Are intelligent young people in Continental Europe starting to wake up and smell the coffee? This young lady from Italy gives me hope that sanity may after all prevail, and the revolt against corrupt and incompetent leaders may continue.
Meanwhile, some Establishment intellectuals (previously pro-EU) are also starting to cleanse their minds of the old dogma!
(I was kind of disappointed with Niall Ferguson before - but now he is talking some pure sense!)
Here he sounds angry about the result, predicts disaster ahead for the UK, etc. Yet now he says that he “never really fully believed” in remaining, that he “deeply regrets” not arguing for leaving, and that he now thinks we were right to tell the EU to (in his words) “go to hell”. Extraordinary!
I’ll think you’ll you’ll find the opposite. Recent polls have shown an increase in support for the EU from all member states (including the UK), maybe not the institutions themselves but the ideals the EU promotes (the four freedoms, humans rights etc.). Few would say the EU is perfect but for unity in Europe there needs to be some mechanism and some overseeing body. That is unless you are promoting a return to nationalism or the sole pursuit of our own interests at the expense of an other country’s even at the risk of war.
“…Recent polls have shown an increase in support for the EU from all member states (including the UK)…”
Personally I see no credible evidence of increased EU support in the UK since the referendum. There have been a couple of individual polls pointing both ways on EU membership. But Theresa May (with her policy of implementing Brexit) has been consistently and massively ahead in every single national poll since taking over as PM - both in terms of voting intention and her personal approval rating. At the same time, the Lib Dems (with their let’s-ignore-the-referendum policy) have remained almost continually in fourth place in national polls - under 10% and behind, ahem, UKIP.
And I’m pretty sure there have been a couple of polls indicating that a clear majority of even the 48% who voted to remain now think the result should be respected and implemented.
Admittedly, there are doubts about how accurate any of these polls are? They are produced by the same pollsters that had the remain side strongly ahead on the day before the Brexit referendum (fail!) They are the same pollsters that said the last UK general election would produce a hung parliament with Labour ahead (fail!) And they are the same pollsters who predicted that the result of the Scottish referendum would be very much closer than it actually was (fail!)
And we haven’t even mentioned the polling before the US election…
There seems to me to be a real crisis in the opinion polling industry right now. They are struggling to find accurate samples.
Well the UK is out. France’s Marine Le Pen says they are out if she’s elected and she seems to be quite popular indeed. Honestly I see it disbanding, not in the immediate future but in the long run, especially if Germany pulls out. It will never happen under Merkel but she may or may not be re-elected.The momentum of Brexit and Trump is simply very powerful and other western countries with leaders who wished for a similar result have been emboldened.
Prinz, I think that ultimately what you say is true. The future does not bode well for the Euro. Here is an in depth lecture by Professor Mark Blyth who essentially says that “Europe is screwed” with the Euro and it will probably fragment into smaller, mini euro nation alliances. Economist Mark Blyth and the future of the Eurozone (with slides) - YouTube
The Euro currency has inflicted immense pain on southern Europe. It seems to me there is a whole generation of young people in countries such as Greece, Portugal and (to a lesser extent) Spain and Italy, that have been effectively written off by Merkel and the EU elite so as to keep their beloved political project going. It didn’t hit the UK because we had (thank Heavens!) too much sense to join the Euro. But it is appalling to see what has happened nevertheless.
Now Merkel has let in well over a million folks from the Middle East into Germany. According to what Niall Ferguson argues in one of the clips that I posted above, they have almost no chance at all of integrating these people into their society. It is almost beyond belief to me that a competent politician would act this way.
In spite of some of the crazy stuff I say, I do have a kind of soft spot for Herman the German - he was always good to me when I lived as a guest in his country after 2000. I’m certain the situation is significantly worse than is being reported in their MSM. People whom I know personally had young men running riot in their town on New Years eve. Women were attacked, and there were tens of thousands of Euros worth of property damage.
I do wonder whether Merkel has pressed an irreversible self-destruct button?
Thanks for this video on Niall Ferguson’s change of mind.
I voted to leave, but pretty well every else I know wanted to remain.
Then I saw Ferguson on TV saying how Brexit was a disaster. He’s someone whose opinion I respect and I started wondering if we’d made a terrible mistake.
But now he’s come round! Great stuff.
The euro has killed the EU, I think. Divided Europe into the weak nations who are beholden to the strong. Needs to be a federation of equals.
I watched a documentary recently where they travel through greece and interviewed people of all walks of life all the troubles they are having… but so many of them still insist that the future of Greece is with the Euro. It’s just amazing.
It’s amazing to see how the centrist and center left parties in Europe and the US (democrats) have just fallen off a cliff in terms of support. They have made it clear that the centralized financial sector success is more important than the needs of the working class and they don’t seem to realize that.
Very interesting stuff from Dan Hodges about the likely May-Trump dynamic as Britain extracts itself from the grasping clutches of the Brussels octopus.
PS
His sublime description of Donald Trump as “feline grabber in chief” is another good example of why computers will never (in my humble opinion) be able to replace humans as translators…
Donald Trump says “I’ll make Brexit a great thing!”
Here’s another quote from that same article that will appeal to you:
“The president-elect said that German Chancellor Mrs Merkel had made a ‘catastrophic mistake’ by allowing 1million migrants into her country – and he predicted that the European Union will fall apart.”
Dave Rubin has a very interesting interview with Yanis Varoufakis on the Greek financial crisis Greek Financial Crisis | Yanis Varoufakis | INTERNATIONAL | Rubin Report - YouTube YV’s argument for Britain remaining in the EU seems to boil down to ‘please don’t abondon us’. However his being a ‘Libertarian Marxist economist’ does make for some intellectually stimulating discussion.
I’m hoping that there will be a big Trumpenomic boom, and that the UK will be strapped to the rocket.
There’ll be speedy trade deals with Canada, Australia, New Zealand too. Hopefully there’ll also be deals with Brazil, India, South Africa, China…the list goes on…
What the remoaning whiners don’t understand: there are exciting opportunities out there in big blue sea, and we need to grab 'em by the octopus!
“…Theresa May’s muscular bargaining position with Brussels has been immeasurably strengthened by two factors: the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House; and the sparkling performance of the UK’s economy since June, which has defied all the ‘expert’ predictions of doom…”
“…A Trump presidency, we are now promised, will put Britain at the front of the queue for a trade deal — not at the back, as threatened by Barack Obama…”
“…That is enormously significant because the U.S. is Britain’s biggest single trading partner, accounting for 20 per cent of our commerce with the rest of the world, and 6 per cent of the UK’s total output…”
“…Britain’s economy is showing a remarkable resilience in the face of Brexit beyond the wildest dreams of those who advocated that we should leave…”
