Brexit and me

I’d like to tell the story of how I became interested in Brexit, back in 2016, only marginally before the vote. In reality, it’s the story of why I didn’t care about Brexit at any point before a critical moment in early 2016. I was born in 1989. Don’t worry, the story doesn’t start there;…

The Family, Brexit and the Right Wing: George Lakoff’s ‘Moral Politics’ applied to Brexit

Introduction In this post, I want to summarise the key points of the book ‘Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives think’ by George Lakoff (1996). (Don’t worry, I’ll leave enough out to justify you buying the book.) In it, Lakoff explains how differences of perspective on the family can go a long way to explaining…

The State of Brexit: Thoughts following the EU elections

Although The Brexit Party won the greatest number of seats in the UK for the EU election, it’s not accurate to see them as the ‘winners’. It is undoubtedly impressive: a party that has existed for only a few weeks has gotten 32% of the seats. However, the European Parliament isn’t something that is ‘won’,…

The UK: A sovereign EU member state

“Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” (UK Government, 2017) Foreword One of the questions I have in my own head is why I don’t deal with the ‘reality’ of Brexit. These would be questions of achievable Withdrawal Agreements, the party politics, and what I…

Why was the 2016 EU Referendum an affront to democracy

Introduction The purpose of this post is to explain how the 2016 EU Referendum didn’t just fail to be democracy at its best, but was democracy delivered so poorly that no democrat should be offering it lip service. Issues of the lies told in the campaigns and breaking of electoral law are both key points…

It’s not just a level playing field; it’s an ethical one, too

There is a phrase that pops up occasionally when talking about free trade, economics and ― increasingly ― Brexit. And it’s a phrase I don’t like: a level playing field. It refers to the idea that different economic entities should trade fairly with each other, where if one country pays its workers fairly, its produce…

What should a democracy look like?

On Thursday 23rd June, the UK undertook a project of direct democracy: a referendum on its membership to the European Union. The result was a 51.9% vote for leaving the EU, a fact we should not ignore. It was a vote, on a day, saying a narrow majority of the British people who voted wanted…

The Brexit vote teaches us that we should be practicing how to do referendums

A Guardian columnist named George Monbiot is arguing for more referendums in the UK. His reasoning is pretty good: the problem with the EU Referendum was that it was a large, complex question boiled down to two answers given to a populace inexperienced in referendums. Referendums, especially significant ones, shouldn’t be a ‘learning-on-the-job’ experience; the…

Brexit and a response to Katie Hopkins

Like many countries, the UK has a few people the media loves to put a microphone and camera in front of and listen to their opinion, no matter how uninformed or lacking in nuance it is. One such person in the UK is Katie Hopkins. She was interviewed outside the Conservative Party Conference about her…

Brexit: where we’re at

As a Remainer who has stated that the Brexit Referendum was not constitutional, as a liberal parliamentary democracy, my summary of the where the UK stands won’t be appreciated by many. This is unlikely to be considered an impartial summary of how Brexit has gone so far. But I do think it’s worth looking at…