1. They were bullying. They started with a lowball figure in the tens of billions and then hiked it up to the hundreds of billions. By all accounts, this figure was pulled out of a hat.
2. They said there were no plans for a European defense force at all during the Brexit ref. then backtracked on that. Now Juncker is talking about a federal army. I guess you think they will use that army to help African children or something? (It will almost certainly be used to force the people in Europe to comply with the EU Parliament/EC no matter how ridiculous the demand.)
3. Britain being a great nation in the 19th century, isn't a meme, it was objectively great then. People didn't vote to leave because of that in my area. They voted to leave because they wanted to govern themselves. Maybe the people you surround yourself with are morons.
I see no such movement of people recanting on their vote. Just increasing polarization. I see the remain camp shouting louder than ever and the leave camp doubling down on wanting to leave. I think a lot more people would vote leave today. The government should hold a 2nd referendum. Remove the voting types which are more prone to fraud. We'll see how the country votes. I would guess though, it would be 59%+ voting out now.
With respect to the people who couldn't be bothered to research before the vote- they sound like the sorts of people who just follow headlines anyway. I know many (but not all) of remain voters seem to think that they are somehow high-brow intellectuals and the educated elite, it might come as a shock to you, but there are many well-educated and highly capable leave voters too. Dyson is one example.
I didn't vote, I was on the fence because I saw no way to win in either outcome. I'd vote leave now, without a second thought, having witnessed the EU negotiations first hand.
PS: Applying leverage is going to end up back firing. The EU is overplaying its hand. There is a reason why Germans are preparing for no resolution and a 'hard' Brexit. There is a reason why negotiations are deadlocked. It's massive hubris on behalf of the establishment.
Laws are only good if they can be enforced. The EU lacks the means to enforce any of their demands at present. That will increasingly be the case as more and more separatist movements come to the fore. Catalonia was just the beginning. Italian autonomy votes and general elections soon. We'll see how the EU enforces things when 30% of the bloc want to exit. Tick tock.
PPS: Don't let the media conflate causation with correlation with respect to economy decline. Recessions occur on average every 8.6 years. We are heading into a recession at present. This has very little to do with the Brexit vote- what I will say is that the next crisis will be a public sector crisis. Again this is nothing to do with Brexit. Brexit was a symptom, not a cause, but it might contribute to the decline going forward (if it wasn't Brexit it would be something else). European countries have accumulated debt since 1949 without much in the way of interruption. The ball was set in motion a long time before any of us were even born. The recession and deterioration in underlying real economic activity will cause this public sector debt to explode in real terms globally, as it has been doing post 2008. That's the real crisis here and the rising cost of living (borne by higher taxes, inflation and asset seizure from the public sector) will tilt things over into unrest globally. This will also be a global phenomenon.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2017 09:19PM by istirith.