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The Brexit Thread


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7 minutes ago, phart said:

We'll see what if anything the house of lords can do.

Dark days indeed when the likes of Lords Howard and Lord Lamont are turned to, to uphold democracy & the rule of law

Though I suspect the most the good Lords would do is to make the Bill more palatable to international opinion, and so minimise the trashing of the British brand, but without going so far as to save Scotland

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In hindsight now the Yes movement missed out on a big chance. If you thing how the IndyRef campaigning went in 2014 many people's heads were turned by Better Together insisting a vote for No to ensure your place in Europe and many fell for that hook, line and sinker. The Yes movement had no real comeback of substance to it. However, why the hell did they not use it to their favour. After all rumours were bubbling and Tories were promising a Brexit vote as early as January 2013 a full 18 months before the IndyRef vote. Why did the Yes movement not make so much more of this and say that the UK government were actively seeking a Brexit vote so EU membership was not guaranteed at all. Or more to the point perhaps it may have made more sense to even take it further and say IndyRef should be paused until after the Brexit vote as it was such a key part on the whole debate. Opportunities missed.

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58 minutes ago, Caledonian Craig said:

In hindsight now the Yes movement missed out on a big chance. If you thing how the IndyRef campaigning went in 2014 many people's heads were turned by Better Together insisting a vote for No to ensure your place in Europe and many fell for that hook, line and sinker. The Yes movement had no real comeback of substance to it. However, why the hell did they not use it to their favour. After all rumours were bubbling and Tories were promising a Brexit vote as early as January 2013 a full 18 months before the IndyRef vote. Why did the Yes movement not make so much more of this and say that the UK government were actively seeking a Brexit vote so EU membership was not guaranteed at all. Or more to the point perhaps it may have made more sense to even take it further and say IndyRef should be paused until after the Brexit vote as it was such a key part on the whole debate. Opportunities missed.

Well Mibee, but Labour had a good poll lead at that time, it didnt look loke the Tories were getting anywhere near winning. UKIP splitting their vote etc....

Noone though the Tories would just turn into UKIP

The'' Salmond in Millibands Pocket'' didnt help Labour. 

It was a good move from the Tories here. 

Brexit was still a way off thing, Cameron Winning the Scottish Referendum gave him the confidence and the balls and confidence to put Brexit back in its box, the way they put the jocks back in theirs..

They were confident of winning,, they had just won 2 referendums in 3 years going for a hat trick...

All what ifs and mibees.... 

Yes really had no comeback for the yes = leave Eu , except common sense, which of course went oot the windae...

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, phart said:

All the stuff coming out about social media targetting, illegal collecting of data etc. Not sat down for a thorough read of it but it's crazy sounding.

When they've basically taken over the BBC and seriously considered opening a facility to process asylum seekers on Ascension Island the government aren't even hiding their bat-shit mentalness anymore.  I'm tempted to just hide under my bed eating Christmas flavoured Jaffa Cakes until at least March and hope things haven't got any worse!    

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3 hours ago, stocky said:

Well Mibee, but Labour had a good poll lead at that time, it didnt look loke the Tories were getting anywhere near winning. UKIP splitting their vote etc....

Noone though the Tories would just turn into UKIP

The'' Salmond in Millibands Pocket'' didnt help Labour. 

It was a good move from the Tories here. 

Brexit was still a way off thing, Cameron Winning the Scottish Referendum gave him the confidence and the balls and confidence to put Brexit back in its box, the way they put the jocks back in theirs..

They were confident of winning,, they had just won 2 referendums in 3 years going for a hat trick...

All what ifs and mibees.... 

Yes really had no comeback for the yes = leave Eu , except common sense, which of course went oot the windae...

 

 

 

The first time the Tories said they'd back a Brexit vote came 18 months before IndyRef. And yet Better Together painted a far different picture kidding people voting No was the only way to secure EU membership and people fell for it whilst it was clear at that time that EU membership was under threat. The Yes movement should have been onto that from January 2013 right up until ballot day but they never. They allowed Better Together to bull shit their way to more votes and make the Yes movement look amateurish in the process.

Edited by Caledonian Craig
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12 minutes ago, Caledonian Craig said:

The first time the Tories said they'd back a Brexit vote came 18 months before IndyRef. And yet Better Together painted a far different picture kidding people voting No was the only way to secure EU membership and people fell for it whilst it was clear at that time that EU membership was under threat. The Yes movement should have been onto that from January 2013 right up until ballot day but they never. They allowed Better Together to bull shit their way to more votes and make the Yes movement look amateurish in the process.

I still think the crucial swing was in the closing stages, when they started pressing the Home Rule, DevoMax, federalism. They finally found the right buttons to press, painting a seductive picture of what many Scots might actually have been happy with to start with - a Union where we were respected as an equal partner; an even more devolved version of the UK, where almost everything short of foreign policy and defence were in Scotland's hands; and so on. Especially how they managed to twist things to imply that you could vote No to get Devo Max - the original hypothetical middle option - so that if you wanted more devo you could get it by voting No - without the scary (at the time) prospect of capital flight, banks and businesses deserting, shipyards closing, involuntary Scexit, etc etc.

As we know, the No side never honoured those promises - not only that but many of the scare stories they warned of came true anyway even within the precious Union - and are now wilfully positively dismantling devolution, an option no one ever voted for. The Tories are taking by force what Scotland never consented to. 

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4 minutes ago, exile said:

I still think the crucial swing was in the closing stages, when they started pressing the Home Rule, DevoMax, federalism. They finally found the right buttons to press, painting a seductive picture of what many Scots might actually have been happy with to start with - a Union where we were respected as an equal partner; an even more devolved version of the UK, where almost everything short of foreign policy and defence were in Scotland's hands; and so on. Especially how they managed to twist things to imply that you could vote No to get Devo Max - the original hypothetical middle option - so that if you wanted more devo you could get it by voting No - without the scary (at the time) prospect of capital flight, banks and businesses deserting, shipyards closing, involuntary Scexit, etc etc.

As we know, the No side never honoured those promises - not only that but many of the scare stories they warned of came true anyway even within the precious Union - and are now wilfully positively dismantling devolution, an option no one ever voted for. The Tories are taking by force what Scotland never consented to. 

Oh I am not arguing with any of that but just feel now, in hindsight, what an open goal was missed/overlooked and allowed to be used by Better Together to the detriment of the Yes argument. Basically, Better Together used pure hypotheticals as fact and as that Radio Clyde commentator said on Faddy's goal in Paris we were 'suckered'.

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29 minutes ago, Caledonian Craig said:

It does re-enforce my view that IndyRef2 really needs to happen sooner rather than later. Strike whilst the iron is hot and don't allow people's feeling of betrayal and being cheated to simmer down and return to passiveness.

Yep

They're getting on with Brexit during Covid 

We should get on with fucking off for good 👍

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The problem with this UK Internal Market bill is that its all a bit hypothetical and vague.  Essentially its a bill that allows Westminster to do unspecified things at some point in the future should they feel like it.   Most people - and this isn't a criticism - will not really be overly bothered until its used to actually enact some policy they don't agree with by which time it will be too late.

Its also something that on the surface is really difficult for people to get their heads around as to why its such a bad thing.  Firstly, having common standards across the four nations makes a lot of sense - the problem is how those standards are being defined, ie. imposed by Westminster.  Secondly, its being spun as the UKG investing directly in Scotland with the implication that it'll be a whole load of extra money for Scotland, ie. the Scottish Government will spend as much as it currently does and there will be extra money from the UKG.

However, that won't be how it works.  That "extra" money will be doesn't come free and you can guarantee that it will be deducted from the block grant and so that will reduce the SG's capacity to spend on their priorities - ie. things that the people of Scotland have actually voted for.   So you'll potentially get the situation where the UKG spunk a load of cash building a vanity bridge to Northern Ireland and the SG Is so skint it has to stop free prescriptions and tuition fees.  But then that would never happen, would it.

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Brexit was an astonishing political lifeline for the independence movement post 2014.

The SNP... instead of exploiting BREXIT to the max bewilderingly frittered it away.

And now we know during the exact same time period they should have been exploiting BREXIT to the max the SNP instead devoted their leadership resources to framing Alex Salmond on bogus rape charges. While frittering the greatest political reprieve of all time away...

Ask yourself why would you take a huge win (BREXIT), a gift from the political Gods, fritter it away, while instead going after the face of the 2014 independence referendum in a totally convoluted trial that would never remotely happened without the machinations of Nicola Sturgeons husband and her inner circle.

This board is so thin these threads are now dumbo popularity contests.

 

Edited by thplinth
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After 2014 we had all the nauseous BS about Scotland being 'a valued partner' of the UK. And about equal partner. Let us test that theory with this proposed bill. Tell Westminster any part of the bill used for matters involving Scotland has to get passed by the Scottish Parliament first.

Three guesses what the answer to that would be?

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21 minutes ago, aaid said:

The problem with this UK Internal Market bill is that its all a bit hypothetical and vague.  Essentially its a bill that allows Westminster to do unspecified things at some point in the future should they feel like it.   Most people - and this isn't a criticism - will not really be overly bothered until its used to actually enact some policy they don't agree with by which time it will be too late.

Its also something that on the surface is really difficult for people to get their heads around as to why its such a bad thing.  Firstly, having common standards across the four nations makes a lot of sense - the problem is how those standards are being defined, ie. imposed by Westminster.  Secondly, its being spun as the UKG investing directly in Scotland with the implication that it'll be a whole load of extra money for Scotland, ie. the Scottish Government will spend as much as it currently does and there will be extra money from the UKG.

However, that won't be how it works.  That "extra" money will be doesn't come free and you can guarantee that it will be deducted from the block grant and so that will reduce the SG's capacity to spend on their priorities - ie. things that the people of Scotland have actually voted for.   So you'll potentially get the situation where the UKG spunk a load of cash building a vanity bridge to Northern Ireland and the SG Is so skint it has to stop free prescriptions and tuition fees.  But then that would never happen, would it.

I agree, it's kind of difficult to define the problem in a way that gets across the threat. "Neutering devolution" is too abstract. "Power grab" isn't quite right either, as it doesn't quite get at the idea that the power imbalance is almost like snuffing one of them out.

The phrase "imposed by Westminster" is more like it. The term "internal market" seems to imply something normal and accepted, like internal market of EU. But that market works because the powers and standards are agreed and negotiated by individual members who are equal partners with a veto. But a UK "internal market" where Westminster imposes all the rules, overrides all the other governments of the UK, is a very different matter. It's an internal market in a superstate, exactly what the Tories/Brexiteers would never stomach or allow UK to belong to. 

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3 hours ago, Caledonian Craig said:

The first time the Tories said they'd back a Brexit vote came 18 months before IndyRef. And yet Better Together painted a far different picture kidding people voting No was the only way to secure EU membership and people fell for it whilst it was clear at that time that EU membership was under threat. The Yes movement should have been onto that from January 2013 right up until ballot day but they never. They allowed Better Together to bull shit their way to more votes and make the Yes movement look amateurish in the process.

They possibly should, but the Yes campaign was all about trying to present a positive "sunny side up" vision.  "Scaremongering" was the No campaign's preserve. 

I don't even think Cameron expected to win a majority in 2013 - one of his "pitches" to the Scottish electorate late on in the campaign was that he wouldn't be there forever!

The thing that really let the Yes campaign down was being so weak on the pensions issue.  How could they not have seen that that would have been a major target for the opposition?! 

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5 hours ago, ThistleWhistle said:

When they've basically taken over the BBC and seriously considered opening a facility to process asylum seekers on Ascension Island the government aren't even hiding their bat-shit mentalness anymore.  I'm tempted to just hide under my bed eating Christmas flavoured Jaffa Cakes until at least March and hope things haven't got any worse!    

They're also considering using a Scottish island for the same purpose (I'm not sure which one though and neither are they, most probably!).

Apparently the "offshoring" of asylum seekers was first considered by Tony Blair's government, which, considering they mulled over similar plans for government IT delivery, I can well believe.

Not only is this current Tory government callous and inept, it's also unoriginal!

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28 minutes ago, scotlad said:

They possibly should, but the Yes campaign was all about trying to present a positive "sunny side up" vision.  "Scaremongering" was the No campaign's preserve. 

I don't even think Cameron expected to win a majority in 2013 - one of his "pitches" to the Scottish electorate late on in the campaign was that he wouldn't be there forever!

The thing that really let the Yes campaign down was being so weak on the pensions issue.  How could they not have seen that that would have been a major target for the opposition?! 

How true this is no-one will know, but the general received wisdom was that Cameron didn't expect to win in 2015 and so was happy to put the commitment to a Brexit referendum in the manifesto to try and see of UKIP - they were worried about UKIP as they'd done very well in the EU elections in 2014.    His calculation would be that he'd be still be in a minority position and so would either have to go into coalition with the Lib Dems - who would demand they drop that as the price - or that they'd govern as a minority and there wouldn't be a majority for it in the house.

Labour had a consistent - although not massive - lead in the polls up until about August 2014 at which point they started to slide in the polls until they were pretty much neck and neck.  If you look at the polling done in the last week of the election campaign every polling company had them effectively level and was predicting a hung parliament.

They were all miles off the final result and the general consensus is that across the industry they were weighting to heavily for prospective Labour voters.    I'm not sure how much impact the whole "Milliband in Salmond's pocket" had - while it was obviously a very srtikeing image and - tbf, a bit of marketing genius - the reality was that the Labour vote was on the stride across Britain long before the SNP became a decisive factor in the elections.   It was only in February 2015 when Lord Ashcroft started to do his constituency polls in Scotland that it became apparent that the SNP were on track to be a decisive factor in the election.   As an aside, the first raft of polls he published were in certain key constituencies which were either likely to be battlegrounds where Yes had done well in the referendum and/or where high profile - generally  Labour - incumbents were standing.  I remember being gobsmacked that Douglas Alexander - ex minister, who was managing the overall Labour campaign - was projected to lose his seat to a - then - unnamed SNP candidate, as the SNP hadn't finalised selection at that point.  Obviously, the candidate turned out to be Mhairi Black and the rest is history, but if I look back, I think that was the point where I though "if Douglas Alexander can lose in Paisley with a swing of 25% to *any* SNP candidate, then this shit is serious"

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3 minutes ago, aaid said:

How true this is no-one will know, but the general received wisdom was that Cameron didn't expect to win in 2015 and so was happy to put the commitment to a Brexit referendum in the manifesto to try and see of UKIP - they were worried about UKIP as they'd done very well in the EU elections in 2014.    His calculation would be that he'd be still be in a minority position and so would either have to go into coalition with the Lib Dems - who would demand they drop that as the price - or that they'd govern as a minority and there wouldn't be a majority for it in the house.

Labour had a consistent - although not massive - lead in the polls up until about August 2014 at which point they started to slide in the polls until they were pretty much neck and neck.  If you look at the polling done in the last week of the election campaign every polling company had them effectively level and was predicting a hung parliament.

They were all miles off the final result and the general consensus is that across the industry they were weighting to heavily for prospective Labour voters.    I'm not sure how much impact the whole "Milliband in Salmond's pocket" had - while it was obviously a very srtikeing image and - tbf, a bit of marketing genius - the reality was that the Labour vote was on the stride across Britain long before the SNP became a decisive factor in the elections.   It was only in February 2015 when Lord Ashcroft started to do his constituency polls in Scotland that it became apparent that the SNP were on track to be a decisive factor in the election.   As an aside, the first raft of polls he published were in certain key constituencies which were either likely to be battlegrounds where Yes had done well in the referendum and/or where high profile - generally  Labour - incumbents were standing.  I remember being gobsmacked that Douglas Alexander - ex minister, who was managing the overall Labour campaign - was projected to lose his seat to a - then - unnamed SNP candidate, as the SNP hadn't finalised selection at that point.  Obviously, the candidate turned out to be Mhairi Black and the rest is history, but if I look back, I think that was the point where I though "if Douglas Alexander can lose in Paisley with a swing of 25% to *any* SNP candidate, then this shit is serious"

Aye, my recollections are very similar too.

An incredible amount of water has flown under the bridge since then, so much so that it looks like a different era completely. For instance, it seems absurd now to think that UKIP were once perceived by the Tories as being a major threat - but they were! 

Cameron succeeded in killing them off, I suppose, albeit not in the way he'd imagined!

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It still smacks of very poor by Yes movement. If you watch all of the televised debates big point scoring was always done by Better Together on the EU membership matter - that is not up for debate. And what they were doing was making a false promise in hindsight. Those in the Yes movement would have known by then about the Brexit vote impending and should have hit back. Their stance should have been that the Tory government are working to end EU membership as we speak and quoted Tory plans. But no - nothing. We rolled over and allowed Better Together to wade in with BS and mop up many thousands of pro-EU voters and make the Yes movement look like they had no plan.

Sure it was fighting dirty by Better Together and if there is an IndyRef2 then Yes2 has to be far better prepared with all the right answers and responses to all the bullshit flung at them from Better Together2. It is Scotland's independence at stake here we are not playing by the Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Edited by Caledonian Craig
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