17
votes
EU leaders have agreed on a plan to delay the Article 50 process, postponing Brexit beyond 29 March
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- Title
- EU considers 22 May Brexit delay
- Published
- Mar 21 2019
- Word count
- 522 words
A friend of mine (s/o Michael) compared Brexit to a man solemnly dismantling his house brick by brick because of the results of a twitter poll, and I think about that metaphor basically any time I read news relating to the whole thing.
They could back out any time is the crazy bit. They won't, because that would require a major world leader actually just admitting that they'd done something wrong and wanted to reverse course (and it'd torpedo the careers of all involved), but they could, and I think that in a way that actually makes it worse.
it's really quite amazing how absolutely fucked everyone here is. like, just to try and recap everything going on here:
nobody wants to be the one holding the grenade at the end if the outcome is no deal. nobody wants no deal. however, no singular deal can command the confidence of a majority of the house of commons, so if no agreement is made the inevitable outcome is no deal. labour has no incentive to stake out a position or crusade for anything that will avert brexit because if they let things be they don't lose voters and the tories take the hand grenade. the tories are too fragmented to support any particular deal, and may's desire to deliver on brexit means she'll keep pushing for what she wants or no deal even though nobody in her party really wants what she wants and in fact a significant contingent want a no deal, but nobody has a coherent alternative to what may wants that other people also want. literally everybody else is just along for the ride and has no power to do anything.
i have no idea how you untangle this besides (1) salting the earth, electing an entirely new slate of parliamentarians and starting anew; (2) getting lucky and somehow fluking to a solution; or (3) just taking the bullet and crashing out with no deal
It's literally a Catch-22. And all because voters fell prey to populist pro-Brexit propaganda and/or anti-immigrant racist rhetoric being spread by politicians and entities who largely didn't expect (or in some cases even want) the referendum to actually succeed, they just wanted to use the anger generated to gain more power... all of which has backfired rather spectacularly. What an unmitigated clusterfuck.
This kind of sums up how we got to where we are. There's no solution, and even if we got a GE there is no opposition party that actually wants to have to deal with this and it's aftermath.
Did you believe what was written on the big red bus?.
I think it is possible. You'd have to sit down with all parties and work together find an acceptable compromise. Might take a year or more, and if that's what they'd done from the start we might not be in this ridiculous mess. Labour and the less rabid Tories would likely back a "soft" deal of some kind, customs union, free trade, freedom of movement, etc. Getting the votes should be possible, there's enough anti-EU MPs and enough MPs terrified of losing their Leave-voting seats. There are two problems with that: firstly that May is absolutely not the kind of politician to work with parties other than her own and also by doing a soft brexit she'd likely cause her own party to break apart as the extreme brexiteers would likely flip out and there's a depressingly large number of them. So if you consider the country more important, it's do-able. But if your focus is your own party, it's not.
If you're being very generous to May, which I'm not inclined to be, you might say she thinks no-deal is better for the country than letting Labour win the next general election, even though that's really not likely. But I think she's just more interested in keeping her party together.
Probably nothing is do-able in the handful of days left, however, even with an extension. It's likely to be crashing out or a last-minute revocation of Article 50. The latter is vanishingly unlikely but I'm not quite ready to give up all hope just yet.
inching closer and closer towards the inevitable revote. the best way to subvert the will of the people, simply ask them the same question twice, but propagandize heavily in between.
Oh I think there was plenty of propaganda ahead of the vote as well.
i agree. plenty going around, of all types.
You say "propagandize", I say "inform".
It seems that quite a few people who voted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union hadn't really thought through how this would happen, and what would come afterwards. If they're better informed now, that's not necessarily propaganda, that's education. And if that extra information has changed their view, that's not subversion, that's growth.
Anyway, if the British people really really really want to leave the EU, they can confirm that in a second referendum. Maybe this time, the margin could be more decisive than 37% to 35%, with 28% abstaining. That's roughly an equal three-way split between "leave", "remain", and "meh".
Exactly this.
The question asked originally was too vague, the result so narrow and the entire public (including mp's) didnt really know what brexit entailed. Too much propaganda from both sides.
Ideally there would be another vote which would give solid options - no deal, leave with mays deal, remain. At least this way mp's would actually know the will of the people. A three way split wouldn't help though...
Wish I knew that putting off group projects until the last possible minute and refusing to take any blame for my failures was a sign of political aptitude. Would have probably changed my life.