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Comment by lawlessone | Hacker News Reader

Brexit was pushed through while loads of people from the UK that could have voted were in France at matches for the Euros.

why the downvotes?

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Maybe david Cameron reckoned England football supporters would more likely to be pro-Brexit?

That doesn't make sense though... Because the plan was NOT to brexit.

Whose plan? Cameron's plan for sure, but it's not all that far fetched to believe he was ill advised and manipulated by his party (a lot of Eurosceptics in the Tory party). Ever watched Yes Minister? I know it's satire, but it's more than believable.

The leading faces of the Brexit movement--people like Boris Johnston or Nigel Farage--were completely caught off-guard by the victory. Cameron's decision to resign immediately after the referendum loss also meant that the Brexit negotiations would be completely owned by the Brexiteers, as they ran out of people who could be blamed if/when things go south.

What was desired by these leading anti-EU folks was not a victory, but a very close loss. They get to keep blaming the EU for every problem (useful, when the biggest gripe--immigration--was entirely under the control of the UK, not the EU). They get to demonstrate that they have too much support to be ignored, but they don't have the responsibility of actually enacting the agenda.

Whoever ensured the referendum was in the Tory election manifesto certainly was planning on Brexit happening.

You don't pay millions in to Tory funds, employ MPs and give pensions to ex-MPs and not get your way.

> why the downvotes?

I did not downvote you, but I think you are getting beaten because you brought up a potential hot topic (brexit) in a way that is unrelated to the discussion topic (copyright). The argument that parties could have been using similar tactics is IMO irrelevant even if true (and that is not clear to me either).

Brexit wasn't "pushed through". Everyone was pretty confident that they'll stay in the EU.

And the way things are going it's looking like Britain will be brexiting in name only.

That's the least worst option, but I'm still hoping that someone will join the dots and realise that giving up our vote and participation is a pointless idea and that we should just cancel it.

We can only hope. The alternatives are too dismal to contemplate.

And if you do contemplate them, you'll be accused of participating in project fear.

Project fear didn't go far enough.

You think so? AFAICT there isn't even such a proposal being negotiated, and it had better be ready for signing this year. BINO looks like it might fail through simple lack of time.

It will all be decided only at the last moment as is the custom for this sort of thing! (I hope)

.. but in the meantime businesses have to have their contingency plans in place, at considerable trouble and expense, which may include pre-emptively moving operations to the EU.

(But either all the current disorganisation is keyfabe or this lot couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag, which is going to result in us taking whatever we can get)

Well, from the point of view of UK's economy that would be the best solution but for the EU that could be bad in the long run. One good thing about the Brexit would have been that UK politicians could no longer blame the EU for everything. As it looks now, they will continue to find new, creative ways to make the EU the scapegoat for their mistakes.

As I recall, there was a pretty even split amongst the population. Approximately half my friends wanted to stay, and half wanted to leave.

Which pretty much mirrored the actual result. It was very close.

That might very well be the case, but it was not quite portraited that way in the media for what I saw.

When GP says "Everyone was confident", they probably mean that everyone in the government was confident.

While many voting to move away never got the point that EU institutions currently located in UK, require to be in a EU country, so they are now moving away and their employees get to choose to search for job somewhere else or go along.

With such laws as this, and giant cookie consent banners, I'm surprised Brexit wasn't/isn't more popular.

Edit: apparently I'm not surprised. Or not allowed to be.

I didn't downvote you. But maybe other people have because of the huge difference between leaving a union of states and peoples (which has a lot of impact, e.g. freedom of movement and trade) and clicking on a banner which is slightly annoying at most.

I think HN is generally anti-Brexit, so the downvotes are likely to be expressing that opinion rather than any specific complaint about the post

> I think HN is generally anti-Brexit

As best i can tell, you can draw clear EU sentiments based on age and education. Younger and better educated are largely pro-EU as they are in a position to seek employment within the euro-sphere virtually at will (and may had friends all over thanks to various EU education programs).

Others have watched local industry either moving their activities abroad, or simply running a skeleton crew between contracts. And when a contract hits, most of the people working there may not even speak a language the locals understand.

Yes that may sound like racism, and the extremists can score some cheap points on it, but for the most part the issue is one of livelihood.

Where as previous generations could count on their industrial or service job to carry them through setting up a home and starting a family, now they can't. And they see the EU as the reason why by eroding their access to jobs.

The cookie consent banners were never really a requirement, more a band-aid for the advertising industry's continued surveillance.

As we've seen with GDPR, not being in the EU wouldn't actually help much with this because almost all websites would still want to sell into (or even be run from) the EU.

You shouldn't be surprised. It's not like the UK is taking a substantially different position on copyrights, and many UK consumers do welcome the protections afforded by GDPR.

The Labour MEP on the legal affairs committee voted in favor of the copyright directive. The conservative member abstained.

Best i can tell, copyright is a topic that allows up and comping politicians to virtue signal and/or for the economic powers that be to test the allegiance of rising political stars.

It is also a dry subject that most people don't care about until they get a sour letter from some lawyer because Timmy discovered bittorrent.

It is a dry subject, but make no mistake, this is not just a pet subject of individual MPs/MEPs.

The "value gap" argument used to justify the EU copyright directive is right there in the 2017 Labour manifesto: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-mani...

The conservatives have used similar but more general language as well.

Online privacy regulation restraining the non-consensual tracking of private individuals; impingement of widescale manipulation of the public via social media ... how awful for us all in Europe, eh?

How dare Europe even try and protect the rights of private individuals. /s

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