debate. It is the opposite of debate and is what the left do in all elections. They attack the person not the idea. They deny the chance to talk about a subject by making the speaker have to defend themselves in their talking time. You have Farage on telly or Paul Nuttall and half of their speaking time is having to defend themselves. Rather than the other people debate these people’s policies they just call them a racist and then they have to state why they are not a racist instead of talking about their policy. It is denying them the same platform of freedom of speech that they are so vocal about defending. If you give these guys the rope they will hang themselves. If you constantly attack them personally then you just get people on their side. Let them hang themselves like Nick Griffin did. As for all this bank stuff and the economy tanking. I feel very sorry for people losing their jobs. I am worried and was worried that the UK economy could suffer but this couldn’t go on with the minions being cast aside and ridiculed while they lost their jobs to unscrupulous government and employers in favour of big business profits and the elite club moving further away. People have done what they feel is their only choice. That they felt they had to do it is where you should direct your anger but you cannot continually call a huge amount of people that voted leave idiots or racists on the back of small amount of that actually are. It isn’t just government or elite or media or establishment that has ridiculed this very large amount of people in this country because a huge section of society has gone along with the mantra as well and there lays the problem. Those that have the fortune not to be at the very bottom whether through birth, intelligence or luck have bought into this racist, xenophobe lazy Brit story and many people who should know better because they are from that stock but got themselves out of it like Owen Jones seem to have lost their sense on reality too. In terms of my choice I voted because people in my position who are normal working class people have been ignored and then cast aside as meaningless to the nation. They are purposefully wheeled out on TV so that they can be made a laughing stock because their vocabulary does not make their viewpoint clear and can easily be directed to mean something else. I am worried about this country’s economy and yes I understand that if the City tanks we are in for a very hard time because the City is virtually all of our economy but on the reverse what is happening now to normal folk and what has happened to normal folk would have continued to happen. As for betraying our children’s futures. What if my children are not able to get above that bottom rung? What if they end up needing a crap job? If they do they will have much less ability to get out of that situation. In the end I did not vote to stick 2 fingers up to the establishment. I did not vote to punish rich people. I did not vote without research because I am very very researched in politics. I did not vote because I don’t like foreigners. I voted for normal people. Millions of them that have been cast aside as meaningless compared to profits. I voted for the futures of many children that don’t have the fortune to be able to educate themselves out of this situation. I voted for the future of these people so that in time (years) they may be able to get back into the workplace doing a crap job for a crap wage. I voted for the majority of British people. I voted for me. I voted for my family’s future. In terms of short term long term. Long term to me is a generation. I would hope that in 25 years this country’s people have much more work no matter how badly paid it is. I would hope that house prices are affordable to the masses. I would hope that governments don’t choose who they are bothered about ignoring all others. I would hope that British people and all our friends in the world can be as collective as we at the bottom are because the vast majority of us socialise with, are married to and live with “foreigners” in a much higher proportion than those above us. In all no matter what happens I would hope that in a generation that this country can eliminate this hatred of the working class and I hope that we stop trying to shut down debate we don’t like because it only re-enforces those people’s support. 1 years, 2 years, 5 years? That is short term vision. I voted. It had valid reasoning. It was for what I think is right. Disagree with my reasoning but respect my right to make that decision and think those thoughts but don’t dare attack all leavers for not sharing the same view as you or try to insinuate that somehow 50% of the country did not have enough facts (or brains) to make a valid decision. Their own lives and their own communities and their own experience is as much a valid a reason as sets of numbers and stats that deny that their lives and experiences are real. I am logging out now until this thread is closed (or hidden) and will not post on here again until it has. Hopefully we can all get along again because no-one bar a tiny tiny minority made any decision just to stick 2 fingers up at someone else. I will read the thread while logged out so feel free to reply to my post if you so want and forgive any spelling, grammatical errors or typos. I have not slept since Thursday morning and my hands are quivering from anger and disappointment from having to tidy up my facebook page and other platforms I frequent for daring to have a differing opinion. This has been an emotional 2 and a half days and I have cried several times reading happy posts as well as vicious and demeaning posts on all platforms. Goodbye for now.
Ah Imp, there is no need to quit the forum mate, everybody has different political views and I am just as likely to annoy other people with mine. I have always enjoyed your input on Saints matters and you have been witty and knowledgeable with it. Please carry on posting as the forum will be a little bit poorer without you in my opinion.
Hope you find one soon. Edit: Just heard my sister just lost her job in banking. Good that "we have our country back" though.... This country is ****ed short term.
Hopefully, "short term" is exactly right. There are certainly a lot of knee-jerk reactions going on at the moment. A lot of things will happen in the name of Brexit that actually have nothing to do with it. Long term, hopefully again, things will end up for the better. Meanwhile, the rich will continue to find ways of getting richer!