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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system.

Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...

Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.

And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.

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> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.

This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.

As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.

Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.

You just demonstrated a big problem with our politics. People lining up with their side on every issue. I think most of what you say is reasonable (although you are missing nuance on some things) but then you call Brexit it stupid and "constitution-breaking". Obviously the majority who voted for it disagreed, and being in the EU without having had a referendum (unlike most countries - France, Ireland and others did, Iceland just did too) was itself divisive. There is not rational reason to call it stupid. The predictions of economic disaster (e.g. the pre Brexit treasury forecast) did not materialise and the economy is doing about as well as comparable EU economies.

Cameron's policy of offering a referendum in 2015 as an electoral tactic was a stupid political move in my opinion, he learned the wrong lesson from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and gambled the future of the country not out of any democratic principle, but for short-term domestic expediency. The referendum was a fundamentally ill-conceived thing, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Conservative Party who feared a) that Cameron could not maintain discipline over the right of the party and b) that the Conservatives would bleed voters to Nigel Farage's then-party UKIP to the right.

I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.

In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.

> clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it

The keyword is "attempted". Its also clear they did not succeed in doing so

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cky83q49e4w0o

> constitution-breaking and divisive referendum

What part of the constitution does a referrendum break? One of the main principles of British constitutional law is that Parliament is supreme.

That's kind of my point. Constitutionally speaking, the Brexit referendum was advisory and could have been ignored. That would have been completely unconscionable from a legitimacy point of view though, so whatever the constitution has to say on the subject on paper an iron-clad democratic mandate to carry out Brexit was forced to coexist with Parliament's iron-clad supremacy.

This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.

Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.

While I agree with your point, I don't agree that the unchecked globalisation is to blame, rather unchecked capitalism. Even without globalisation unchecked capitalism would lead to the same result, only per country.

And the countries that did the work to rein capitalism in, in a proper way, are doing well, also in the circumstances of globalisation.

Arguably they are inseperable.

Unchecked globalism leads to unchecked capitalism as it creates a race to the bottom. Unchecked capitalism leads to unchecked globalism as it continuously seeks to lower wages.

> Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini)

As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.

Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.

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