On the contrary, the fact the EU had enormous power over British people, yet barely anyone knew what it was, what it did, or why it was important, was a compelling reason for the UK to leave.
"Enormous power"; do not paint it as if it were a confederacy.
The EU has been a scapegoat in Britain for decades. The elites used it to justify many a policy that would hurt the middle class, while pushing for more and more liberalization once in the EU parliament.
The average guy in Britain is just as much at fault here for not following what has been happening. They kept reading their fucking tabloids, the reality-check will be harsh and gruesome.
No, it's not a compelling reason for the UK to leave. It was a compelling reason for the average Briton to learn and educate himself. Now they shot themselves in the foot. Well done!
The problem the EU has always had is that it wasn't really unified and that non elected officials held to much sway over countries. Countries, not states, not territories, or such. Meaning that you had distinct separation, governments, and the like, being controlled by people not of the same. This will always lead to strife.
If anything vote simply reaffirms that EU favoring side either failed to communicate properly why it was good to stay or worse, failed to recognize or acknowledge real issues that existed and take action to explain them or fix them. As in, far too often the exit crowd was portrayed and ignorant, bigoted, or worse, and you do not convince people your side is right when you attack them
plus it benefits the EU to make it all doom and gloom because this loose grouping was never bound to be successful without more tight knit integration, something they knew they could not sell.
I had the feeling that they forced countries to do the right thing, for example granting human rights. Even here in Germany we had laws that let you lock up people forever.
What was the bad stuff that happend in the EU?
The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.
What the EU did in the last years was mainly telling "the people" that they elected a bunch of assholes that milked their countries dry.
The Remain campaign never made any positive points about staying in the EU (apart from a few in the Labour party talking about workers rights, but they got about 4% airtime and very little newspaper coverage). The vast majority of the Remain campaign was all about the terrible consequences of leaving.
The Leave campaign was a mix of fear of foreigners, fear of unaccountable bureaucracy and a vision of a Britain that had "taken back control".
The purely negative vision lost.
(There are also those that say that the Eurozone was doomed to failure because of the imbalances in the countries involved with no mechanisms to rectify those imbalances - making the fact that the EU stepped in and replaced two democratically elected governments an inevitability. So it engineered a bad situation then punished the losers in that situation for falling into it. But I don't know enough about economics to argue that point)
Maybe you should look up stuff like 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung'. The EU is literally demanding (and receiving) money from Germany because the haven't implemented this law yet. The reason they have not is that is was against the German constitution and it was rejected by the Bundesgerichtshof.
Now the law is coming back and a argument of the supporters is that its about EU integration and cost.
The law is very clearly against western principles, surveillance for everybody even if they did nothing.
This is just one example, the EU is used to push threw laws that can not get threw on National level and then get imposed top town.
The EU gets much better coverage then they deserve because people are into the idea of "Europe United, No War" but nobody really knows or cares much beyond that.
> The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.
The left the question about debt open (legally) but gave the impression that it would be common. The market assumed so, and this provided false incentives for all the governments. When the debt was not common, as you can see, the bond yields spread again and some of the nations were not able to role over their debt.
Instead of fully committing to the idea of not sharing debt and letting Greece default, they don't allow that and keep Greece limping along. This is the worst of all ways because nobody knows what to expect form the EU.
The ECB has also not helped the case by conducting monetary policy so badly, that it has lead to something so bad that its only comparison is the the Great Depression. Their are multiple nations in Europe that are doing worse then they did in the GD. The GD on a global scale was far worse then what happened this time, but Europe is the outlier and that has mostly to do with the EMU and the ECB mismanagement.
Its unbelievably hard for Greece to service debt and reform while also having a NGDP that is dropping like crazy. No nation on the planet could deal with that. Greece is poor but they are not flexible, so going the forced price/wage deflation route is also not gone be easy (thats essentially what some of the Balics did).
To be fair to the ECB, even if they did do everything perfectly, they would still not be able to do a perfect job. Their is broad agreement about that in the research area of common currency zones. The problem of uniformity is quite real. Compare the NGDP of Germany and Greece. Germany in the same monetary union has a growing NGDP, the NGDP of Greece is lower then it was in 2008.
The EU and specially the EMU has totally disgraced the hole project of european union. Now the nations hate each other, calling "them" lazy or nazis in newspapers. When the project was mostly about Free Trade and Free Movement it was growing together.
Now we could get into a hole lot more issues such as the other horrible protectionist polices and the cartel enforcement that they do. Their are many other issues but this post is already to long.
tl:dr; The EU(specially EMU) is a horrible institution that is horribly managed in almost every way, specially everything that relates to economics.
There has been a mood that the EU has benefited many of those who were more educated and better off while many blue color working class members of British society were left very much behind.
Sure there's the immediate market shock of a decision the market didn't expect, but we can't say for sure that end result in one, two, or five years will be more negative than positive for those Britons.
> "No, it's not a compelling reason for the UK to leave. It was a compelling reason for the average Briton to learn and educate himself. Now they shot themselves in the foot. Well done!"
Au contraire, mon frère. There were compelling reasons for the UK to leave the EU, they're just clearly reasons you either don't know about or don't care much about.
To give one example, the Five Presidents report from 2015 made it clear that there would be a push towards greater integration of the Eurozone, and there were fairly clear implications for what this would mean for the UK.
""The world’s second largest economy cannot be managed through rule-based cooperation alone," says the report, drawn up by the heads of the European Commission, the EU Council, Eurogroup, the European Parliament and the European Central Bank (ECB)."
"The eurozone “will need to shift from a system of rules and guidelines for national economic policy-making to a system of further sovereignty sharing within common institutions, most of which already exist and can progressively fulfil this task," it adds."
""In practice, this would require member states to accept increasingly joint decision-making on elements of their respective national budgets and economic policies.""
"These changes should be possible witin the current EU treaty but other ideas such as eurozone finance ministry by 2025 are likely to require treaty changes.
“Euro area member states would continue to decide on taxation and the allocation of budgetary expenditures according to national preferences and political choices. However, as the euro area evolves towards a genuine EMU, some decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively while ensuring democratic accountability and legitimacy.”"
So with all that in mind, you can see that 'rule-based co-operation' was seen as not effective enough, and that moves were being made to set up a EU Treasury, which would control taxation throughout the Eurozone. The UK would clearly have been marginalised at this point, as the Treasury would be incentivised to make sure investment from Eurozone countries stayed within the Eurozone. However, even with this compromised position, they wouldn't have been able to strike new trade deals on their own terms as the responsibility for doing so had been taken over by the EU.
This is just one example of many, and I'd say the democratic issues in the EU were even more problematic than the financial ones. You can try to pretend that Leave voters were uninformed if it makes you happy, but there were legitimate concerns about the EU, including concerns that had nothing to do with racism.
The EU is not other people. The UK has always held large power in controlling the EU. Obviously in concert with others, but such is the nature of cooperation.
This othering of the EU is really lazy. The EU was never some ominous foreign entity.
Plus, get better education if that's the problem. My civics teacher was quite adept at explaining the EU. For historic reasons there is some ugly cruft, but it's nevertheless not that hard to understand.
This is a failure of media coverage and attention, not the EU.
And the people who were representing them are, well, mostly still David Cameron. One of the sad things about the EU is that it could never completely shake this thing many supranational organizations have, i.e. that the top-dogs are the heads of the respective member-state governments (and maybe their ministers if it’s about more narrow areas of expertise). Without them nothing can happen. They are still centrally important and involved everywhere and most everything that’s decided is done with consensus and not majority rule.
The people implementing the details are truly not that important. Do you know (many) people below the minister level in your country? It’s not relevant.
People I can think of in the EU off the top of my head: Jean-Claude Junker, president of the commission. Martin Schulz, president of the parliament. Julia Reda, cool European MP from Germany. Beatrix von Storch, racist European MP from Germany. Martin Sonneborn, European MP from Germany, member of a satirical joke party.
There's nothing wrong with having a referendum over it. But a horrible media industry has made a circus over the entire thing, leaving many people misinformed.
But that is exactly what is wrong with having a referendum over it. The circus is inevitable, as are emotional arguments abused by populist politicians. Some matters shouldn't be decided by which side of an argument happens to have hired the better team of PR consultants.
Well you can have another, can't you? Or is leaving the EU a one-way thing?
I'm sort of jealous. They had a referendum on Scottish independence and they honored the outcome. I'd love to have an up/down national vote on abortion, gay marriage, gun background checks.. At best here in the US, you're voting for a derivative, you're electing someone on the wish/hope that they support your issues if they get a chance or opportunity to of if they're willing to use political capital to actually propose the issues.. With something like abortion, it's at least 2 derivatives removed, you're voting for someone who will hopefully select a court justice (should they get to) that will align with your issues should the opportunity ever arise for them to make a judgement on it. And what's more perverse, there are a lot of single issue voters that take that multiple derivative issue situation as the only issue that matters.
It'd be an interesting experiment if nothing else.
Or even more, maybe a compelling reason for Britons to elect representatives in the government and EU parliament who could actually push the reforms the EU needs?
How is this "raw emotion", though? Leaving the EU has been discussed for a few years now, quite widely.
Also, "raw emotion", direct democracy (in Switzerland, for example) can work very well. Direct democracy may not scale well, hence we need representation, but big issues should be left up to the people to be voted on.
In the end, I believe, the people in the UK voted against not so much the idea of EU, but rather expressed their frustration with the EU's inability (unwillingness?) to fix its problems. It's been brewing for a while.
A big part of this vote is a huge swathe of voters who felt that they were not being properly represented by their representatives. All three major parties had similar lines on economic liberalisation, immigration and freedom of movement and so on and this has been the case for almost 20 years. So when a new party stepped in and said "we hear you, we want things to change to" it's not surprising it captured some of the public's imagination.
Remember the European Constitution that failed a few years ago? (At least the three hundred page document that they were calling a constitution.) I was shocked when my German friends mentioned that the German people would certainly have voted no, but they never got the chance. The German legislature voted for it, and that was it. Apparently most Europeans had no direct vote up or down for that constitution. And when it finally failed, it came from one of the countries that got a direct referendum.
But then thinking back to the US Constitution, it was voted in by the state legislatures without a direct vote, too. Somehow that seems OK back then, but an affront to democracy in today's world. How times change.
Even worse, many nations did not go into the EU by popular vote. Generally if people are asked about the EU, they don't follow the line of the politcal classes. This is just the latest example.
We elect politicians whose full-time jobs it is to understand big and complicated issues, and to decide on our behalf how to deal with them. That includes the right to make and break treaties with other world powers.
> We elect politicians whose full-time jobs it is to understand big and complicated issues, and to decide on our behalf how to deal with them.
But, on Brexit specifically, the British people elected a government that made a campaign promise to hold exactly such a referendum, and to abide by its results.
One very plausible theory I've seen doing the rounds is that the government never actually expected to have to follow through on that campaign promise. Strategically speaking it was a terrible idea and Cameron was always pretty pro-EU, but he needed the support of the anti-EU faction of his party, so he promised the vote as a sop to them. The theory goes that he didn't expect to get an absolute majority in Parliament and hoped the other parties would "force" him to to not follow through.
Is this also an argument for states to pull out of the USA? Because I doubt your average voter understands much about the US or state government or federalism.
I would actually wager the average American understands the federal government much better than their state government, due to the hyperfocus in schools and in the media on the federal government. State and local governments get away with incredible amounts of nonsense because people don't know or care anything about them.
I agree. My daughter knows both. She just graduated High School. She has lobbied Congress and The Senate at the federal level and written a state bill (with 2 other high school students) that passed and was signed by our governor. While her experience is unusual, the schools here focus on us history and us government history.
I do think when I was in high school I learned more about the rest of the world than they do. And that is sad.
> She has lobbied Congress and The Senate at the federal level and written a state bill (with 2 other high school students) that passed and was signed by our governor.
At least doing auch lobbying and drafting was possible. This would be unthinkable in the EU. The disconnect to even the highly involved politically aware person in the EU to the power structures is huge. In manu cases purposefully and by design so. After all, the EU was born oit of a price pact essentially stablished though conglomerate economic interest. (steel, coal, electricity, transport, machinery).
That is sad. In the us it is easy to lobby congress and the senate. It takes coordination and determination. Whether they listen is another story. But my daughter's cause is something that both sides of the isle care about.
Writing the state bill turned out to be easier than we would have thought but it took a lot of presentations and having the right people listening the presentations. She actually had surprising cooperation from a democratic state chairwoman of education and a republican state senator.
The cause is funding for afterschool STEM competitions for disadvantaged schools.
To the contrary: Americans are usually more invested in federal politics than state politics. E.g. turnout is usually higher in federal elections, and more people know who their federal senators are than their state senators.
Anecdotal, but in public elementary school in the US they actually did do a good job of explaining this. I mean I know it's very complex in some ways, but it's also not that complex?
Yeah, but barely anyone fully understands their municipal org either, and I took the comment to mean people have no idea at all what the EU is. For example, Iceland is not part of the EU, just part of another construct which kinda/sorta makes it easy for them to do business with the EU.
If that's true, then having them vote is a game of those in power to get what they want by trying to keep them stupid. Is that the rest of your thought? We can see how places with conflicts try to keep the population misinformed or under-informed in order to more easily justify violent actions, so who's to benefit (besides Boris Johnson) from a proper exit?
The EU has been a scapegoat in Britain for decades. The elites used it to justify many a policy that would hurt the middle class, while pushing for more and more liberalization once in the EU parliament.
The average guy in Britain is just as much at fault here for not following what has been happening. They kept reading their fucking tabloids, the reality-check will be harsh and gruesome.
No, it's not a compelling reason for the UK to leave. It was a compelling reason for the average Briton to learn and educate himself. Now they shot themselves in the foot. Well done!