It's pretty depressing that's the only win we have right now.

Jeez, it feels like 'muricans are going to war with each other.

How do British people feel about the upcoming early election?

Well, let's see.

We have our current government, who've approached Brexit primarily on the principle that if we put our fingers in our ears and hum loudly enough, we can ignore the obvious problems, and who are slowly choking off the NHS's funding (not to mention supply of staff) despite promises in the Leave campaign to the contrary.

We have Jeremy Corbyn's Cult of Personality, who've been completely ineffectual in opposition, delusional about their polling numbers (which currently require an electron microscope to detect), and a similar Brexit stance to the above. If they run the country as well as they've run their own party, I'm convinced we'll all be eaten by radioactive land sharks within six months.

We have Tim "questionable personal religious views" Farron, of the "wait, who's that guy again?" party (but at least his voting record doesn't follow his personal views).

The Green party are still incapable of getting their acts together, and still treating science in much the same way the US Republicans do, just to different ends.

And the less said about UKIP the better.

Sigh.

Hahahaha

Given the results of the referendum, how would you approach Brexit differently if you were in Theresa May's position?

Not getting suckered into trying to organise it, probably? I mean, she's in a really difficult position, but this was an entirely predictably really difficult position. Leave BoJo to try and fumble his way through running it or something.

But at this point, the government has a moral obligation to respect the result of the referendum, right? Brexit has to happen.

I think it's a questionable argument at best that a 52% majority in a referendum notable for campaigning that was outright and knowingly false [1] is an absolute moral obligation to go ahead with wading blindly into Brexit, but even assuming that *is* true there's clearly not a mandate for the current hard Brexit course - there were some pretty prominent statements by major Leave voices along the lines of "nobody is talking about leaving the Single Market, that would be insane".

But in this case my point was more that accepting the leadership was a dumb move, and more importantly it was a clearly dumb move beforehand. At this point she has only herself to blame.


[1] I'm criticising Leave here primarily because they won, but Remain's campaigning was pretty terrible too...

In a way, if Britons truly don't want a hard Brexit, they now have the opportunity to say so by tossing out the government. Polls seem to show May is popular though, and not just because the other options are lackluster.

I think May is smart to pursue a hard Brexit, though (from a political perspective). Trying to compromise and assuage the remain side would have just made enemies on all sides.

Honestly, Britain has put up such a stink with their brexit, that I feel even if they didn't go through with it, at this point they would be bodily trown out of the EEUU. Trade agreements and such will be a nightmare to handle either way.

Well, in a year or so, the EU may cease to exist entirely, so....

Another question: how does the u.k. feel about scotland/N.Ireland/Gibraltar possibly leaving?

Some senior EU figures have suggested that if a general election result were to overturn Brexit, they'd be opening to cancelling Article 50. We can hope, I suppose.


Scotland/Gibraltar/etc is another set of entirely predictable Brexit-related problems. Losing Scotland in particular would be terrible for both parties, but I think it's a likely outcome of Brexit sooner or later.

Gibraltar is a cabbageshow at the moment, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of spaniards who work over there but live in Spain and the spanish airport nearby is mostly used by the british. If they were to set up a barrier around Gibraltar it would really slow down everything.

How does GB feel about giving Gibraltar up?

So how do people feel about the outcome of the British election?

Pretty much. There's no magic money tree to pay the civil service, but there sure is one to bribe the crazy fundamentalist party to prop up the government, apparently. Meanwhile, Brexit negotiations are off to a predictably terrible start already, and the Brexit secretary is blaming the PM for making his job harder. Great success?

Happy 4th of July America!

Not sure there's going to be much of a referendum given the government crackdown on it.

If anything, the crackdown by the Spanish government would do more to push public opinion in Catalonia towards independence, no?

I would guess that the calculus here runs along the lines of a) they're not going to win the vote if it happens, b) if the separatists win a vote it gives them legitimacy and additional popular support. Whereas if the vote doesn't happen, they may gain some popular support as a backlash against the government crackdown, but the government may also be able to paint the separatists as dangerous extremists to some people, and either way they don't gain the legitimacy of being able to say "this fair and widely-attended referendum is in favour of independence". (See, for example, Brexit and the 52% Leave vote being treated as an inviolable, absolute and overwhelming mandate, which I'm sure the Spanish government has noticed...)

Honestly, everyone's quite sick of the catalonians here, they've been trying and failing to get independence for over a century now and every recent referendum amounted to nothing. The crackdown from the government was pretty brutal and devolved into some serious fighting, and yes, that will garner the separationists some sympathy. But while people may be against the police brutality it actually means less support for the government instead of more people wanting catalonia to separate. Problem is that the referendum wasn't even that legal in the first place, so even if they had won it, it's doubtful that the separation would have actually happened. Most catalonians don't even want to separate that badly, but would be lynched for expressing that opinion; so the dangerous extremist angle isn't actually that far off. In recent years their views have gotten more and more radical, to the point where it's mandatory to speak only catalonian in official capacities and they've forbidden the use of spanish in schools.