Currency vs Brexit: GBP Losses

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It's hard to consider this is a fair vote given Brexit is really a handful of traitors and tycoons, bankrolled by Russia, convincing Joe Bloggs all his problems are due to foreigners. The plans for after Brexit are also hardly democratic, intending to remove powers from both voters and parliament and hand them completely to government.

It amazes me people are saying "We must not damage democracy", without realising by supporting this they're putting the noose around its neck. A vote doesn't make a bad idea good. Especially not when the majority aren't going based on facts but lies and offensive notions of a renewed British Empire
 
HellCat said:
bankrolled by Russia, convincing Joe Bloggs all his problems are due to foreigners.
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So it's not all foreigners then, just Russians? :p

Putin plays a very interesting game and while I'm not necessarily a fan (or convinced the Russians were really interested in Brexit at all), the way he plays he kinda deserves to win. I keep hoping it's true about the US elections and that they've finally got a taste of their own medicine they've been dishing out to the rest of the world since the end of WWII. Undermining other countries' democracy for their own interests was the USA's speciality. Who are they to say Russia can't do the same?

HellCat said:
It amazes me people are saying "We must not damage democracy", without realising by supporting this they're putting the noose around its neck.
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Mind elaborating on this a little? iirc you're not personally in favour of direct democracy, but this was a democratic vote which as far as I'm aware is not going to have any impact on people's democratic rights to a say in how they're governed, which are enshrined in UK rather than EU law. I can see how it's potentially damaging to the causes of liberalism and globalism, but not to democracy. People could still vote in favour of those things in the future.
 
HellCat said:
I get the feeling you're taking the piss.
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Why?

Just as on the brexit issue the Lib Dems are the natural party of those like yourself who wish to see the result overturned, they (we?) are also (within England at least) the natural party of those who want a soft brexit - by which I mean one that leaves us in the EEA and thus preserves the EU's fundamental freedoms, whether they are remainers who are resigned to the result of the referendum or even leavers who wanted that sort of brexit to begin with or perhaps didn't realise/think about the costs of abandoning these things before the vote.

Not to mention that there will be plenty of those who voted Lib Dem despite the party's Brexit position rather than because of it. Just as, as you yourself pointed out, there will be those who voted for other parties despite being closest to the Lib Dems on the Brexit issue.

Telling people who do not fall into your section of the party that they are taking the piss by saying that they voted Lib Dem can only damage the party and, in so doing, damage the things that it seeks to achieve.
 
I would love for nothing more than to go back in time and not have Brexit, but I do think that continuing to rerun the same referendum until 'we' receive the 'correct' result is farcical. It's also sort of condescending to the Leavers, even though I personally still think they're all wrong about everything. The big parties are swallowing their own pride to various degrees and trying to proceed according to the wishes of the majority, however annoying those wishes are. For me as a completely disloyal, easily-persuadable member of the public, the Brexit vote itself was unrelated to my choice of parties the other week. I would prefer that nobody make the assumption that just because I chose not to throw my vote away voting for someone I didn't especially want to win, I actively supported Brexit back when it mattered.

I also don't especially blame the Leave or Remain 'leaders' for the outcome of Brexit. It's the media which adopts a stance and gives particular viewpoints a platform, and it's the media which people listen to as an unbiased (...) source of information, not the politicians themselves. Years and years of being told that 'they' are taking 'our' jobs and fleecing us, plus the overwhelming media interest in UKIP right from their inception, laid the foundation for how it all played out long before the first promises started flying around. There are a lot of people in this country with views I cannot relate to, but that's just reality.

R
 
ayase said:
So it's not all foreigners then, just Russians? :p

Putin plays a very interesting game and while I'm not necessarily a fan (or convinced the Russians were really interested in Brexit at all), the way he plays he kinda deserves to win. I keep hoping it's true about the US elections and that they've finally got a taste of their own medicine they've been dishing out to the rest of the world since the end of WWII. Undermining other countries' democracy for their own interests was the USA's speciality. Who are they to say Russia can't do the same?


Mind elaborating on this a little? iirc you're not personally in favour of direct democracy, but this was a democratic vote which as far as I'm aware is not going to have any impact on people's democratic rights to a say in how they're governed, which are enshrined in UK rather than EU law. I can see how it's potentially damaging to the causes of liberalism and globalism, but not to democracy. People could still vote in favour of those things in the future.
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Right now the chief issue if we leave the EU is the Tories pushing a Repeal Bill. Said bill would give government powers akin to a monarch, allowing them to do as they see fit without a vote of either public or parliament.

If paving way for that is "defending democracy"....
 
HellCat said:
It's hard to consider this is a fair vote given Brexit is really a handful of traitors and tycoons, bankrolled by Russia, convincing Joe Bloggs all his problems are due to foreigners.
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You forgot the illuminati! Why does nobody mention them anymore?

Gross oversimplification of very complex systems seldom provide the all encompassing umbrella under which they all reside. It's funny how pro-remainers love to paint brexiteers as all being racially motivated and it cheapens any subsequent intelligent arguments they actually do provide on the matter.

A country divided is a country conquered.
 
This is why I made the "taking the piss" comment. Feels like all I'm getting in this thread are accusations I'm part of the tin foil hat brigade.
 
HellCat said:
It's hard to consider this is a fair vote given Brexit is really a handful of traitors and tycoons, bankrolled by Russia, convincing Joe Bloggs all his problems are due to foreigners. The plans for after Brexit are also hardly democratic, intending to remove powers from both voters and parliament and hand them completely to government.

It amazes me people are saying "We must not damage democracy", without realising by supporting this they're putting the noose around its neck. A vote doesn't make a bad idea good. Especially not when the majority aren't going based on facts but lies and offensive notions of a renewed British Empire
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To begin with, I would like to question the "bankrolled by Russia" part and ask for evidence. Rupert Murdoch has his own money, he doesn't need Russia's...

Let's assume you're right and think about the logical consequences of what you're implying here, which is presumably that only certain types of people should be allowed to speak about certain things. Is this not the dictatorish behaviour you claim to want to avoid? Then look at the type of people you think should be excluded from talking, the wealthy and those "bankrolled by Russia". Banning people that have had contact with Russia from speaking sounds kinda racist to me. Which is odd because isn't that what you decry Brexiters as?

You seem to be willing to give up on a lot of your supposed values to avoid Brexit. Quite frankly, I'd rather be alone with a soul, than in Europe without one. I'm not willing to throw away my moral scruples to avoid Brexit and I don't think anybody else should be either.

HellCat said:
This is why I made the "taking the piss" comment. Feels like all I'm getting in this thread are accusations I'm part of the tin foil hat brigade.
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Not to be mean, but you have a habit of making questionable claims without evidence.

Take this gem from the other day:
HellCat said:
It's not bias or ignoring facts. Evidence shows that Corbyn half arsed to outright sabotaged the Remain effort and has spent the year since avoiding calling out the damage Brexit has caused because he really wants to lead it, thus doing his job as opposition leader would undermine that. As a result he has aided a Prime Minister who has taken every opportunity to say Remain voters aren't legitimate parts of our supposed democracy.
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Evidence? What evidence? That sounds a lot like a bizarre theory you conjectured because you don't like the man, and given there's no sources, I personally find it hard to believe.
 
"This article is the subject of separate legal complaints on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited, and Sophie Schmidt." :cool:

In all seriousness, that article is really hamming it up. The meat of it can be summarised as Leave.EU and associates (potentially) used a secret group of data scientists, called Cambridge Analytics, who spread information that benefits them and use data analytics to target specific individuals. The data scientists in question like to remain private and perhaps have an overly close relationship with the Pentagon, another secretive Canadian firm of computer programmers and another firm called ASI Data Science. Cambridge Analytics have been accused of illegal activities in Bermuda, but it's not clear whether their British behaviour was illegal or not. (They're accused of illegal donation of services to an election campaign, not illegal use of data.) Then there's just a suggestion that because they've done work in Russia and spoken to state-owned companies, they're bankrolled by Russia, but there's not really anything to back that assertion up.

Once you remove the dramatics and ridiculous Mr. Robot-esque conspiracy stuff, there's not actually that much meat to the story. Various leave groups employed data analytics to find suggestible people and then tried to suggest them. And this is supposed crime of the century? By all means, question their use of Cambridge Analytics as a firm, and whether their behaviour and relationships are really appropriate, but I'm not sure there's all that much to be outraged about here. The real crime here is in the choice of analytics firm and failing to declare the value of services donated appropriately. It doesn't sound like they did anything especially illegal or even perhaps immoral with regards to Brexit.

That article seemed to me to be rather reminiscent of the propaganda-ish attempts to persuade the uniformed masses it's supposedly decrying. Where the hell does Sophie Turner even come into the story? She's seemingly just there so they indict other tech figures you might have heard of...
 
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I feel like a lot of the anti-Russia stuff in the media at the moment is just a continuation of the same US-Russia rivalry for influence that's been going on since they became the pre-eminent world powers. I have no idea how much of it to believe, but I suspect very little since there's so much propaganda on both sides. US propaganda is generally more subtle but it's still propaganda. Then when you see stuff like this:

New US Russia sanctions bill riles Germany and Austria - BBC News

Which is basically the US using political concerns to tilt the balance of economic power away from Russia and towards them, it's not difficult to come to the assumption Europe (and by extension the UK) are still just pawns in a power game between the US and Russia just like they were during the Cold War. Both superpowers behave pretty appallingly regarding the rights of other countries to self-determination. Is it possible Russia meddled in Brexit? Certainly, but if so I'm sure the US would have been meddling as well. Hell, Obama outright said we should stay when it's nothing to do with the US. I don't think Putin ever outright said we should leave, and I'm not even sure it's in Russian interests given that leaving the EU is likely to push us closer to the US.
 
So I've been wondering this for awhile but do you think that the Conservatives are kinda doomed over the next few decades? It's no secret that their base is older voters whilst Labour's is younger voters. There is a much larger and starker divide between generations now than there ever has been.

The Millennial generation are pretty much I believe always going to favor Labour and Left Wing Parties. The old theory that the older we get the more Conservative we become I'm not totally sure will happen.

Do you earmark likely landslides for Labour within the next decade? I honestly think the Conservatives will really struggle once Labour get into power. Of course there is always the possibility of Labour just messing up. Once in charge they not do the job and I guess the Conservatives will be there to pounce potentially as the opposition and the endless roundabout could continue. I don't know really, I just get the impression that the Right Wing politics will find themselves outnumbered by a Generation that has been on the wrong end of those politics for so long and with such huge consequences.
 
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Blaize said:
The Millennial generation are pretty much I believe always going to favor Labour and Left Wing Parties. The old theory that the older we get the more Conservative we become I'm not totally sure will happen.

Do you earmark likely landslides for Labour within the next decade? I honestly think the Conservatives will really struggle once Labour get into power. Of course there is always the possibility of Labour just messing up. Once in charge they not do the job and I guess the Conservatives will be there to pounce potentially as the opposition and the endless roundabout could continue. I don't know really, I just get the impression that the Right Wing politics will find themselves outnumbered by a Generation that has been on the wrong end of those politics for so long and with such huge consequences.
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Time to be highly cynical again but I think that will depend entirely how much wealth the dying boomers pass on to their kids. If the younger generation finds themselves being left houses and sizeable inheritances they'll probably become more Tory to protect it. If however (as I suspect is more likely to be the case) they find themselves with nothing because the boomers have re-mortgaged their houses and spent it all on themselves before they died and left them nothing but more debt I think conservatism is dead, capitalism having finally eaten itself and destroyed the spending power of the people it relies on to function through endless debt.
 
The claim that as we get older we get more Conservative is utter bunkum. By the age of 30 most people hold the views that they will broadly stick with for the rest of their lives, and those that do shift them are as likely to shift leftwards as rightwards.

However, the Conservative party itself has changed many times to match the views of the older generations at that time. And I see no reason why that won't happen again.

The thing that changes is what people perceive as being conservative or liberal or right or left. It's just that in the UK at least each generation has been successively more to the left on social matters, so the ones lagging behind have always been the parties on the right. Economic matters have historically been more fluctuating, but the general shift there has historically been to the right - there are far fewer communists around than there were in the 60s and 70s. There is nothing inevitable about either of these, though I don't see the social side of things changing direction any time soon.

Of course, it can take a couple of crushing defeats to convince a defeated party to change their tune to better fit the zeitgeist and thus be able to win elections. This has happened before, of course.
 
Financial Times

EU and Japan close in on free trade deal
Agreement would be strong repudiation of Donald Trump’s protectionist rhetoric
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Mauro Petriccione, left, the EU's chief negotiator on a possible deal, with Japanese counterpart Yoichi Suzuki prior to talks in Tokyo on Tuesday © AFP

June 29, 2017 8:19 am by Arthur Beesley in Brussels and Robin Harding in Tokyo


Japan and the EU are closing in on a free trade deal that would unite two of the world’s biggest economies in an emphatic rejection of Donald Trump’s protectionism.

Cecilia Malmström, EU trade commissioner, and Phil Hogan, the agriculture commissioner, are scheduled to fly from Brussels on Thursday night as both camps push for a deal before G20 leaders meet next week in Germany.

The talks are seen as a test for liberal world powers after Mr Trump upendeddecades of US policy by scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and threatening punitive tariffs on steel imports from allies.


A deal would open up new markets for European food exports and expand automotive trade between two of the world’s biggest car producers. Europe and Japan have been discussing a trade pact since 2013, coming close to a deallast December but losing momentum.

As the talks enter their most sensitive phase, one European diplomat described the atmosphere as a “hard slog” and “touch and go” with little certainty that an agreement is prospect.

“We are coming close to an end but the issues that are still left are quite difficult,” said one senior Japanese negotiator.

By flying in the commissioners, Brussels hopes to add fresh impetus as negotiators try to resolve differences over public procurement and the amount of agricultural goods that Europe can export to Japan.

The diplomat reported “huge progress” on other elements of a deal that would curtail European tariffs on Japanese cars and car parts and settle disagreements over auto industry regulations.

Asked about plans for Ms Malmströmand Mr Hogan to travel to Tokyo, a commission spokesman said they were following the talks and stood “ready to engage with their Japanese counterparts whenever the discussions require a direct involvement at the political level”.


What is Donald Trump doing about steel imports?
The US president is poised to deliver his first big protectionist action

With multilateral trade under intense political attack from the US president, an agreement with Japan would reinforce EU trade policy after its pact with Canada nearly collapsed last year. Separate talks on an EU-US stalled in the months before Mr Trump took power.


For Japan, a deal would replace the 12-member TPP as a way of boosting exports and reinvigorating its moribund agricultural sector — an important reform priority for Shinzo Abe, prime minister.

Senior officials say they have pencilled in July 6, on the eve of the G20 meeting in Germany, for a summit to sign off on any deal. If there were an agreement, Mr Abe would meet with his European counterparts, Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission and Donald Tusk of the European Council.

Preparations for a summit come as Brussels makes plans to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs or quotas on European steel as part of Mr Trump’s threatened crackdown on imports on national security grounds.

Earlier this month in Brussels, Ms Malmström said the EU-Japan talks had entered an intense phase and that both camps hoped to reach an agreement in principle soon. “This is an agreement that will help us shape globalisation in line with European values,” Ms Malmström said.

The commissioner added that she had instructed her chief negotiator in Tokyo to “stay for as long as it is needed to get this deal done”.

https://amp.ft.com/content/501846dc-5c89-11e7-9bc8-8055f264aa8b
 
Labour put forth an amendment on staying in the single market. EU hating Corbyn whipped his MPs to abstain but he'll be firing a bunch who opposed him, even though amendment failed.

The man is a lying charlatan who is selling his youngest supporters down river. But I'm sure at least a certain fanboy of his here will tell me I just irrationally hate St Corbyn.
 
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