Welcome to our German Friends

[Old Greg]

The political left likes to that tell us that the common man is too uneducated and stupid to make important decisions, we should leave them to our elected leaders and the appointed government experts. Sorry to bring reality and logic into it again but let's point out a few flaws in that:

The most obvious one is that our elected leaders and experts are not guaranteed to be competent or benign and act in the public good. Hitler was elected and had the benefit of state advisors, so that made him a good leader of the German people did it? History is littered with self-serving, egotistical or impractically idealistic leaders, both elected and otherwise, who have inflicted disaster on their citizens.

While it is true that those who achieve leadership will generally be more intelligent and better educated than average, intelligence and education do not define political direction or views. You can find equally intelligent people on both sides of every political argument - look at Camoron and Johnson for example - both highly intelligent, Eton and Oxford educated men and yet they espoused completely different views on EU membership. You are telling us we should trust our leaders to do the right thing but which leader is it that we are supposed to trust?

If the common man is too ignorant or stupid to make a decision on EU membership, why is he capable of making a decision in a UK election when many of the same issues are involved? The various political parties have very different views on the major issues like the economy, welfare and social services, world trade, immigration, defence and... ah yes, EU membership! If we can't be trusted to weigh up those factors in a referendum, why can we trusted to do so in an election? One can only conclude that some lefties do not believe in democracy at all.

If the common man should trust in our leaders to do the right thing, then surely you should do the same lefties? If a Tory/UKIP coalition wins the next election you'll still be telling us we should trust our leaders will you? I suspect not. This protest against the referendum result is just hypocritical sour grapes and I have no doubt that, if stay had won, you'd be praising the common sense of the British voters.

Finally, let's look at some recent history and one of those wise leaders, President Tito of Yugoslavia. He imposed a common government on disparate nations, largely dominated by the most powerful state of Serbia, although he was from the small nation of Croatia. There are
distinct parallels with the EU today where the zealots like Junker from the small nation of Luxemburg are obsessed with trying to pressure us all into a common federation that is largely dominated by Germany. And what happened? Yugoslavia fell apart in Europe's deadliest conflict since WW2, having failed after nearly 50 years to achieve a consensus between the constituent nations. The EU that Junker and others are trying to press us into is even less likely to succeed given the greater divergence of cultures and languages. Yugoslavia is just one example of the way that forced unions between people of different views and cultures rarely work. Not to say that they can't, but what is the best way to find out if people feel they have a sufficiently common ground to make a success of it? Ask them of course!

Nurse! Mr Xoggoth is in the Day Room again!

[xoggoth]

That's because when you're voting in a general election, you pick an elite, not one particular issue out of a web of complex, intertwined problems. Hence a shadow cabinet, so that you can pick which set of experts you would rather trust. On a referendum, the plebs (in the strict sense of the word) vote on one issue, as if it was in a vacuum.

Hardly that simple.

When you vote for a party you are not just voting for the leader who seems most impressive, you mainly vote on what their policies are on issues that concern you. In elections, two of the major issues in recent years are the economy and immigration, the same as in the referendum. Why should people be allowed to make judgements on those in national elections and have their desires overruled by an EU without any say in it?

However, I think the major concern for very many of us, me certainly, was the lack of democracy in the EU, the drive to weld us all into one ever-growing unified state far to quickly. The views of British citizens would count for less and less. Regardless of the individual issues, the basic right of citizens to have an occasional real say in the direction of their own nation is of overriding importance and very much the sort of thing where referendum results should count.

As for the complexity of some issues, whether we get good trade deals etc., so much said on both sides was nothing more than speculation. Our leaders and experts had such a host of totally different views on those that, statistically, none is any more likely to be right than the man in the street.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

Hardly that simple.
As for the complexity of some issues, whether we get good trade deals etc., so much said on both sides was nothing more than speculation. Our leaders and experts had such a host of totally different views on those that, statistically, none is any more likely to be right than the man in the street.

Saying that the arguments before the referendum were both for and against is a lot like saying that global warming might or might not be happening, or that vaccines might or might not cause autism, as we have experts on both sides of the argument. It ignores that the only experts I've found who were for leave, argued for a South-East Asia style market economy, which is what economists often do, confuse what we coul do technically with what is possible politically. For the UK to benefit economically from leaving, they would need to abandon much of workers' rights, most of the NHS and cut back on all other forms of social spending drastically, as the argument's gist is that the UK could be competitive internationally that way.

Guess what the unemployed or struggling working class that voted for leave thinks about that.

Economically, it's a non-starter, unless you're wearing blinders.

[vetran]

Surely that should have started with 'The political right...'

nope its the left that feels people need protection from themselves. Oh the poor deprived X need us to legislate, rule and provide for them.

The left hate the upper class or the wealthy they expect them to pay for society and previous imagined or real ancestral sins. They love ethnic diversity because they now have new needs to legislate for.

The right believe that we are responsible for our own destiny and we should get in there and make money. There are obvious exceptions of those not mentally or physically equipped for the fray.They do like to exploit us though.

The right believe you get to keep what is yours apart from a reasonable contribution to society.

The right hate shirkers & those that don't contribute.

That is pretty much it.

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The extreme left will happily guillotine anyone who disagrees with them or enslave them in a dictatorship.


The Fascist Right will happily blame their problems on anyone not like them with no evidence and kill them for it.
Of course we aren't talking about them however much you try to smear us.