OH MY GOD let's get several things straight about Brexit

[haele]

246. Actually, I do know what I'm talking about. I saw the breakdown of the Brexit vote.

I also heard a lot of people - including personal friends who are English ex-pats - who thinking it was just going to be a protest vote that would push Parliament into a plan that would allow them to leave eventually. To an Englishman and Englishwoman, they were all shocked and upset that it had been taken seriously and passed.


Look, We face the same bloody attitudes here in the US which is "What makes a true American" - "What is the True American Culture".
Has nothing to do with elitism.
Has everything to do with the Know-nothingism, fear of others, and a weak view of one's own history pushed by the various British Conservitive "Nationalist" groups.
Look at the organizations that were pushing Brexit - they're pretty much fear-mongering racists nationalist that would turn on fellow Britains in a heartbeat, or they're greedy Neo-Liberals looking to make a killing on the fall of the English Economy. Instead of actually working on and providing the public with "this is how we exit the EU, and still maintain a viable economy and not fall into a Thatcherist/Facist paradise", they're screaming "Burn Down The Barn" - and everything in it. Without telling the public what they're going to replace the shitty barn with.

This referendum screws more Britains - Englishmen - than it helps. Do you remember England Post WWII? That's probably the best outcome for England, there's been too many decades that the EU has been an effect on British Economy - almost as if England was a "colony" of the EU. Even two years supposed "planning" to decouple from the EU won't save the British Economy, especially with Ireland and Scotland the next to pull out. And then, what are they planning to do with all those "evil immigrants that are taking good British jobs" - in a world where Asia and Eastern Europe are Britain's primary competitors?

The situation that most rational anti-EU Britains I know were trying to push into place was to make a viable plan to decouple from the EU and not crash the economy, or lose Scotland, Ireland, and perhaps Wales - much of their industrial and skilled labor hubs. Instead, they get to experience privatization and austerity on steroids, because of the f'n Tory games.

Look, England deserves it's sovereignty and a healthy sovereign economy- but that's not what the referendum was really advertised as, and that's not what the English were encouraged to vote for. It was advertised as "get rid of the corrupt EU and those nasty foreigners".
And a huge part of the problem was provincialism. Just as it is here, with our conservatives, Know-nothings, and provincial elitists who think they are the only True Americans. We've got our own Sovereign Citizen problem, along with corrupt corporations and globalists.
Large melting pot countries don't have a specific culture, they need to have mongrel subsets. If they try to impose a homogeneous (edit point - wrong word damn don't ask don't tell computer) culture, then you end up with a large group of citizens who are left out - and potentially persecuted because they don't fit in to that culture based on their own heritage, no matter how many generations their families were in the country.

Likewise, we have no true "American Culture". If we did, three quarters of the country would be up shit creek, depending on what that "culture" would be.

Brexit was an extremely flawed referendum. I'm just praying it doesn't become as bad as history has shown what typically happens when one country decouples from a larger country. The minorities are the first to feel the pain.

Haele