The Brexit Thread (topical thread)

[Mathilda]

I think @Mathilda may have misunderstood my referring to SNP as "republicans" as having something to do with US, where I just mean they believe in a Scottish republic. I'm deeply republican myself so I sympathise, I hate everything to do with the UK royal family. I hate the Queen, I hate Prince Phillip, I hate Prince Charles, I hate the idea of aristocracy. Recently I heard about this other royal I had never heard of, and I hate him as well. What's his name? I forget, let me Google it... Prince Andrew. Their whole family tree is like a telegraph poll the inbred freaks.

I hate the royals too. I think they're the human face of the British establishment that stops any real reform from happening because it's harder to hate a person who stands for nothing than an undemocratic system.

The SNP aren't actually opposed to the royal family, but nor are they pro-royal either. It's another question for another day.

[Dom]

I think @Mathilda may have misunderstood my referring to SNP as "republicans" as having something to do with US, where I just mean they believe in a Scottish republic. I'm deeply republican myself so I sympathise, I hate everything to do with the UK royal family. I hate the Queen, I hate Prince Phillip, I hate Prince Charles, I hate the idea of aristocracy. Recently I heard about this other royal I had never heard of, and I hate him as well. What's his name? I forget, let me Google it... Prince Andrew. Their whole family tree is like a telegraph poll the inbred freaks.

I hate the royals too. I think they're the human face of the British establishment that stops any real reform from happening because it's harder to hate a person who stands for nothing than an undemocratic system.

The SNP aren't actually opposed to the royal family, but nor are they pro-royal either. It's another question for another day.

Probably the idea of royals isn't all that irrational - people seem to need someone to follow through their life and discuss and get pissed at and adore etc. You have all kinds of celebrities capitalizing on that, and - all kinds of bad politicians. It's like a cult, and it can be harmless or harmful. Trump has a cult, so does Kim. I think the royals are perhaps a fairly painless way to let the people have what they seem to be insisting on the world over, through all times.

[Phaedrus]

The English royals seems to me to be akin to the American 1%.

They serve no purpose except to leech off the working class.

[Aractus]

The SNP aren't actually opposed to the royal family, but nor are they pro-royal either. It's another question for another day.

Ah yes interesting, if I'm understanding you they just want to declare independence one way or the other even if it means they remain a "commonwealth country" instead of a full republic.

Also I really did have to Google "Prince Andrew" in the previous comment, lol. Sounds like that guy won't be climbing the family telegraph poll very quickly, although given he raped a woman the proper place for him is in gaol IMHO.

[Minimalist]

Seems as if Britain is about to learn that it is not 1906 any longer,




and the sun has set.

But don't come here, Brits.  We have an even bigger dickhead running things.

[OakTree500]

@Mathilda - if Scotland are going for independance, can I please move in with you? I'm hating being an English person at the moment.

On a serious note - friends and family in both Scotland and NI. Should the union go tits up in the coming years, I'll be moving elsewhere with my family.

[adey67]

Well I'm very nervous for the future now. It  feels like I'm in a runaway bus heading for a cliff with a clown in the driving seat, but this election was decided before it was fought, Corbyn is an anti semite neo marxist idiot and he made the Labour Party completely unelectable.

[NorthernBen]

Worst election result in decades, labour safe seats won by the tories, a total and utter disaster. It's time for Corbyn to go and give the working class a credible party back. One good thing is that Farage is going to the US to 'help out' Trump... Hope he stays there.

[Mathilda]

@Mathilda - if Scotland are going for independance, can I please move in with you? I'm hating being an English person at the moment.

On a serious note - friends and family in both Scotland and NI. Should the union go tits up in the coming years, I'll be moving elsewhere with my family.

On a serious note, yes you will be absolutely welcome up here. We have civic nationalism. Which means, if you live here then you are considered Scottish no matter where you came from.

So yes, now is exactly the time to move up if you want to continue living in a progressive society and wish to rejoin the EU.

[Aractus]

Okay so I may have been wrong before about *when* the UK would be leaving EU, but I think we can now confidently say we know how Brexit will look.

First, the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration will pass before Jan 31 2020. The UK at this point has left the EU, and the transition period begins.

Second, the Johnson government will negotiate a simple FTA with EU prior to the end of the transition period on Dec 31 2020. There will be no extensions to the transition period.

The Johnson government are going to write into law that they can't extend the transition period - frankly that's just showmanship, that law isn't worth the paper it's written on. If they change their minds they can just repeal the law and then extend the transition period.

On the second point, lots of critics are saying that 12 months is not enough time to do a comprehensive FTA. They're right. But it is enough time to do a *simple* FTA, which is what the Johnson government is going for. It will be incomplete, with further expansions to be negotiated into the future. Some people in the UK call that a hard-Brexit, and in a way it is. It's the hardest possible imaginable Brexit that could pass with the support of the Conservative MPs on all sides. The ERG and the "hard-line-Brexiteers"/hard-line-Eurosceptics would like to go even harder - "clean break" i.e. no-deal, and only then begin the negotiations for a FTA.

[Aractus]

Here is an interesting, albeit very lengthy, read on Speccy: Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won (Jan 2017).

"A warning. Politics is not a field which meets the two basic criteria for true expertise (see below). An effect of this is that arguments made by people who win are taken too seriously. People in my position often see victory as confirmation of ideas they had before victory but people often win for reasons they never understand or even despite their own efforts. Cameron’s win in 2015 was like this – he fooled himself about some of the reasons why he’d won and this error contributed to his errors on the referendum."

Aint that the truth when you hear garbage from the extremities like "it was populism dat dunnit":

"The left is swift to denounce Brexiteers as uneducated, racist, xeno/homo/Islamophobes. Trump voters and conservatives in general receive the same treatment. But if leftists are so smart, why do they keep losing elections? The consensus opinion in green-left enclaves is that it’s ‘populism wot dunnit’."

With this glowing example from the sneering left (this Tweet since deleted):



Anyway continuing on with Dominic Cummings's article:

"Confirmation bias kicks in and evidence seeming to suggest that what actually happened would happen looms larger. ...

"You see these dynamics all the time in historical accounts. History tends to present the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria as almost inevitable but historians spend much less time on why Bismarck pulled back from war in 1865 and how he might have done the same in 1866 (actually he prepared the ground so he could do this and he kept the option open until the last minute). ... The branching histories are forgotten and the actual branch taken, often because of some relatively trivial event casting a huge shadow (perhaps as small as a half-second delay by Cohen-Blind), seems overwhelmingly probable. This ought to, but does not, make us apply extreme intelligent focus to those areas that can go catastrophically wrong, like accidental nuclear war, to try to narrow the range of possible histories but instead most people in politics spend almost all their time on trivia.

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful."

Indeed the Bible in all its glorious forms as well as other religions texts represent precisely that: attempts made by ancient people to make sense of world through stories.

"‘The big why?’ is psychologically appealing but it is a mistake. In general terms it is the wrong way to look at history and it is specifically wrong about the referendum. If it were accurate we would have won by much more than we did given millions who were not ‘happy with the way things are’ and would like to be out of the EU reluctantly voted IN out of fear. Such stories oversimplify and limit thinking about the much richer reality of branching histories."

Indeed there are a number of reasons Brits voted leave. Here is Vote Leave's internal polling conducted by ICM:



Internal polling like that is typically much more accurate than newspaper polling, even if conducted by the same organisation (in this case ICM).

"the result that we actually witnessed was very close. If about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters – had decided differently, IN would have won. This is a small enough margin that it could easily have happened if quite a few specific events and decisions had turned out differently. If just one person had behaved differently the dominant story now would be ‘the economy was always going to trump a revolt against the elites, the status quo and “the economy stupid” always win’ – which is what the overwhelming majority of pundits said before 23 June and in some cases had drafted for their columns after the vote."

"For example, if Michael Gove had stayed out of the campaign then Vote Leave would almost certainly have either collapsed (which it nearly did anyway) or been forced into fighting the campaign on a losing message like ‘Go Global’, a firm favourite for many years among a subset of MPs and Farage’s inner circle (Leave.EU adopted this as its first slogan) and a total loser with the public. ...

"Without Boris, Farage would have been a much more prominent face on TV during the crucial final weeks, probably the most prominent face. (We had to use Boris as leverage with the BBC to keep Farage off and even then they nearly screwed us as ITV did.) It is extremely plausible that this would have lost us over 600,000 vital middle class votes.

"Without Victoria Woodcock, an absolutely phenomenal manager and by far the single most important person in the management of Vote Leave (and who would have been running Downing Street now but for the Gove-Boris debacle – more branching histories), we would not have been able to build anything like the structure we did and this could easily have cost us the winning margin of votes."

"Problems with Vote Leave

"...

" *   infighting over who appeared on broadcast and strategy,
" *   the lack of resources (many kept clear because of the infighting and many used infighting as an excuse to keep clear of something they thought was doomed),
" *   the extreme difficulty of finding a governance system that could work,
" *   four crucial posts held by the wrong people (including the disastrous John Mills as first Chairman),
" *   the fundamental structure of how the media works (see below),
" *   the extreme difficulty of getting prominent people to say on TV what research showed was necessary to win, and
" *   the lack of anything resembling a well-organised mass movement.

"Despite many years to prepare, the eurosceptic community had built remarkably little to prepare for the battle. On the ground were many small ineffective and often warring little groups and essentially no serious machinery (though Business for Britain had begun to build a business network). All this had to be built almost entirely from scratch in an environment in which many of those in charge of the small groups were sure we would lose, were less interested in winning than they were in ‘preserving our group’s identity Dominic’, and were keen to get their hands on cash being handed out by Leave.EU on condition that they not contribute to the campaign with Vote Leave. At various points UKIP HQ sent out emails to UKIP activists telling them not to work with Vote Leave and some senior activists were told by Farage’s gang that they would lose their UKIP jobs if they helped our ground campaign (luckily most of those out on the ground ignored these instructions but they were disruptive).

"The office implemented the winning message in ~125 million leaflets and nearly a billion targeted digital adverts regardless of all complaints. We recruited more active volunteers (~12,000) in 10 months than UKIP in 25 years (~7,000 according to Farage). Our GOTV effort targeted crucial voters identified by traditional polling, a new type of experimental polling, the ground campaign, and the social media campaign, all overseen by the data science team. But until the last 4-5 weeks we had a big problem getting those going on TV to give the same message. The office could only do so much. If Boris, Gove, and Gisela had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked ‘Turkey/NHS/£350 million’ with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost. In the awful weekly campaign committee meetings, there were constant complaints and arguments for variations on ‘Go Global’ (until all the polls swung our way and people remembered ‘I’ve always said stick with 350 million’.) The Big Three knocked this back despite great pressure.

"...

"It should be remembered that the net effect of Conservative MPs was strongly supportive of IN. We won despite the net effort of Conservative Party MPs, not because of them, though the support from a small fraction was vital. Although Leave voters were more enthusiastic and determined than Remain voters, Cameron and Osborne were more focused on winning than most Leave MPs were. ...

"Most of the MPs we dealt with were not highly motivated to win and lacked extreme focus, even those who had been boring everybody about this for decades. ... They were very happy to be on the Today Programme. But they didn’t want to win that much. Not enough to work weekends. Not enough to stop having all their usual skiing holidays and winter beach holidays. Not enough to get out on the streets day after day.  Not enough to miss a great shooting weekend. Not enough, most of them, to risk annoying a Prime Minister who they thought would still control their next job after 23 June.

"...

"Our core campaign team were not like this. They sacrificed weekends, holidays, and family events. They worked like dogs week in week out for little money often treated with appalling rudeness by people calling from their beach loungers (Boris, Gisela and Gove were three notable exceptions and all three were liked by junior staff partly because of their good, therefore rare, manners). We were happy to risk looking stupid to win. We knew that almost nobody in SW1 understood or agreed with what we were doing. We also knew we had more chance of winning if we did not explain a lot of it – most importantly the entire digital and data science element which (combined with the ground campaign and GOTV) gave us a chance to exploit strong network effects  (and which we hid from the Board and MPs, see HERE)."

Remember this was written almost 3 years ago now, and it's a very different portrait of Boris than the one we've been fed by his loudest detractors.

"We were urged by everyone to hire a big advertising agency and do traditional posters. ‘When can we discuss our posters?’ I was asked constantly by people who would then try to explain to me their creative ideas (‘we need another Labour Isn’t Working, Dominic, I’ve got an idea for a picture of the globe and arrows…’). One of the few reliable things we know about advertising amid the all-pervasive charlatanry is that, unsurprisingly, adverts are more effective the closer to the decision moment they hit the brain. Instead of spending a fortune on an expensive agency (with 15% going to them out of ‘controlled expenditure’) and putting up posters to be ‘part of the national conversation’ weeks or months before the vote, we decided to 1) hire extremely smart physicists to consider everything from first principles, 2) put almost all our money into digital (~98%), 3) hold the vast majority of our budget back and drop it all right at the end with money spent on those adverts that experiments had shown were most effective (internal code name ‘Waterloo’). When things are digital you can be more empirical and control the timing. The world of advertising agencies and PR companies were sure we had screwed up because they did not see what we were doing. (Tim Bell told everybody we were doomed because we hadn’t hired one of his companies.) This points to another important issue – it is actually hard even for very competent and determined people to track digital communication accurately, and it is important that the political media is not set up to do this. There was not a single report anywhere (and very little curiosity) on how the official Leave campaign spent 98% of its marketing budget. There was a lot of coverage of a few tactical posters.

"...

"Steve Baker often disagreed with me, sometimes very strongly, but he was a rare person in the campaign – an honest man. Not only did Steve win some important Parliamentary battles he also played a vital role during the attempted coup of 25 January. If he had thrown in his lot with the coup, it might have proved fatal. Instead he spoke honestly about the situation. We did not agree and we were both under pressure from a set of people who thought that ‘if they [HQ/MPs] control the campaign we will lose, we [HQ/MPs] must control it’. We came to an agreement that we both stuck to. With five weeks to go, there was an attempt to revive the coup by a couple of VL Board members working with players from the January coup like Malcolm Pearson. The demand was to replace the Big Three (Boris, Gisela, Gove) and the core campaign team with Farage, and replace £350 million / NHS with ‘go global’ trade babble. This didn’t get past the usual weekend boozy chats partly because of Steve Baker telling them he thought it a mad plan. This also shows how volatile the situation was right until the end and how few prominent eurosceptics even then understood that a) the £350 million / NHS argument was necessary to win and b) their ‘go global’ message was a total loser."

I'll post back with more from the Cummings article shortly.

[Aractus]

Citations adapted from Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won (Jan 2017) with added/altered formatting.

"The IN side started with huge structural advantages.

"1. IN started in 2015 well ahead in the polls and had the advantage of having the status quo on its side which is intrinsically easier to explain than change...
"2. IN had the government at its heart including the Downing Street machine, the Cabinet Office, and Government departments and agencies all of which added up to thousands of people including hundreds of press officers. Cameron and Heywood also instructed Permanent Secretaries not to share EU material with Secretaries of State supporting Vote Leave...
"3. IN controlled one side of the renegotiation and its timing. VL was at the mercy of events and could not get any ministers supporting us until the process ended.
"4. IN controlled the timing of the referendum. VL had to plan resources on the basis of many scenarios.
"5. IN controlled the Cabinet and junior ministers – bribes for support and threats to deter. They had the chance to set the terms for how ministers engaged in the campaign (though they partly blew this). VL had to meet ministers in secret, could guarantee them no jobs, and (as was pointed out to me by many) could not dodge the basic truth that purely from a personal career perspective it was usually better to support the PM.
"6. IN controlled the governing party and the Parliamentary timetable and procedures. VL had to work with a small number of MPs...
"7. IN set the legal rules. VL faced a huge imbalance in how these worked. For example, Cameron even during the official campaign could do huge events at places like the British Museum and the IN campaign did not have to account for such events as part of their £7 million. Meanwhile VL was told by the Electoral Commission that if people we did not even know put up huge signs that appeared on TV we might get billed for them. There were many other consequences of the imbalance. E.g. the Government’s legal timetable meant we had to commit before the official start of the campaign to a load of activity that would occur after the official start of the campaign without knowing if we would be the official campaign and therefore legally entitled to spend this money. We therefore had to choose between either a) not do various things, be sure we would not break the law, and lower the chances of winning or b) do the right thing for the campaign and riski [sic] being judged to have broken the law. Obviously we did (b) though we had to hide this choice from some of those on our Board as this was exactly the sort of thing some of them were very weak about.
"8. IN had access to huge resources – financial, personnel etc. IN had the support of almost every entity with power in Britain, Europe, and the world from the senior civil service to the CBI to the big investment banks, to Obama and the world bureaucracy (G20, UN, IMF etc).  Very few senior people were prepared to risk supporting us. Those who did mostly did so in a small way and on their own terms without getting involved in our campaign. ...
"9. IN had the support of most journalists and senior management in the main broadcasters. The broadcasters let the Government set the agenda on TV for almost the entire campaign, apart from ten crucial days after the immigration numbers on 26 May. VL had the support of some powerful papers but we were overwhelmed on TV news. ...
"10. IN started with legal access to vast amounts of electoral data from at least three political parties, unofficial / illegal access to vast amounts of data from things like CCHQ data and the Crosby/Messina models built during the campaign, and vast amounts of commercial data. (CCHQ laughably claimed that there were ‘Chinese walls’ that prevented any abuse of Party data.) VL had none of these things. We could not even afford to buy standard commercial datasets (though the physicists found ingenious ways around this). We had no way even to acquire the electoral roll until the official process allowed us in early 2016, after which we had to wait a couple of months for LAs to fulfil their legal obligations to provide us with the data (which they did patchily and often late).
"11. IN had a great boost to its fortunes in the form of a network linking Nigel Farage, Aaron Banks, assorted peers (e.g. Malcolm Pearson), MPs (e.g. Bill Cash), businessmen (e.g. Richard Smith), and a handful of Vote Leave Board members (including the one-time Chairman John Mills) and some staff foisted on us (one of whom won the title of the most repellent person I’ve met in politics – Nigel Griffiths, an ex-MP who some female staff refused to be in the same room with). Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that’. He also put off many prominent business people from supporting us. Over and over they would say ‘I agree with you the EU is a disaster and we should get out but I just cannot be on the same side as a guy who makes comments about people with HIV’.

"On 25 January 2016 a network of these characters launched a coup. But for the actions of Stephen Parkinson, Paul Stephenson,  and Victoria Woodcock (supported by most but not all of the office) it would have succeeded. This would have given control of the official campaign to the Farage crowd. They ran with vapid slogans like ‘Be in the know’. Ironically for a group of people who claim to be anti-SW1 they rehashed the classic losing SW1 eurosceptic trope for 25 years – ‘Go Global’ – showing how little they understood the electorate and mass communication. They rejected the connection between immigration, £350 million and the NHS, which was absolutely vital, as the IN side has said after 23 June ... They published dumb offensive videos. They talked about privatising the NHS. They built little grassroots organisation and their claims about social media were (and remain ) laughable. Farage himself admitted after 23 June that they did not have the organisation to run the campaign if they had won designation: ‘quite what we would have done if we had got it I’m not really sure!’, which sums them up (Shipman, Location 4,150). The media would have covered this gang’s official campaign as a version of their own book – a bunch of childish dodgy boozers on an ego trip.

"Before the 2015 election Farage said to me at Stuart Wheeler’s that he knew he could not be the leading face of the campaign – ‘I’m one of the generals but I can’t lead the army’ he said, to my relief. When I next saw him in the summer, I was amazed at how his tune had changed, his obsession with the debates, and his pessimism. ...

"Given all these huge advantages, if their campaign had been of equal effectiveness to Vote Leave then, all else remaining equal, Cameron would almost certainly (>95% likely) have won. ...

"Our story rested on five simple foundations that came from listening very hard to what people really knew, thought, and said:

" 1. ‘Let’s take back control’. The overall theme. When I researched opinion on the euro the best slogan we could come up with was ‘keep control’. I therefore played with variations of this. A lot of people have given me a lot of credit for coming up with it but all I really did was listen. (NB. ‘back’ plays into a strong evolved instinct – we hate losing things, especially control.)
" 2. ‘The official bill of EU membership is £350 million per week – let’s spend our money on our priorities like the NHS instead.’ (Sometimes we said ‘we send the EU £350m’ to provoke people into argument. This worked much better than I thought it would. ...) ...
" 3. ‘Vote Leave to take back control of immigration policy. If we stay there will be more new countries like Turkey joining and you won’t get a vote. Cameron says he wants to “pave the road” from Turkey to here. That’s dangerous. If we leave we can have democratic control and a system like Australia’s. It’s safer to take back control.’
" 4. ‘The euro is a nightmare, the EU is failing, unemployment is a disaster, their debts and pensions are a disaster, if we stay YOU will be paying the bills. It’s safer to take back control and have a new relationship based on free trade and friendly cooperation instead of the European Court being in charge of everything…’ (This is not an official text, just a summary of the notion off the top of my head.)
" 5. Anti-Establishment. E.g. We aligned our campaign with those who were furious with executive pay / corporate looting (about 99% of the country). We aligned ourselves with the public who had been let down by the system.

" ...

"Cameron/Osborne mistakes ...

"1. Cameron never had to offer the referendum in the first place. His sudden U-turn was a classic example of how his Downing Street operation lurched without serious thought in response to media pressure, not because of junior people but because of Cameron himself and his terrible choice of two main advisers (Llewellyn and Oliver). This happened many times and I wrote about all the damage it caused on other issues after I left government (HERE). This was the biggest example. It was a product of a deeper error – a combination of his failure of party management (misleading them about the best way to handle the party) and failure to understand how swing voters really think and therefore the dangers of a vote (see below).
"2. If Cameron/Osborne had had a top notch person like David Plouffe running their campaign and they did as they were told then they would have won (>95% confidence), all else being equal. They were warned many times by their closest friends about Oliver and Llewellyn, including by Gove, but would not listen.
"3. Their renegotiation was flawed from the start and badly undermined their central message. They compounded their errors in 2015 by accepting the pathetic deal in 2016.  If they had walked away in February then Vote Leave would quickly have imploded and the flying monkeys would have taken over the campaign.
"4. They made themselves too prominent in the campaign and were too crude. Lacking a feel for psychology they gradually undermined their own message. Oliver thought Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ was brilliant. It was counterproductive. They thought ratcheting up the warnings to DEFCON 1 was effective. It was counterproductive.
"5. They doubled down on ‘tens of thousands’ [migration policy/pledge]. They thought they would lose credibility if they didn’t. The opposite was true. They should have dropped this in 2015 – for example, in an exclusive to the Independent on a Saturday in early August 2015 – and gone into the campaign without it. Every time they defended it they were helping us.
"6. They suckered themselves into over-prioritising their coalition versus message. Blair’s campaign against us in the North East did the same. When you do this you lose focus and clarity which is usually fatal. The error was perhaps most visible the day Cameron unveiled an absurd poster that effectively listed all the ‘serious people’ on their side and – creative genius! – a blank page for us. A total waste of valuable time. The fact of being the Government meant the broadcasters let them lead the news almost all the time but they often wasted it like this. (I would bet that that ad was never put in focus groups or if it was the results were ignored.)
"7. One of my basic criticisms of Cameron/Osborne from the start was the way they steered by pundit. ... left to their own devices in the referendum when under pressure they defaulted to their instincts at a crucial moment. The reaction to the dreadful murder was an example of how the media and SW1 can live effectively in a parallel universe. Somehow they convinced themselves that this event might undo over a decade of growing hostility for those in power. They therefore tried to push the theme that actually MPs are great, ‘they are in it for good reasons’ and so on. The media led themselves into a dead end and No10, defaulting to their instincts of steering by pundit, followed. As soon as I saw Osborne and Matt Hancock wasting their time tweeting broken multicoloured hearts and encouraging #weloveourMP, I knew they had screwed their own OODA loop. We knew from focus groups (conducted by the brilliant Henry de Zoete who also played a crucial role in coordinating the digital and data science teams) that opinion outside London was extremely different to that of MPs and those in charge of most news. We went straight back to what we knew were the winning messages leaving Hancock and co to tweet broken hearts."

There's a huge amount of interesting observations in there. Of course I don't expect people to agree with all of Cummings' opinions and observations, but there are some definite political truths in there that can help campaign directors win future elections or plebiscites. I mentioned earlier regarding the 2019 UK GE that Boris Johnson's slogan 'Get Brexit done' was a far better campaign slogan compared to 'Brexit means Brexit' which is what Theresa May ran under in 2017. Similarly 'Let's take back control ...' is a far better slogan than 'Go Global'. Good short positive slogans are very effective at getting the message across, and Cameron's side didn't make effective use of them. Slogans like 'best of both worlds' were never going to resonate. Their main campaign slogan wasn't much better to be honest:



Yes, it is a clear simple positive slogan, but what does it convey about EU membership? 'Stronger, safer, better off' is simply too vague, not to mention it was associated with the negatively received "Stronger In ..." slogans from the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum. Furthermore this is not a slogan to win over undecided voters - it's one to reassure your existing supporters and prevent them switching sides. Whoever designed that slogan did a poor job.

The remain side did start with a huge number of advantages. One of their biggest mistakes was in putting out massive lies - arguably the biggest of which was when David Cameron got the then-US President Barack Obama to say that Brexit would put the UK to the "back of the queue" for trade talks. This was part of what Vote Leave called Project Fear. Let's examine Obama's comment in full:



Obama: “Maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done. And UK is going to be in the back of the queue.”

There are actually two lies in there. The first is that the US is focused on getting a FTA with the EU. Let me show you a map that thoroughly disproves this claim:



That is a map showing FTA's the US has with other countries. Here's ours:



The US is not putting anyone at the "back of the queue", negotiating FTAs with the EU is an absolute nightmare which is why we don't have one - yet we have several more bilateral FTAs than the US does.

Although a lot of people on this forum seem to disagree at this time, voters are not stupid. They're certainly not that stupid - and look how that threat has worked out? The US under the Trump administration is keen to get a FTA with the UK in short order. Frankly it makes Obama look like an incompetent liar. So this time around in the 2019 GE campaign they told another project fear lie: The Johnson administration will sell out the NHS to America. I can't believe how often I see this garbage repeated by the anti-Conservatives. There's absolutely no real-world data to suggest that the UK's healthcare system is under threat from a FTA with any foreign nation.

The problem with FTAs is they're goddamned complicated and involve compromise, so the public is never 100% happy. The EU's model of perfect regulatory alignment is flawed for oh so many reasons.

On both the FTA and NHS points I talked about it with my mum over Chrissy. She's very engaged with Australian politics and a life-long ALP voter. I told her how Labour was using the scare campaign that the Tories would sell the NHS to America in a FTA. Her response was quite entertaining "how would they do that? I hate that kind of thing, that's like when ALP said Medicare would be gutted by Liberal ..." Yes exactly, of course it is. And on the claim that a year isn't long enough to get a FTA, she also thinks that's ignorant to think they can't sign a FTA in a year. Why should it take longer when they're existing close trading partners in the EU? We both agree that one year probably won't cover all industries that both sides want in their FTA, but they can put one in place to cover say 90-95% of their key industries and build a more comprehensive one down the line. You're not going to get an FTA with "everything" in a year, but nor do you need that.

Really the only way that they don't get a UK-EU FTA by the end of 2020 is if the EU refuses to negotiate one.

Back on the main topic at hand, the overall narrative from Remain was an economic one. However what the sneering-left in particular hasn't acknowledged is that many Leave-voters voted to leave the EU with the full knowledge that it would mean they have to take an economic hit to get back control and sovereign self-determination free from EU interference. They saw it is a price worth paying to get out of EU (there's a 10 min video on that page where you can see people who are intending to vote leave saying precisely that).

[Aractus]

An article by John Rentoul states several things I've been observing for ages now (pretty sure I said it explicitly at one point or another) as did many other commentators: Labour should have voted in favour of May 2.0 as it was a deal that achieved everything they claimed they wanted to negotiate. One thing the article does not acknowledge though is that Parliamentary Labour was mostly Remainer, and more interested in stopping Brexit than negotiating any form of Brexit.

There is no clearer example of this than the man who was the shadow-Brexit secretary, and the leading candidate to replace Corbyn as the next UK Labour leader: Keir Starmer. Starmer in 2018 came perilously close to the same fate as Davies when the Corbynites attempted to remove remaining in the EU Customs Union from their Brexit policy. The fact is that Labour was just as divided over Brexit as the Tories were under May. May was an unpopular leader with a divided party, voting through her plan in March would have given Labour a fighting chance to force an early election and win, or at the very least table a shitload of amendments and bills of their own to make Brexit a compromise.

As we all observed when May's deal failed to get through, both camps of opposition claimed it as a victory. Those holding out for a so-called "harder Brexit" with no Customs Union, and the remainers who wanted to Revoke Article 50. As Rentoul's points out he, and indeed I and others, could see that only one of those two camps could possibly be "right" in the end. The deadlock would have to be broken sooner or later and those who blocked May's deal for the loosing reason will have to come to terms with that.

Rentoul's observation about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP is precisely what I've been thinking - so much so I could have written what he's said: "Nicola Sturgeon was ready to ask her MPs to vote for it. She calculated – correctly, as it turned out – that the Scottish National Party would win back a lot of the seats it lost last time. And hardly anyone noticed or cared that she was prepared to sell out the Remainer cause for party political advantage."

The only part of the article I find deficient is on Lib Dem. All the Tory and Labour "defectors" lost their seats. Of course they did. Some may have stood a better chance as independents, but they made the political mistake of joining another party mid-term, the voter's don't appreciate that.

But ultimately Lib Dem's most damaging mistake was in making their sole defining cause "To Stop Brexit". They've been deluded into believing that there's a greater Remain majority in the wider electorate now. Dominic Cummings believes that Vote Leave won because they had a better overall campaign - and that's probably true. However the UK didn't move "back" to being pro-Remain in their attitudes, look at Vote Leave's internal party polling:



That I think tells the picture that the biased media, as well as Labour and Lib Dem chose to be ignorant on. Lib Dem tailored a message that could only possibly be attractive to the 41% (31% + 9%) of EU Referendum voter attitudes. Johnson's campaign targeted the 68%+ (44% + 15% + 9% + a percentage of remain voters in favour of honouring the result), that's why he always talked about his deal positively in a way to reassure that 15% that were not fond of the EU but were worried about the effects on jobs and living standards (and probably other effects), as well as the "undecided". Sure those raw numbers could have changed since 2016 - in fact it'd be madness to think they haven't. However, it'd also be madness to think that the 32% who managed to over-represent themselves in the actual referendum via higher turn out have grown to anywhere close to 50%.

[Aractus]

Here's an excellent video from 2014:



When people say that Boris became a Eurosceptic overnight for political advantage for the 2016 plebiscite/Vote Leave campaign, they should also take a look at that video.

[Bucky Ball]

Harry and Meghan don't wanna be no royals no more.
Is this Meghxit or Harryxit ?

[Kim]

I think @Mathilda may have misunderstood my referring to SNP as "republicans" as having something to do with US, where I just mean they believe in a Scottish republic. I'm deeply republican myself so I sympathise, I hate everything to do with the UK royal family. I hate the Queen, I hate Prince Phillip, I hate Prince Charles, I hate the idea of aristocracy. Recently I heard about this other royal I had never heard of, and I hate him as well. What's his name? I forget, let me Google it... Prince Andrew. Their whole family tree is like a telegraph poll the inbred freaks.

I hate the royals too. I think they're the human face of the British establishment that stops any real reform from happening because it's harder to hate a person who stands for nothing than an undemocratic system.

The SNP aren't actually opposed to the royal family, but nor are they pro-royal either. It's another question for another day.

Probably the idea of royals isn't all that irrational - people seem to need someone to follow through their life and discuss and get pissed at and adore etc. You have all kinds of celebrities capitalizing on that, and - all kinds of bad politicians. It's like a cult, and it can be harmless or harmful. Trump has a cult, so does Kim. I think the royals are perhaps a fairly painless way to let the people have what they seem to be insisting on the world over, through all times.

Steven Fry once posited something along those lines which I agree with. He pretty much said that the US clings to the flag as a symbol and imbues it with a sense of nationalism and patriotism, whereas the British people have a monarch who carries their sense of patriotism and nationalism. I think he's right about that.

Our flag rarely changes and our nationalism and sense of patriotism is unchanging, and skewed to the point of stagnation. In contrast, Britain has it's monarch ... until that monarch is dead. Then they grieve and move on - progress. It seems much more healthy to me, psychologically.

[Kim]

Oh shit - didn't realize I was replying to something a month old. Sorry. Interesting topic, though.

[Mathilda]

Harry and Meghan don't wanna be no royals no more.
Is this Meghxit or Harryxit ?

It's #Megxit

[Mathilda]

Oh shit - didn't realize I was replying to something a month old.  Sorry.  Interesting topic, though.  

Not a problem resurrecting threads. This thread has been going on for a while now but I think everyone is still in shock at the result of the general election. I know I am.

[Aractus]

Not a problem resurrecting threads. This thread has been going on for a while now but I think everyone is still in shock at the result of the general election. I know I am.

Too many SNP?

In all seriousness, I'm not in shock and it happened like I was suggesting (big Conservative majority):

Anyway, there's going to be a Tory majority after December 12. This is the election May wanted to have in 2017. ...

Parts of the UK media are still peddling the lie that this is an unpredictable election, what is clear is that Johnson will have a very clear mandate for his manifesto. The only thing that remains unknown is whether the Tories get a majority, or a bigger majority.

I was expecting that outcome since mid November, but I kept most of what I was saying confined to reporting from UK political analysts rather than my own reading. I was actually expecting the Tories to loose up to half their seats in Scotland (despite what John Curtice was saying). But the problem with predicting Scotland is a lot rested on Lib Dem and how much they'd split the pro-unionist vote (Labour essential ran on a platform of ambivalence to the Union which I think hurt them in Scotland). If you look at the actual vote share, SNP are way over-represented, that's in large part due to FPTP (somewhat ironically the Conservatives are against a preferential system like we have, even though FPTP benefits Labour way more than it does them).

The UK GE outcome is due to two seismic events in my opinion. The first is that Johnson was able to build political capital around securing a new Bexit deal, one that actually looked like Brexit and not half-Remain. Had he not successfully re-negotiated a deal with EU the election outcome would have been different. The problem with May's deals is that they didn't allow the UK to come out of the EU customs union, even though Leave voters were promised (indeed warned) time and time again by David Cameron and others that it would mean leaving the customs union/single market and free movement. This was a problem because it wasn't clear how May's Brexit would leave the UK better off (or that is to say what advantages it offered).


When it comes to "free movement" I must say I find the UK about 50 years in the past. What you call "free movement" we called the White Australia policy. I have to agree with the Eurosceptics and Brexiteers that immigration should be non-discriminatory.

Anyway Johnson's deal, and the GE manifesto, is popular. He's able to talk about the advantages without having to say "one day in the distant future once the Irish backstop is resolved ..." Everything was the reverse of 2017 - in 2017 there was an unpopular leader, with an unpopular manifesto, and an unpopular Brexit plan. Johnson was a lot more popular/likeable to the electorate compared to May, he had a popular manifesto even if most of it besides "get Brexit done" was quite boring and status quo, and he had a realistic and optimistic Brexit plan that resonated. The situation was so completely different to 2017 that Labour needed to adapt to the changing circumstances to have any chance (and yes that's in the ALP review like I keep saying all they had to do was read that document and not make the same mistakes as the ALP here in Australia!!)

The second seismic event is the Labour Party's substantive political change. You could say as a result of a collapse of the moderates and a takeover by the hard-left socialists who want a return to 1970's policies:



We can see that the primary reason that Labour voters abandoned Labour was because of the party's leadership, not "to get Brexit done" (although that may have been an important secondary reason and for that matter a poll like that should have allowed multiple choice). As for the people changing their vote over Brexit, 1/3rds of that 19% voted or supported Remain not Leave in 2016:



Labour are still in denial, or the Corbynites/hard left are anyway. They continue to believe their manifesto was popular - when the data says otherwise. They are judging their manifesto in isolation, not against the competing Tory manifesto. They're often judging individual policies instead of the manifesto as a whole. They deny any part of the manifesto was unpopular, even though specific policies like free nationalised broadband were shown to be deeply unpopular, especially in Labour's working-class heartlands.

I should also briefly mention Lib Dem. I had thought (wrongly as it turns out) that a weak Lib Dem would mean a stronger Labour Party. They were every bit as weak as I thought they would be. I've already explained before why I think this is, I suspect that Jo Swinson was treating the party too much as a Scottish party, but she definitely should not have accepted defectors from Labour and Tory into the parliamentary party. In my opinion that was her gravest mistake - and look how it worked out, not one of them kept their seats. If you're a minor party and you have no aspirations of every being a major party, sure let in defectors/Independents into your parliamentary party. But if you have a substantial voter base - how are they going to react to you inviting in political enemies who have either resigned or been kicked out of their parties?

[Cavebear]

In the long term, it won't matter. It just means that a lot of beaurocrats will have jobs making things about the same as they were. Nothing against the beaurocrats, they are just doing their jobs to clean up after the elephants pass... The elephants are the problem.

[Mathilda]

Not a problem resurrecting threads. This thread has been going on for a while now but I think everyone is still in shock at the result of the general election. I know I am.

Too many SNP?

In all seriousness, I'm not in shock and it happened like I was suggesting (big Conservative majority):

Anyway, there's going to be a Tory majority after December 12. This is the election May wanted to have in 2017. ...

Parts of the UK media are still peddling the lie that this is an unpredictable election, what is clear is that Johnson will have a very clear mandate for his manifesto. The only thing that remains unknown is whether the Tories get a majority, or a bigger majority.

Fair doos. Well done for correctly predicting it.

It's still shock though because until it happens you can still have hope.

The only thing keeping me going at the moment is the idea that Scotland will get its independence and rejoin the EU.

[Aractus]

It's still shock though because until it happens you can still have hope.

The only thing keeping me going at the moment is the idea that Scotland will get its independence and rejoin the EU.

Well you can still have hope that Brexit will be a thumping success?

When the next Scottish independence referendum happens it will be a clear choice between which union you want to be in: UK or EU.

I don't agree, at all, with Galloway's far-left politics (obviously), however let's look at a couple of things he has to say first here right before the 2014 referendum:



Here the host says that Alex Salmond was saying "keep the Pound, keep the Queen, keep the social union". Galloway's response is "no he can't keep the Pound, and shouldn't keep the Pound. If Scotland became independent the worst thing in the world would be to use another country's currency. That makes you a colony like Panama."

I don't agree with his response. The GBP is not handled by government so what he's saying about economic policies in London isn't directly relevant (it is indirectly relevant). However, I do agree that if Scotland were to become independent that keeping the Pound Sterling as the official currency is completely untenable. Ed Miliband was clearly saying that Scotland couldn't keep the Pound if independent. This is a major problem for the independence movement because the Euro is deeply unpopular in Scotland, as it is in the entire UK. In fact the SNP's official policy now is to change to a brand new currency once independent. I don't think that's realistic either - I think that if Scotland were to become independent right now that the only credible currency option is the Euro.

And here following the 2019 GE:



Galloway was a Corbyn supporter - in 2017 he had nothing but praise to say about Jeremy Corbyn. I'll get to that in a moment.

On Scotland he says: "they want to leave the democratic union of the United Kingdom that they're in, which has no border, which is a small island of English speaking people, and join an undemocratic European Union where they speak a hundred languages and with whom Scotland currently trades virtually nothing at all." His argument that they speak 100 languages in the EU is bullshit, there are 23 EU languages excluding English. His far-left politics betray him here with his overreach - all he had to say was that European politics is different to Scotland/UK. As for the argument itself he's right - the independence movement wants to leave a democratic union, where they have meaningful parliamentary representation (not to mention substantial devolution to Holyrood), and join the EU as a member state with little democratic input. And Scotland is part of GB, not mainland Europe so it does make sense to be closer to England than to France, Germany, or Spain.

Now finally on Corbyn. Galloway is a far-left Eurosceptic socialist, he may as well be a "Corbynite". In 2017 he believed in the Corbyn project. He points out that Labour's 2017 election manifesto promised to accept the Brexit referendum decision, but in 2019 just two years later they had kept the same socialist agenda, policies, and leader, but "refused to accept" the Brexit referendum decision. Again I think his words "refused to accept" is overreach, his main point however is valid. What actually happened was that Labour had spent two years in parliament opposing a people's vote (which is slogan for a "second referendum"), and then when the election was called they suddenly changed their policy to holding one. But because it was Lib Dem's policy, prior to the GE being called, they didn't even use the positive slogan "people's vote" nor did they develop their own, instead they dogmatically repeated the phrase "Labour is committed to renegotiating our own Withdrawal Agreement and then putting that to a referendum against Remain".

Labour were not refusing to accept the referendum result as Galloway says, they were in complete denial that a EU independence referendum had ever occurred. I've gone over why Labour's policy was problematic so many times, but I may as well repeat it - there are two simple fundamental flaws with their policy. (1.) The "people's vote" policy was a parliamentary policy designed to put the Tory's Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration (the "deal") to a "conformational" referendum. It makes no sense to put your own Brexit policy to a referendum. (2.) It wasn't their policy in opposition - they opposed that exact policy and only adopted it after the election was called. "Policy on the run" as they call it. People don't like it when you suddenly change your policy on an important issue when an election is called (same problem Lib Dem had). Really the root problem was too many Remainer MPs in Labour.

[Aractus]

Finally, some actual reflection from RLB:



Rebecca is a Corbynite. Should she win the Labour leadership she will stand the party on exactly the same socialist agenda. From her op-ed in The Tribune: "We need a proud socialist to lead the Labour Party ... I don’t just agree with the policies, I’ve spent the last four years writing them ... It is true that one reason we lost the election was that Labour’s campaign lacked a coherent narrative. But this was a failure of campaign strategy, not of our socialist programme." However, she's finally opened up some honest reflections into the 2019 GE (unlike this commentator who's still living in blissful denial). Well they sounded like honest reflections anyway, I can't rule out that she used the ALP review as a cheat-sheet! She sounds groomed, it wouldn't surprise me if these reflections are not her own but have come from her handlers. Here's what she has to say:

* Labour's Brexit policy was poorly received on the doorstep, people didn't understand the policy, and they perceived Labour's policy as trying to overturn a democratic mandate that the voters delivered. She says people didn't trust them on Brexit. She fails to admit the policy was fundamentally flawed as I've pointed out.

* She says clearly Brexit was not the only issue.

* She admits the manifesto was being poorly received on the doorstep. They didn't look economically competent, the manifesto was too cluttered. They were not able to get their core messages through.

* She says people didn't trust Labour "quite frankly". They didn't trust them to deliver on Brexit, didn't trust them to deal with anti-Semitism, didn't trust key issues in the the radical manifesto. She agrees with Sophie (the host) that people thought the Labour policies in the manifesto were unrealistic.

* Corbyn should apologise for not dealing with anti-Semitism.

* They pulled resources from seats they needed to campaign in for safe seats that they were at no risk of loosing.

* She clearly says that Labour didn't win the argument. This directly contradicts Corbyn's delusional claim (literally the title of his op-ed is "We won the argument, but I regret we didn’t convert that into a majority for change"!). If they'd won the argument they've had won the GE she says.

This is a sheila who's absolutely determined to be the next Labour leader. She's starting to position herself to do just that. Be worried, be very worried - because it's a political strategy that just might work.

[Aractus]

As I mentioned in the previous post, this journalist is living in complete denial: "What would look especially crazy to a visitor from outer space is that, although the election was not formally a referendum on Brexit, it is clear that a majority of the electorate were Remainers. The problem was that their votes were fatally split."

The majority of the electorate are remainers? Has he seen this?



His delusional claim has come to listening to too much of the left-leaning media, and making the fatal flaw of believing their rhetoric. There is no majority in the UK electorate for Remain. It is true that if there was a do-over Referendum the result might be different, however remainers number about 1/3rd of the electorate as you see above. Their vote was padded by the unsure group below them, that wanted to leave but were worried about the impact it might have. This is what the remainer media has failed to grapple with. They've treated the electorate as if there are just two types of Britons: those that want to leave the EU and those that want to remain in the EU. But there's a large number that are unsure. The unsure group shouldn't be described as either leavers or remainers - it's a group of the electorate who see problems with leaving and problems with remaining. The final group is the undecided group.

"[T]he extreme-Brexiter vision [is to become] the 51st US state and [do] trade deals with other climate-crisis deniers such as India and Australia."

Ah yes the "climate crisis". That's a made-up environmental emergency that the EU focuses all its attention on rather than the real environmental crises like Europe's overfishing in their waters and in Africa's waters. The destruction of the marine environment and their ecosystems. The eminent climate scientist Michael Mann claims the Great Barrier Reef "will be gone in a matter of decades". No the Reef is not going to die. Those alarmist claims are not based on science.

Anyway, as fas as I'm concerned it's Europe that are in denial of the very real environmental crisis in the seas and oceans caused by overfishing. The UK is one of the worst offenders - them leaving the EU will weaken the block of countries that are in favour of unsustainable fishing practises that are destroying the North-East Atlantic, and other, marine environments. They're one of the EU countries that has been voting to keep overfishing. That means that position in the EU will now be substantially weaker - will the UK abuse their own waters once they kick out foreign fishing vessels? I don't know - maybe - but it will certainly put them into a position where they can protect their marine environments if they want to - in the EU I don't see that happening.

As far as the Common Fisheries Policy goes it's been nothing but a disaster. An environmental disaster, as well as a humanitarian disaster. It doesn't take a genius to tell you that foreign fishing vessels don't give a shit about your environment. Or that letting foreign vessels take your fish disadvantages the host country economically: they're literally stealing your natural resources. The west-African nations that have EU fishing vessels in their waters are unimaginably disadvantaged by this arrangement - that's their fish that they should be catching themselves and selling to EU countries (or to whoever they like), not letting EU come in and steal their resources, destroying the environment in the process. Guess how many Australians would like to see European supertrawlers come into our fishing waters? See this is one area where the EU's approach can be shown, unequivocally, to be harmful.

As for his claim that Brexiteers want the UK to be the "51st US State" - they want nothing of the sort. They want the UK to be an independent country with national sovereignty over things like their marine environments.