The E wrote:Bluesqueak wrote:People weren't voting on our exact relationship with the European Union. Whether they voted to Remain or to Leave, that exact relationship is something to be negotiated by whatever government has been elected into power.
The Leave campaign wasn't a government, and it wasn't a political party (it was several). It could discuss as many ideas as it liked. The Leave campaign had exactly zero power when it came to putting any of these ideas into practice - that was a power reserved for the elected government.
And isn't that just fantastic (if you are a pro-brexit campaigner)? Not only can you lie openly about the money birds flying into the UK to build hospitals and millions of pounds being poured into the NHS, you don't even have to actually do the hard part of making it work!
Uh, again, I think you are not getting the UK context. We've just had an election campaign in which one side promised that the money birds would fly in and pay for free bus travel for under-25s, building 100,000 homes, provide free broadband - in addition to extra money for the health service. Etcetera. They didn't get elected.
There was a court case about one of the Leave 'distortions' (the amount of money sent to the EU). It ended up being thrown out at High Court level because the judge saw it as normal campaign exaggeration. Equally, the Remain campaign went so overboard with the 'economic disaster' predictions that people were joking about zombie plagues and the four horsemen of the apocalypse by referendum day.
The UK electorate is very used to this sort of stuff. They expect to have to sift through it for truthfulness. They
do expect the Johnson government to build more hospitals and spend money on the NHS, because he's seen as 'the guy with the bus'. But they're not going to be wildly offended because he quoted a pre-rebate amount. That's like a politician announcing that there are 100,000 NHS vacancies and 'forgetting' to point out that most of these vacancies are being filled by temps.
The E wrote:Bluesqueak wrote:For that matter, it can equally be argued that those voting to Remain didn't have a clear concept of what they were voting for either Were they voting for the status quo, or were they voting for 'ever close union'? Were they voting for nothing changing, or for further treaties? Who knows?
That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? A vote for Brexit had quite a lot more and quite a lot more severe uncertainties attached to it than a vote to remain. The number of uncertainties of the UK/EU relationship and how it may develop in the future with the UK as part of the EU and the number of uncertainties involved in the UK divorcing itself from the EU and having to renegotiate hundreds of bilateral and multilateral treaties and deals that define its place in the global economy is simply not comparable in any real sense.
No, but I think you'd be being disingenuous if you thought that those who voted Leave didn't expect disruption. People who vote against the status quo generally do expect that this will disrupt that status quo.
On the other hand, it's legitimate to point out to people who are voting for the status quo that there
is no status quo - just a smoother slope for the changes to come.
You also seem to think that the 'global economy' was what the Leave voters were voting about - but that was the mistake the Remain campaign made. They ran a campaign that was almost entirely about the economy and the economic impact of Brexit, and discovered that this time it
wasn't 'the economy, stupid.'