Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Is uk short on fuel, or just short on people to deliver it. Last night I heard a very loud plane, went onto flight radar and it was a US Navy fuel plane, can carry 55 tons of fuel it seems, so I tracked it online, just to see where it was going, landed in Cardiff.

In the original plans for C&SP/EEC it was the French had envisioned the UK playing a key leading role and we're desperate for them to be involved to act as a team to keep Germany forever under thumb.

Britain of course said no. Island nation alone against the word and all that and seeing themselves as next to not in Europe. Instead of the belligerent half committed role the UK played during it's time in the EU they could have chosen to shape the EU into the one they wanted from day 1

The Tory press have, do, and will continue to absolutely try and blame the failings of Tory politicians on the EU. It's all they have ever known because it has worked so well for them for decades and the press have lapped it up because it stoked controversy and shifted newspapers. The gaslighting of an entire population shall continue for quite some time yet, despite said attempt showing signs of faltering in the face of cold hard daylight.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy was a good book on all of the history to this.

Also Post War by Tony Judt

They'll never rejoin the EU.

It would take a change of generation at minimum, before they could ever countenance loosing that much face.

Closer alignment without actual voting rights is the future.

looks like the only real losers of FoM will be the British themselves!

That split of the party forever should have happened 2 years ago - that was the opportunity to form a "govt of national unity" and everyone (libdems, labour, SNP, recalcitrant tories) blew it and handed Johnson his 80 seat majority; they could have scuppered the CONservatives forever but they completely blew it - it would have been chaos, there would have been riots on the streets but it would have finished to tories

I don't agree with the idea that a change of the ruling party in the UK led to a complete about face in UK policy. If it were true, voters would feel empowered whereas the reality is they feel disempowered and that voting doesn't matter. Since at least the era of Blair's Labour (so, the last 30 years near enough) there have been next to no difference in the ruling ideology, bar cosmetic differences played up for political benefit. Within "centrist" politics, the policy aims are already settled, all that voting determines is who administers it. Brexit is best understood as desperate passengers on a hijacked plane storming the cockpit. The end result is uncertain, but its better than numbly awaiting whatever end is planned by the hijackers.

The problem with Brexit is the resistance of the alienated UK voters against a distant political establishment was led by a group of establishment politicians who had no major disagreement with the aims of the UK political establishment, barring that they should be the ones implementing the policy.

Well, there's a lot of pejoratives there but surely it would have been easier to demonstrate my view was wrong by presenting a couple of policies where there is a decisive ideological difference between Labour and the Conservatives? What you're pointing to only indicates the Tories are worse managers than Labour is. These sort of cosmetic differences are played up to somehow energise voters, but they are just cosmetic.

Lets look at the Afghanistan War for example. War is a decisive decision - the British spent 18 years in Afghanistan, expending immeasurable loss of life and wealth for next to no gains bar a wave of Afghan migrants who will undoubtedly bring Afghan cultural practises to northern towns. 18 years of Labour and Tories trading places, but no still the Afghan war grinds on. In this political regime, should a UK voter choose the Tories or Labour to end the war?

I'd agree - the UK is overwhelmingly a Conservative country, with short intermissions of Labour. Blair was a bit of an anomaly because he managed to present himself as Tory lite and bring in some votes that would not have otherwise gone Labour. However, you can only fool all of the people some of the time and Labour's traditional voters have noticed they have been abandoned.

But either way this Conservative/Labour divide is just surface level politics. The ultimate effect is just a change of managers rather than a change in direction. And the UK voting system contributes to this inertia of the ruling idealogy. UKIP won 12.6% of the vote in 2015, but under FPTP they won just 0.2% of the MPs. Surely it would have been better for the UK political system to be more representative of the disaffected voters that UKIP (however confused) represented. As it was, the UK political elite wandered into the deep dark woods of a referendum by a disaffected, alienated population which saw a once in a lifetime chance to stick it to them. There is a kneejerk reaction by "centrist" parties to lockout "populist" parties from representation, to prevent them interfering with the agreed policies. That is fine as far as it goes (majority rules), but it does breed the sort of alienation that leads to results like Brexit.