Hobbs1951 wrote:Mick F wrote:Most posters on this thread are Remain voters and they can list all the good things the EU has done. Leave voters don't know the future, and neither do Remain voters. It's all speculation and a wager plus hot air and gas.
The consequences of leaving the EU are already being seen and felt within the UK economy, and it has
nothing to do with how any individual on this forum or in the wider public voted.
The UK government failed pre and post referendum to understand/calculate the impact of leaving on the UK economy, so I don't see how many on this forum can.
John.
Quite so - I never understand how the pontificators for and against can kid themselves that they understand "the economics" of, well, anything since the arrangements are convoluted, complex, vast and unpredictable. It isn't just a joke that "economics is one rung down the list of human bodies-of-understanding from astrology".
The wee discussion about Malta and its buses is a good example of how both "sides" will select what are base facts then concoct them, with various correlation-arguments, into a new "fact" of their liking about what the cause of the now worse service is. But correlation is not causation. And there are 59 other factors in play of which we're unaware (except for knowing it's never as simple as A+B = C).
I nearly didn't vote in the referendum, on the grounds that I knew I had no real understanding of the consequences either way. I did vote "stay" in the end because of three factors:
* The leave factions seemed infested by xenophobia, faux-nationalism and racism, which didn't bode well for a future with leavers in power;
* The EU provides a large bloc that has far more clout internationally, on many fronts, than a Little England will have.
* I'm a conservative (small c, not the Party variety) who feels that vast revolutionary changes are far more dangerous than a slow and careful evolution of the status quo.
Do we see the USA states seceding? Do the Leavers want a fragmented Britain - not just Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as separate nations but perhaps also Cornwall, Yorkshire and Greater London? (There are voices who would like that).
The trend of history is to have large socio-political blocs that mesh the parts to do more than the individual parts could ever manage. Fragmentation is the usual precursor to what is generally referred to as a Dark Age - stagnation, regression and poverty, with the small bits predated upon in various wars of acquisition by newly-arising socio-political blocs.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes