AHC:Have Britain be less Eurosceptic

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Idea; for the British public to be more accepting of the European Project, you would essentially need Britain to not be involved in the EEC, which would need Labour to openly be Euroskeptic. Obviously for Wilson to do so this would be difficult, as the man's hands were tied, and having him step down in 1970 or 1971 would only result in Roy Jenkins, but if you can maneuver the situation into where Heath still cranks out the deal but you have Barbra Castle or even Peter Shore in the drivers seat when the referendum comes around, then you can have an environment where Labour are more inclined to oppose the EEC, and thus shift a vote against the EEC. Though having a more competent leader instead of Wilson or a larger majority would make it easier.

Again though, had Major called a referendum on Maastricht, or if Blair had done one himself (Blair toyed with a Referendum on the Euro before Brown told him a change from Sterling wasn't happening), then you could see a noticeably less Euroskeptic Britain. But that really only erases the issues of 'democracy', which will still be a recurring issue in the future.
If the young always win, then that means that Brexit wouldn't have happened...
And I disagree that UK could've kept Singapore...
I'm going to dig out that graph @AndyC did, then the numbers of young people who voted and if all the none-voters could have actually flipped the vote, because I suspect they couldn't.

And Hong Kong maybe, but that would have required China imploding and an Independence movement being more silent.
 
If the young always win, then that means that Brexit wouldn't have happened...

You should know older people vote because they have an interest in politics that affects them such as pensions, benefits, social security, jobs, the housing market, investment and young people are less interested one because they are entering that phase in their life and two the honesty in UK politics is at an all-time low and that resonates better with young people because they have better things to do in life than old people. Apply this to the fact that older people are living longer through better medical treatments and the ratio of old and young male and female people in the UK is unbalanced, as there are more old than young in the UK, then persuading young voters to vote is very hard and unreliable.

I did not say Brexit would not have happened through the young vote, an astronomical amount of young people voted "in" however one Mr. incompetent Jeremy Corbn flopped during one of the most critical times in our history and armies of labour voters voted "Out". This is not an incident to ignore no matter how many young voters voted the guy is as useless a piece of dirt. However, flip the coin and the young may win whatever comes their way in the future.

Hong kong is completely different because it is a territory that has been under UK and China and in 1994 Chris Pattern passed through the Hong Kong electoral reform thereby giving the people a vote which China does not do now. The further time drifts away from 1997 the Hong Kongers will demand to rejoin the UK or become independent, in 1997 the now old wanted to go back to China and the now young want their vote back. The Chinese can wave that Sino-British declaration as much as they want, if the young want it the young will have it, it is only a matter of time.

And I disagree that UK could've kept Singapore...

I was including Winston Churchill in this post because he is as much to blame as anyone even if he did defeat the world's most evil men.
 
Last edited:
Hong kong is completely different because it is a territory that has been under UK and China and in 1994 Chris Pattern passed through the Hong Kong electoral reform thereby giving the people a vote which China does not do now. The further time drifts away from 1997 the Hong Kongers will demand to rejoin the UK or become independent, in 1997 the now old wanted to go back to China and the now young want their vote back. The Chinese can wave that Sino-British declaration as much as they want, if the young want the young will have it, it is only a matter of time.

You do know as well as I do that the UK caring about Hong Kong democracy was more of a last-minute thing, right?
 
Only since Margret Thatcher did she create something special, mainly in "London" and the south but even she made big mistakes, for example closing all the mines... Where are all the miners going? In graves through popping pills, snapping their own necks or getting turned into swiss cheese. The solution was to retrain them to create growth, increasing birth rates, less unemployment and so on.

I'm not a massive fan of Thatcher (the fact that she's regularly mentioned as the best post-war PM shows just how awful our post-war PMs have been) but the story of her 'closing all the mines' is one of the greatest myths of all times. There were actually more mines closed down under Labour governments than she managed. The only reason she's remembered for doing it is the attempt by the miners' union to overthrow the government and the violence that went with it.

The logical question can never be can Northern Ireland join Ireland but can Ireland Join the UK. For two reasons, one is Northern Ireland is financially more powerful, well-off than Ireland and if Ireland is united. Ireland would not be able to pay of Northern Ireland’s debts off because its economy is not big enough. (Even with Northern Ireland. Yea that is right the UK debt is astronomically far bigger than its trillion-pound economy. I think it currently stands at 9 trillion in debt, 3 trillion GDP.)

The UK's debt is currently just over £1.7 trillion and our GDP is about £2.8 trillion.
 
Re-read my post and I says it has (past) and is been thrown away (present), anyway who says you cannot do it illegally and ignore it but only a genius diplomat on par/similar with someone like Bismarck could do create it.

No. You said: "People in the UK as a people miss/hate not being a big speaker in the world through the British Empire (prestige, global economy, military) and we missed and are throwing away the chance to create something "special"". You made use of the present tense, denoting that Britons were missing a chance today.

The chances of it happening now are nearly impossible if impossible however having trade agreements is already being talked about in Australia and we are in negotiation with Canada about a trade agreement long before Brexit was conceived.

What are you talking about?

The only trade agreement involving Canada and the United Kingdom has been the ongoing Canada-European Union free trade negotiations. Canada has not been involved in any negotiations with the United Kingdom, at least not before Brexit, simply because the European Union was the agency responsible for negotiating Britain's non-EU trade.

There has been substantial speculation as to how this will affect Canada's foreign trade, not least because Brexit adds still another complication to the Canada-EU agreement. There has not been, to the best of my knowledge, anything but the most preliminary of discussions.

Where are you getting your information?

I think Brexit will signal to our former colonies that we have abandoned the EU project and that we want to create new relationships for the next 50 to 75 years

Yes, it is. Did you know that Brexit has signaled to the Commonwealth that Britain has become less important as a partner? Having a large and wealthy Commonwealth member-state inside the European Union, to serve as a base for Commonwealth trade and a lobby for non-EU Commonwealth interests, worked for us. Having the United Kingdom outside of the European Union does not work in our interests.

People in the UK as a people miss/hate not being a big speaker in the world through the British Empire (prestige, global economy, military) and we missed and are throwing away the chance to create something "special"

This is clear. What seems to be equally clear is that Britons, perhaps particularly of the Leave persuasion, have little to no idea of what the world outside their country actually thinks and how it functions.
 
The logical question can never be can Northern Ireland join Ireland but can Ireland Join the UK. For two reasons, one is Northern Ireland is financially more powerful, well-off than Ireland and if Ireland is united. Ireland would not be able to pay of Northern Ireland’s debts off because its economy is not big enough. (Even with Northern Ireland. Yea that is right the UK debt is astronomically far bigger than its trillion-pound economy. I think it currently stands at 9 trillion in debt, 3 trillion GDP.)

Northern Ireland is not financially more powerful than Ireland: The latter's GDP per capita is more than 40% greater, and it has two and a half times the population.

Irish unification would be absurdly expensive, and I'm not sure I see a need for it. It's important to use accurate figures.

In all respect joining the EEC was a cop out, by that time we seemed to lack the desire, innovative and ambition to look forward. It seems that we thought it was the end but it could have been different and it did not need to be like that. We could have easily kept Malta and Singapore if we put our minds to it

The referendum in Malta could have gone a different way. Singapore, though? How?

and Hong Kong... We could have kept it

No, you could not have. China was very clear about its goal of retaking Hong Kong from Britain, something any Chinese government would have demanded. Britain did well enough to negotiate a good deal for Hong Kong, and then left.

Why would Britain have done more? Its citizenship laws were explicitly formulated to keep out migrants from its island possessions, including Hong Kong. Even during the exodus of the post-1989 era, when countries and jurisdictions around the world were competing for wealthy Hong Kong immigrants, Britain opted to keep its doors closed.

If Britain truly wanted a network of insular and near-insular territories integrated into itself, then it would have to do like the French and grant the inhabitants of these territories the same rights as the people in the metropole.

and there is still a chance it might come back to us or go independent.

Independence is hugely more likely than a return to Britain, not that independence is particularly likely.

the younger voters who want to rejoin the UK

Cite, please.
 
Other things can be put down to highly contingent elements of domestic politics. As I noted here in May, the fact that so many Poles and Balts headed to the United Kingdom in 2004 was a huge surprise, something unprecedented in the prior history of Polish and Baltic migration to the United Kingdom. It occurred only because of the decision of the British government to open its labour market to migrants from the new EU member-states after 2004 while Germany, in many respects the more natural destination, opted to keep its labour market closed. Had Britain's government made a different decision--something that every other large EU member-state did--then this influx would not have occurred.

If the OP wants the UK to be Euroskeptic enough to avoid Brexit then this single decision is sufficient.

Putting it simply - the person accountable for Brexit is Tony Blair. That may sound like Blair bashing (and actually I'm mostly a fan) but on this one decision he was completely wrong.
 
Bear two things in mind -1) The Leave campaign's final vote probably understates the degree of Euroscepticism in Britain. There were a number of reluctant remainers and the "Remain" campaign had the wind at their backs and had a very good night. The vote was taken shortly after the assassination of a young charismatic/telegenic pro-European MP and with the PM, Chancellor and all leading economic commentators predicting plagues of frogs and locusts and the rivers turning to blood (aka Project Fear) if Britain left the EU. No political assassination and a more measured and truthful campaign (say if PM and Chancellor were hedging their bets) of the "A vote for leave will probably shave half a percentage point off our economic growth and make it slightly more difficult for British companies to recruit skilled workers. The supply of domestic servants and au pairs is likely to be severely restricted (though that probably wouldn't be mentioned except by a closet Eurosceptic;)) and skilled labour are likely to be able to demand significantly higher wages. The British economy is, however, unlikely to be severely disrupted as we purchase more from our European partners than we sell to them and punitive measures are thus highly unlikely..." and the "Leave" vote would have exceeded 52%

2) Britain isn't uniquely Eurosceptic, polls in all those EU states not directly bordering that nice Mr. Putin's Russia show comparable levels of disenchantment + or - 3% (yes, even in France and Germany) . Ours was simply the only Member State where the political class was divided enough to offer the voters a referendum (through fear of UKIP syphoning off the Conservative vote). So you don't have to make the British public less Eurosceptic, you simply have to replace first past the post with PR or STV at one of the times that this was mooted. Politicians are thus more likely to finesse away the darkening public mood through coalitions.
 
You do know as well as I do that the UK caring about Hong Kong democracy was more of a last-minute thing, right?

Yea I know, it's a disgrace to think we wrote Magna Carta and then we don't give Hong Kongers the vote pre-1980, 1950 would have been good. I have read that Chris Pattern was an exceptional governor of Hong Kong and they liked him a lot for what he did only to leave Hong Kong/China in a perilous situation.

Strange how things work out sometimes. Who made China a democratic country? Chris Pattern because he gave Hong Kongers the vote, which represented as a beacon of freedom for all china to its eventual fall.
 
I'm not a massive fan of Thatcher (the fact that she's regularly mentioned as the best post-war PM shows just how awful our post-war PMs have been) but the story of her 'closing all the mines' is one of the greatest myths of all times. There were actually more mines closed down under Labour governments than she managed. The only reason she's remembered for doing it is the attempt by the miners' union to overthrow the government and the violence that went with it.



The UK's debt is currently just over £1.7 trillion and our GDP is about £2.8 trillion.

Thanks for correcting me, I appreciate it. I know my stuff more in politics than economics but I don't have time to study either of them because I am studying something similar.
 
Last edited:
I'm afraid I will not be able to comment any more on this post as it has ventured into serious territory and to be honest I have better things to do like preparing for university, conducting my own independent studying and writing than justify comments I made through recollection/memory and admit some were wrong only because I am amateur, human, talking in general terms or did expect to get bombed by critics (or would have been more specific). Just so that you know I could reply to the messages above however that would be a waste of time and energy which in my case is always in short supply and needs to be allocated accordingly.

Regards
 
Idea; for the British public to be more accepting of the European Project, you would essentially need Britain to not be involved in the EEC, which would need Labour to openly be Euroskeptic. Obviously for Wilson to do so this would be difficult, as the man's hands were tied, and having him step down in 1970 or 1971 would only result in Roy Jenkins, but if you can maneuver the situation into where Heath still cranks out the deal but you have Barbra Castle or even Peter Shore in the drivers seat when the referendum comes around, then you can have an environment where Labour are more inclined to oppose the EEC, and thus shift a vote against the EEC. Though having a more competent leader instead of Wilson or a larger majority would make it easier.

On the Jenkins point, it actually wouldn't be too hard to see him out of the running for the leadership if he were to bungle an attempt at the leadership in 1968 or 1969. Multiple conspiracies amongst the former Gaitskellite and social democrats (many of whom were staunch Europhiles) abounded during these two years and it was oft-predicted that Jenkins would wrest the Labour crown from Wilson's head.

Have him misjudge a single moment and he could be, along with his Europhile allies, out of Cabinet and out of momentum for a leadership bid.

From there, a Eurosceptic successor is quite likely.
 
Top