Boris Johnson not running for PM. He was just all talk it looks like. He doesn't want to do the actual hard work of Leaving the EU meetings, etc. Or perhaps he doesn't want to be blamed for the upcoming recession once they leave the EU.
More likely, he recognized that he just couldn't win. He was never the favorite. Gove just sealed it.
Heseltine launches scathing attack on Boris Johnson 2 hours ago Conservative grandee and former leadership contender Lord Heseltine has launched a scathing attack on Boris Johnson, accusing him of creating the "greatest constitutional crisis in modern times". Lord Heseltine, a former deputy prime minister, told the BBC the former London mayor had "ripped the (Conservative) party apart." Lord Heseltine described Mr Johnson as "like a general, that led his army to the sound of guns, and at the sight of the battlefield abandoned the field." http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36677623
He's making the smart move. The next PM has a major headache on their hands and probably is going to come out of the process feeling battered, bewildered, betrayed, etc. (God I love Nathan Lane's portrayal of a Fin's fan after a loss.) So Boris lets Gove or May take it in the chops and probably go down swinging with the EU and the b,b,b British voters and then he comes back as the *next* Prime Minister who gets to bounce back from all the mayhem. The funny thing (sad thing if you're a Brit right now) is that the perfect PM to negotiate the exit with the EU is David Cameron and he's had enough and is exiting stage left before the brawl begins. Cameron is the only guy the EU might give a fair break to in the negotiations, since they know he really wanted to stay and they'll have some pity on him for calling the Brexit vote without calculating the odds well enough. However he also knows he got the best deal available from the EU before the vote (dependent on GB staying in) and they know it also. That means he knows he's going to get jobbed by them no matter what, just likely to a much lesser degree than some of the other candidates to replace him. My money is on May. She was a Remainer also and she probably has the second best position to negotiate from among the Conservatives at this point. The EU Commissioners will not hate her with a passion as she's walking in the door. BTW, the Brits should have gang-tackled Nigel Farage as he was headed for the EU Parliament session. There was no way that having him go gloat there was going to do anything helpful for the negotiations moving forward and in fact he somehow managed to make a bad situation worse by his actions. Being a bad loser is really crappy but understandable. Being a bad winner should be a firing offense.
Umm, yeah. So, then, there's this. No, Britons Were Not Frantically Googling ‘What Is The EU?’ Hours After Brexit Vote This is, frankly, a perfect illustration for why Brexit won, and why Frexit, Danext, Nethexit and Whateverexit will also win. It's because the Left has this ingrained notion that it is correct because it's smart, and the other side is wrong because it's dumb. A natural off-shoot of the heart of the Left residing in Academia. As if every PhD were just bubbling with genius. Heh. Right. But it's also a way that stupid people feign legitimacy. A chicken-and-egg thing. If they're on the Left, then certainly they MUST be smart. This is the whole point behind Brexit. A group of Eurocreeps, so certain that they're right because they're on the "right" side, pushed just s bit too far. This wasn't the first member-state vote that slapped back at the idea of a European Superstate. France the The Netherlands tried before. Didn't matter. The Eurocrats forged ahead. And why? Because they're on the Left. And that's the "smart" side. In their mind, it was in everyone else's interest, they just weren't smart enough it know it. Yeah, right Which isn't to say there aren't smart and intellectually honest people on the Left. There are a couple right here on this board. Easy to spot. On the other hand, the notion that people voted out of the EU because they're dumb and didn't understand what they were voting for, which was the whole purpose of this post above is, itself, insulting to millions of Brits who saw what the EU has been doing and said, plainly - enough! It's just easier to consider them stupid than to understand their point. Just about every European leader has publicly admitted that the EU needs reform. Even Angela Merkel. Even Francois Holland. Jean Claude Juncker, for his part, has brushed those comments aside and said that no one can tell him what they are doing wrong so, for him, it's business as usual. Not to mention, the predominant voting block within the EU is absolutely intent on creating a United States of Europe. It doesn't even matter that getting there requires unanimity on the Commission, because for the European nation state, it's death by a thousand cuts. Clear enough - they'll get there eventually. If the issue were truly about a common market, Brexit would never have been necessary, because the EU would want that also. Trade agreement, by their very nature, benefit both sides. So, trade issue? Simple. Done all the time. Matter of fact, just take the trade agreements with Switzerland and Norway and work from there. Easy as pie. And a trade agreement will happen, because this isn't Belgium or Romania leaving the EU, this is UK. As much as Remain folks might like to suggest that industry will up and leave UK and settle elsewhere because of this mythical Euro conversion issue - they won't. Why? Because international businesses want to be located in an English-speaking country (for starters) and they also have to deal with LOCAL regulation on top of whatever the EU drops on them. They might locate elsewhere also, but they certainly won't abandon Great Britain. Not to mention, not a single prudent business would bank on the EU even existing in five years. But, yes, Brexit voters are dumb and didn't know what they were voting for. Righty-o!
A United States of Europe would be a much better arrangement than the nationalism that gave us WWI and WWII. I'm actually not worried about Brexit at all. I'm not a Brit and so I won't feel whatever the consequences are in close order the way they will and so it's really not an issue. I'm not sure that the exit will be bad for Britain, although it might cost them Scotland and that might matter to some of the people who voted to leave. I'd have a completely different take on a French exit from the EU with the Germans angrily denouncing the move, for obvious reasons. Great Britain is a minor player on the political stage unless they're meddling on a divided continent. This will become apparent as the world financial markets move on and the big banks leave London.
I'll agree that "the left" will unfairly push the idea that all their plans are correct because its smart. That's a cheap tactic that regrettably gets used too much. I think you nailed why they do it and why there is resistance to that idea. but you can't tell me that there isn't a shit load of truly stupid people in the UK. I'd venture to say that the average voter didn't understand the referendum much at all. I don't think its stretch to say that the stupid people were more likely to vote 'out' either. In this particular instance its clear that its easier to explain to a moron the pros for leaving as it is to get them to wrap their heads around why they should stay. Basically what I am trying to say is that the debate on whether to leave or stay in the EU doesn't have a "smart" option, its a legitimate debate and both sides have intellectual merit. But the average voter in the UK (and the US too although N/A) is dumb. Both sides try to take take advantage of that fact. In this particular instance it was easier for the "out" side to take advantage
The Leave vote had nothing to do with stupidity. It had to do with anger. Cameron thought the Brexit issue was a Conservative issue and that he could manage that part of the equation and stop the internal argument in the party. He had no clue that Brexit also divided Labor to the same extent and that's what blindsided him. You know who Cameron is really angry with right now? He's angry at Boris Johnson for taking the Leave position and he probably worked very hard behind the scenes to make sure Boris wouldn't get the nod this time around to replace him. He's also really angry at Corbyn for not working harder on Remain. His comment that Corbyn should GTFO out of leadership in Labor wasn't a normal comment for an opposition party pol to make. It was rooted in his conviction that Corbyn threw the referendum on purpose.
And a bowl of ice cream would be a better arrangement than a punch in the face - you talk about these things as if they were the only options to the exclusions of all else. They aren't.
Yeah, inasmuch as BOTH sides magnified the worst fears of the voters, I agree that the truth was probably clouded. I don't think there was doom waiting on either side.
Left to their own devices things (and governments) tend to go to ruin in a hurry. European nationalism has been absolutely ruinous for the continent as a whole since the Western Roman Empire fell. There was no period from the fall of the empire to 1968 in which multiple international borders were not crossed during hostilities and there were systemic outbreaks of open warfare that shattered the peace. Since the EU began to form all of the conflicts in Europe have been either civil wars (the breakup of Yugoslavia being the most obvious) or they've been on the periphery of Russia with former Soviet Republics and the Russians engaged in a constant state of conflict in one place or another. Western and Central Europe have not had as long a period in which no national borders were crossed during a conflict (going on 50 years now) since before the Romans fell in the West. Part of that is NATO and American involvement in Western Europe but a much bigger part is that no nation in Europe has declared war on another nation in Europe (except for Russia - which is outside the EU) since the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU, was formed in 1951 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Germany. It turns out that when you are actively in union with other countries you're much less likely to decide to declare war on them over a passing issue that would have marked a clear casus belli in eras past. The perfect example of this is the civil war that occurred when Yugoslavia broke up into constituent ethnic nations who had historical allies all over the map and allies that had tended to go to war with each other over differences in the region in past eras. The Serbs were Russian clients well viewed by the French. The Croatians were Austrian clients well viewed by the Germans. The Macedonians and Albanians had drawn the Turks and Greeks into hostilities in the past. The Bosnians were a religious minority with no real friends in the region outside of their co-religionists in Kosovo. In the past the breakup of Yugoslavia would have drawn everybody into the conflict at some point and likely sparked another world war in the process. However the Europeans, being bound by their shared economic ties and NATO and their growing movement towards union, avoided the kind of horrible bloody conflict that Europe produced every 30 years like clockwork before those ties were formed and nurtured. French, Austrian, German, Italian and Greek pols took the long view and the conflict was contained to the borders of the former Yugoslavia. The Russians were unable to cause much trouble in Europe for the first time in centuries despite having real ties to and sympathies for the Serbs. The Croatians were unable to create a real war with the Serbs, something that would have happened without too much effort in the past because they had no sponsors north or south of them willing to create an environment that allowed them to be assertive and take full advantage of the breakup. That's what the EU and European Union is really good for. It's hard to get a real war going when everybody is talking and co-governing (regulating if you will) all the time and any disruption of the peace is likely to bite everybody involved really hard in the ass before hostilities even commence. That's why the EU members are so pissed off at the UK right now. They're wondering how the Brits forgot so quickly what a pain in the ass it is to have to fight in France and Greece and Italy and Turkey because something big got rolling and there was nothing standing in it's way until Great Britain was bleeding again from problems that arose elsewhere.
It's like dudes bringing up the Crusades to discuss the ills of religious radicalism in 2016. What Neanderthal Man? _
everytime i see the term brexit i want to punch a kitten. come up with something better than that world.
