Scrutable

Little waster wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 21, 2022 5:01 pm

tenchboy wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 21, 2022 1:43 pm

And didn't D.Cammy go to referendum to shut the brexiteers the f.ck up once and for all? - because he didn't beleive the country was so stupid as to actually vote leave?; and when it would come back to stay (as he thought it would) he could then flip it out of the court for good.
His mistake was in underestimating the stupidity of the british people: you can laugh at him for it but it's hard to knock him for having faith in the collective common sense (even if it was misplaced) when just about everyone since has relied on that stupidity to advance their own interests and get where they are today.

But the counter-argument is he made a hash of the referendum through a number of obvious and crucial mistakes.

1. He never expected there to even to be a referendum, it was just an electoral wheeze to nick a few hundred UKIP voters in some key marginals and put some spurious clear blue water between the Tories and their Coalition partners. He fully expected 2015 to result in another Coalition with a much-shrunken and chastened LD party. He would then buy off the LDs with a promise to ditch the referendum and then pin the blame on them when the ERG objected. Meanwhile he could go back to the Blukip voters and say "look what the mean LDs made me do, now give me a workable majority in 2020 and we'll finish the job, pinkie promise." Ditching the referendum under those circumstances was a "Free Action" for Cameron and the likelihood is the LDs would have been so grateful to get even that they wouldn't have pushed for anything else, in which case Cameron would have had free rein to implement the rest of his manifesto with the un-complaining support of the rump of the LD MPs who had proven loyaler than his own back-benchers. It was a supposed win-win for Cameron, in the end it worked too well for him with the LDs imploding and the Blukippers giving him a full majority. At that point he shat himself as he now had to implement it.

Now that initial mistake lead to the others:-

2. Not putting in the groundwork. With idiocies such as withdrawing from the EPP and the shambles of the EU re-negotiation he had already pump-primed the Eurosceptics while undermining his own credibility in making the pro-EU argument, all compounded by an AWOL Labour Party and a shattered and discredited LD kicking away the other pro-EU supports.

3. Scheduling the referendum for the mid-terms. After 6 years of austerity and in the midst of the usual mid-term blues he essentially pulled down his pants and offered the public his buttocks with "Kick Me" written across it. Unsurprisingly they obliged.

4. The wording of the question. First, it was supposed to be a choice between the "new and improved" re-negotiated deal and leave, but after he had made such a hash of the re-negotiation it was no longer felt even worth making the offer. Then it became a straight choice between Remain and Leave, a choice between Remaining in the known imperfect status quo and whatever personal fantasy Leave you could imagine; at a stroke maximising the Leave vote as old-school Lexiteers, Singapore-on-Thames zealots and the "no one is talking about leaving the Single Market" moderates could all paint in whatever mutually-exclusive sunny upland they wanted onto the same binary outcome. The wording should have been specific on spelling out what Leave actually meant, was it the Norway option, the Swiss option, the Turkish option or the Canada-plus option even if it meant having multiple questions and a run-off. As the May premiership taught us not one of those specific Leave options could ever summon even a plurality of support, only by lumping all of them in together did they scrape together the fabled 52%. Instead we came within hours of the Mauritius-minus option and ended up with the current half-baked deal which is already in crisis, with all the time the Brexiteers disingenuously claiming whatever was on the table at that given moment was the immutable Will of the People chosen with full knowledge of what it entailed.

5. The referendum criteria. They could have put in a say 60% supermajority requirement, or a 4-nation lock or a minimum turnout or a STV-voting model or 16+ voting age or ex-pat voting or EU citizen voting or any of a half-dozen ways to ensure any drastic change to the constitution genuinely reflected a true majority of the people affected, instead we has a 50%+1 winner-takes all on a 72% turn-out of UK-resident-and-citizen-only, one wet Thursday in June.

6. The campaign itself. Which to put it mildly was an utter shambles.

All stupid, all predictable, all Cameron's fault.

bjn wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 21, 2022 11:42 am

f.ck. Truss has the hots for Minford’s economics. We are totally screwed.

jimbob wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 22, 2022 1:26 pm

A thread specially for EPD

https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1550 ... J4AaUGEK1w

discovolante wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 22, 2022 11:05 pm

We've been trying to coax him out with pieces of Cumberland sausage for the last 7 hours but he won't move.

TimW wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 10:30 am

Just earrings?!

TimW wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 10:30 am

Just earrings?!

Woodchopper wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 10:10 am

Entirely reasonable response: https://twitter.com/ajrichardsonmp/stat ... AfdUGQzZgA

shpalman wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:26 pm

I know, a stupid person might have gotten confused.

tom p wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 21, 2022 8:59 pm

Exactly this.

noggins wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:41 pm

The Punjab Ponce and The Blue Hag.

Tessa K wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:17 pm

What would Truss and Sunak's wrestling/boxing nicknames be?

Tessa K wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 6:56 pm

noggins wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:41 pm

The Punjab Ponce and The Blue Hag.

Let's avoid race references and sexist language. There's plenty of other ammunition.

Trinucleus wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2022 4:22 pm

Would "Vote Liz, get Nadine" scare some into Rishi's camp?