There are alternate ways to engage and be empathetic other than immersing yourself in the stinking mire of our current political systems. Unless you are actually a member of a political party and can feasibly nudge things in some direction via meaningful discourse then my opinion is that the majority of these political happenings really aren't worth spending the thought energy on, the system just isn't set up to pay much attention to your input.

I completely checked out of worrying about the vast majority of politics a few years ago, probably coinciding at the point when I stopped watching terrestrial TV. I'll still do the minimum necessary to research optimal options prior to any votes and such, but apart from that I refuse to spend any time or energy thinking about or discussing decisions made by the turbocunts that supposedly represent us.

We all know how cunty they are, and how they'll fuck everything up, it's been going on for decades now. Trying to improve the situation from within the current shitty framework is akin to trying to solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them, with enough effort it might well work, eventually, but probably not nearly soon enough for so many who are suffering and not certainly not fast enough in the face of environmental or biological catastrophes.

Instead of spending hours and days of your life fretting and arguing about most of what goes in our government it seems to me that a more potentially fruitful approach is to think around the problem and come up with tactics that aren't predicated on being workable within the current political system. Doing things locally in order to build some kind of grassroots movement is good example.

Another that I've been thinking about a lot is new technologies and how they can have a radical impact on discourse and our shared understanding, there is potential for an information organisation/representation/communication system that goes far beyond the wholly inadequate social media platforms we are currently stuck with. There is massive underrealised potential in computing and the internet that could subvert and accelerate the process of education and societal change. So I would much prefer to spend time and effort thinking about these things rather than just impotently venting while my blood pressure rises as I watch madness ensue (I do this all the time, not having a go at anyone).

Meh anyway that's some general reckons not specifically related to brexit, but there you go.

I read Rouj's objections not to disengaging from politics now but the lack of engaging that one time when it was pretty important to do a democracy. I'd stop short of a 'you can't have an opinion because' but it is certainly frustrating to see.

Tempy wrote:

Call it sanity, call it apathy. I just disagree with it is all. It was the same thing I tried to convey to my grandparents and parents, their concerns were only with how everything directly affected them, rather than future generations. I think that’s ultimately short sighted. I’m not going to say people can’t complain, but I am gonna roll my eyes at it. If that breaks the camels back, so be it. I am a scary radical leftist after all.

If there's one thing that'll refocus the attention on future generations it's having a child.  Credit to those who make that mental shift without having done so.

Badly worded:  "without having a child".

Milk in terms of liquid, proper milk is essentially 100% UK produced. Most of our dairy imports come from Ireland, which the EU has no effect on because we were in a customs union with them pre-dating the EU.

There are other areas of farming that the EU can be convincingly argued to have had a negative effect on, but milk production isn't really one of them. After the last round of expansion where our fair isle was invaded by all these bloody Romanians, milk prices erm... went up. They had been dropping for the couple of years before the referendum, and in the year before crashed, but was in part due to Russia banning imports in retaliation to sanctions.

My farming mates' lack of farming jobs was their rationale. The JobCentre offered one a job in York! He managed to find something a while later, else he'd have had no income. A lot of jobs around my way are below min wage because the money just isn't there. You can do cash or impose an expectation of hours beyond the official.

An old friend of mine's a fruit grower who mostly employs migrants (couple of locals), but he inherited his fields and business from his dad. I know a farmer my age who also inherited a dairy farm, and he can just about make it work (his land's worth millions to developers, as it goes). When you say about the damage we've done to future generations I totally agree, but the EU weren't acting as our saviours from the rightwing values that brought us here. That's not their role, but to some degree it could be. Unicef were the ones sending our kids food recently.

Our access to cheaper workers has led to big buyers demanding we pass on those savings, so you can blame supermarkets' greed rather than the EU's passivity, but when you remove our access to exploitation as an element it forces change. Like the Tories saying ‘Fuck yer subsidy!’ and another increase in unemployment, but if we'd had Corbyn in that situ...

A good while ago we had a local factory paying £18ph when the min was still around 5, and they were taking on unqualified people with training provided. No prizes for guessing how many applications they had. It wasn't an interesting job, but for the last time in my memory it let working-class people like me afford a two-up/two-down mortgage. It was about equivalent to the lifestyle my labourer dad and care worker mum had in the '80s.

I'm not against these people, and I don't believe remaining would've helped our poorest kids to reclaim that lost ground, else how did we arrive here? Maybe if we'd not had Blairism...

Again, the Tories'll make everything worse for us, but the EU's lack of poverty protections disappoints me. I think our PMs and the EU have let the poorest in UK society down. Throw a bit of socialism into their trade pot and I'm right there; I'd have voted for that.

Diluted Dante wrote:

After the last round of expansion where our fair isle was invaded by all these bloody Romanians, milk prices erm... went up. They had been dropping for the couple of years before the referendum, and in the year before crashed, but was in part due to Russia banning imports in retaliation to sanctions.

They haven't recovered that much, and we've fewer producers than we had in the mid-'90s when the going was good. Rural prospects have rapidly diminished in my own lifetime, hence the need to think about some format of UBI.

When you use language like ‘Invaded by all these bloody Romanians’, are you trying to reframe what I'm saying to make your argument easier? I haven't mentioned numbers because I'm not a racist, just the localised effects of a growing reliance on migrant labour.

GurtTractor wrote:

I completely checked out of worrying about the vast majority of politics a few years ago, probably coinciding at the point when I stopped watching terrestrial TV.

Yeah, I quit terrestrial years ago. I always remember Savile telling Theroux he didn't do politics because he wasn't affected, and thinking how lucky he was, and how I'd love to be in that position. That I'm not's why I'm so prone to getting tetchy about these things.

When I use language like that I'm doing it to make the point that your argument was wrong.

Well, he knows the percieved effects.

I'm gonna be honest, I have a hard time accepting strands from the leave campaign that oppose my binary view that the UK is better off in the EU than it is out of it because since 2014 I have not seen a single argument for any of the benefits of leaving that is backed up by any kind of credible source or associated information, unless it was talking about disaster capitalism, people making money by shorting stocks or the kind of people who would benefit from trading against a weak pound.

On the flip side, at the very least the EU gave us mandatory paid holidays for workers, introduced a maximum working week, brought in a scheme that allows students to study abroad, removed barriers to travel which reduced the costs of going on holiday and the cost of imported/exported foods, which they also protect from imitation via the designated origin system. They also operate their own GPS satellite systems which we are going to be closed off from, as well as having their own space agency and majority funding of flagship scientific research institutions like CERN.

Well I for one would like to thank Escape for sticking his head over the parapet and putting forward his views.

I may not nessecarily agree with the overall 'result' of his thoughts, but it's also some of the most interesting, measured and thought provoking discussion of leave I've seen.

Escape wrote:

Don't pay, GPS away! Freedom of movement has to cost sub money? Looking after workers and students is basic care and shouldn't (though in our case does) need to be enforced by an outsider. Although within the NHS it actually isn't, because the WTD's not worth the paper it's written on.

Right I'm gonna do this so you can understand what I mean when I say I never heard a single credible piece of information that supported the UK moving away from the status quo and leaving the EU. I'm going to only look at this single paragraph because I don't have the strength to respond to everything else. 

We are not part of the schengen zone, therefore the only reason there was free movement between the UK and European countries was because the government didn't have an issue with it and we were operating in good faith with our fellow member states. We could have stopped all the migrant workers who came here and took all your friends jobs, the UK government had the power to prevent whoever they liked from the EU coming here the whole time, Eastern European workers coming here and taking your friends farming jobs happened because the UK government, aware of the consternation at the time and general xenophobia from sections of the public at the time while "Polish people took all our construction jobs" chose to do nothing to protect UK workers from employers exploiting people from poorer countries willingness to come here and work for less money than was currently being paid to domestic workers. If we were inside schengen and this was happening, you might have a point that unrestricted freedom to move for work can be problematic if protections for the workforce are not properly considered (protections which I must stress should be about paying people who come here the same as UK workers, not using them as a source of cheap labour), but we werent, the government could have stepped in at any time to protect UK workers from employers exploiting people exercising their right to come and work in the UK. Here's a map of the schengen zone to help you:



In terms of our "sub money" what this is a graphic from the ONS (https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/theukcontributiontotheeubudget/2017-10-31) that shows how much we paid to the EU on average in the years 2014-2018. The whole bar is our gross contribution, the blue area is our net contribution to the EU. As you can see, we effectively paid the EU about £7.8b a year. 


In comparison the NHS in 2018/19 cost £129b (https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/), so I guess the question you have to consider is on a personal level, do you feel like the cost of being in the EU at just under £8b a year is good value for the british taxpayer? Me personally, the answer is yes, things like GPS, the space agency, protection of origins of foods, the erasmus scheme for students studying abroad are causes worth supporting and things which we benefit from in less tangible ways such as access to the best brains, access to latest industrial and scientific research, and then a the other stuff that I haven't listed because I'm not directly aware of them. 

I'm going to end with the WTD. Specifically your assertion that it's not worth the paper it's printed on because you have used one single anecdotal example from the NHS as a reason why the WTD is ineffective. Here is what the BMA have to say about doctors and the WTD: https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/working-hours/european-working-time-directive-ewtd/doctors-and-the-european-working-time-directive  I don't have first hand experience of the shift patterns of people in the NHS, but I tried to google a load of variations of "NHS workers exceeding the working time directive" and I coiuldn't really find anything in news or general search results, I think one of the problems is that the WTD measures the maximum 48 hour working week as an average over 17 or 26 weeks, the BMA article talks about this, it also talks about the opt outs, which are that you can sign the waiver if you want to opt out of it (it recommends strongly not doing that) but that it is not possible to opt out of the minimum rest periods that are stipulated by the WTD. So at the moment what I need from you, is a bit more than your one line reckon on the WTD based on NHS staff, because the WTD applies to every job in the country, and there's study about the impact it's had which you can read here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/389676/bis-14-1287-the-impact-of-the-working-time-regulations-on-the-uk-labour-market-a-review-of-evidence.pdf  it's 91 pages long, so forgive me for not reading the whole thing and cherry picking this snippet from page 5:

"Since 1998 there has been a decline in the incidence of long-hours working in the UK and a general trend towards shorter working hours. It is possible that this is, at least in part, due to the introduction of the 48-hour maximum working week despite the existence of the opt-out. We have also seen a general trend over this period towards a more diverse range of working patterns."

I appreciate you taking the time to write your opinions and reckons on the remain/leave situation, but the time for vague, nebulous, wiffly-waffly, blue  sky thinking about what could be was in the period after the referendum was announced and prior to June 24th 2016. In 2020, after not voting in the referendum, coming around with anecdotes about how the EU didn't do enough to protect workers, while offering no evidence to support how the biritsh government would do it better (which appears to be contrary to how we were doing before some of these regs came in) isn't gonna cut it mate. Either give me logical reasoning for the benefits of leaving the EU with some sources of information, or next time you see your mates in the pub, tell them to go fucking fuck themselves from me.

I think the elephant in this particular room is that despite both being on the capitalist scum end of the political spectrum, the EU is generally more left-leaning/socialist than the UK Government (whichever party is in power).

Also it's wildly overstating the power of the EU, or understating the power of the UK, to suggest that it's because of the EU that we don't have a more progressive Europe, a fairer Europe. It's wildly overstating those things to suggest that it's BECAUSE of the EU that we don't have a fairer Britain!

It's a trading and legal construct. It can be influenced by directly elected representatives. Those same people who voted Leave overlap significantly with those who voted for right wing anti progressives to represent them in the EU. It would be a farce if it wasn't so tragic.

Roujin wrote:

… no one said the EU was perfect or even good as part of the referendum, it only had to be better than what the UK looked it would do if we left.

I get frustrated because it’s such a fucking stereotype and has been since at least the sixties. The left are so tied up with complaining that their own side isn’t being socialist enough that they end up helping the capitalists win again. It’d be funny if it wasn’t constantly and repeatedly fucking us all over.

Don’t we have a full right to elect the socialiest government we want though?

And also it’s worth remembering that the EU is as progressive as all of the governments that make up the EU.

So when you say “we have this law because of the EU” it’s only because our government (amongst others) said “this is okay”

Define "realism"