Qassändra

Depends on whether there's a 'cohort effect' or not - i.e. whether it's the case that getting older makes you more of a Leaver, or whether it's just that people of a certain generation are more likely to have had specific experiences that would make them more Remain/Leave. So to take one example, polling found that while over-65s on the whole were very pro-Leave, it was more balanced between Remain and Leave for over-80s because a lot of them fought through the war and are more inclined towards the view that the EU has played a big role in fostering peace in Europe. Of course this also means that while death would slowly make the population more Remain-leaning, it wouldn't start really hitting Leave support for another 5-10 years.

Nah. We're leaving the EU on 29/3/2019, but we'll (provided David Davis stops playing silly buggers) go onto a transitional deal then that for all intents and purposes count as a negotiation extension, as making a proper deal to leave is so complex it's literally going to be impossible in the 9 months or so we have left to come up with a deal and have it pass all the parliaments in time for us to leave on 29/3/2019.

They hadn't cut libraries back then.

Carefully concealed, or did you just never bother doing any research? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal...Steel_Community

kopečka coming back with powah powah

Good grief this semi is obscene! Beyond the painfully obvious winner of this heat on my part, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus really killed it here. What a fabulous selection of NOISY BITCHPOP!

Collectively? Sure. But you might have noticed the EU as a whole is bigger than us. It's like saying a car hitting a bus head-on causes more damage to the bus. Yep, probably on the whole, but whoever's in the car isn't getting out again. Most of the people in the bus will probably live. Also if we pull out of the EU without a replacement deal for the Open Skies Agreement (which governs flight arrangements between the EU and the USA), flights literally won't be allowed to go from the UK to the EU and the USA. There's no WTO body that does default rules in that case. That's why you need to make a deal.

Given you've never been able to cite a specific piece of EU legislation that you so burningly disagree with it's worth going through the economic turmoil pulling out will cause just so we have the decision on it ourselves again, yes I do still think it's a wonder. (no, nothing on freedom of movement counts - that was there when we voted to verify membership of that trading bloc.)

Saying something is a smoke screen for something isn't comparing it to it, it's saying it's being used as a distraction from it.

Because the first referendum was pretty much equivalent to what another referendum would be now. We'd already joined the European Community in 1973 - the referendum was certifying whether or not it was the right decision, people had experienced what it was like and were asked whether they wished to verify the status quo. There probably should have been one at the time of Maastricht.

Without considering how much we'd be down given it's difficult to forge a half-decent trade deal with the EU that involves making no contributions whatsoever.

Dunno if pledging to never judge public opinion on the outcome counts as respecting the result? I certainly never would have taken a Leave vote as carte blanche to do any Leave outcome no matter how extreme, any more than nobody would have ever taken a Remain vote as carte blanche to join the Euro and have ever closer union with the rest of the EU. Given the Leave campaign's leading figures mostly committed to keep us in the Single Market even if we voted Leave...

The headline really doesn't seem to match up to the story. It's obvious how a lack of diversity can impede help in these kinds of circumstances - where people being helped don't have English as their first language, for example. I mean yes, the categories white and not speaking the family's first language / not having full knowledge of how being Muslim might mean someone after a disaster has different needs (on food they can eat, services they need access to, funeral traditions after death and the need to bury the day after a body is returned and how that might impact on a family's time and availability and access to charity help) likely generally coincide. But it isn't the whiteness that's the problem there, it's the not having the understanding. The headline's going for inaccurate sensationalism over portraying what the actual drift of the CEO was saying about how a more diverse volunteer base for Red Cross would make it easier for them to help in some instances.

Would Philip Davies and Kate Hoey likely be that high up a party list? I'm sceptical they wouldn't win anyway in a several member seat.

Yes. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT

I was more referring to people not being confused by the voting system. On the point though, how often is the constituency result really down to THEM? And I can't speak for the Tories, but I know that Labour and the Lib Dems at least have internal democracy on how high up the list a candidate ends up, so they have to prove themselves as much through selection as any constituency candidate does.

Well, notionally nothing, but it's what happens when you get into the realms of people tactically voting. You'd think ordering 1 to 5 wouldn't be that hard to understand, but you still have people regularly coming out with UTTER NONSENSE like "I gave you all five of my votes" or "only vote for this candidate first preference and don't use any of your other preferences to make sure they win!". With the discovery that yes, some people really ARE that stupid, sticking to just one X each for a constituency and a list seems much more appealing.

STV is so DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND though. So many ordinarily intelligent people (SOMEHOW) end up confused by AV and come out with all sorts of nonsense about not using your second preferences to ensure their first preference gets elected - I SHUDDER TO THINK what the average voter would make of Droop quotas and Saint-Lagüe systems and the like. But you CAN'T go WRONG with a CONSTITUENCY AND A LIST

AMS! AMS!

I take Attlee's line on this.

You really seem completely incapable of understanding that "whites have benefited from racism" is not a 'prejudiced' statement but merely an unambiguous statement of fact akin to saying what a country's GDP is, so I don't know what more I can say on this really. Particularly when you make up quotes like saying whites 'deserve' prejudice against them. Who said that? Where?

I'm really not sure what part of this you find so hard to understand. We live in a country and society that is much wealthier for the riches it gained from empire and slavery. Even the poorest in this country are better off than the poorest in most other developed countries without those histories because of the societal benefits (a stronger economy, better infrastructure) that have come from that wealth. Even if you don't necessarily have those benefits at a given time, you have more opportunities than the poorest elsewhere because of those benefits. Calling that a stereotype is just nonsensical.

White supremacy is as much an ideology as radical Islam. In any case, the distinction feels pretty moot - the people going "send 'em back" about attackers more often than not born and raised in the UK and saying that secular relatives of theirs should be fired from jobs at Heathrow certainly aren't approaching things as if they're all too fussed on the distinction between race and religion.

I find the idea that it's "self-hating" to consider whether we may have wronged people in the past (even if inadvertently) for the colour of their skin and think how we can avoid doing so again in the future pretty depressing. Humility, admitting we can be flawed and making an effort to learn from that and work against our worst impulses - to me those are traits that make you a stronger, more well-rounded person, not weaker or "self-hating". The idea that the obsession is that more than anything else what we should be feeling is guilt is misplaced. What good is guilt on its own? Certainly not much to the people bearing the brunt of this kind of discrimination. Guilt is just an indulgent and self-hating emotion if it's in isolation. That's where you get the horrid performative "I have wronged!" breast beating that comes off as just a salve for the conscience instead. Guilt's only of use if it impresses on you any pain you've caused others and as a spur to make amends, to no longer be part of the problem and avoid hurting others in the same way again in the future. Guilt is pointless without change.

Munroe's point wasn't about guilt or direct moral responsibility for the British Empire. It was that we have all benefited from racism. Which part of that was wrong or hypocritical? It's not about blame, it's about doing what we can to overcome it. And no, they're not confined to Caucasians, but as the race which broadly dominates positions of power and the world economy it means that our unconscious prejudices are the ones which have the most impact on other races. We know that it has a detrimental impact. To jump to the get-out clauses on finding out about unconscious prejudice rather than taking the approach of "right, this is a tendency we lapse into which hurts other people - what can we do about it to mitigate this?" is to effectively say you're fine with other races being disadvantaged as a consequence of tendencies we know about because que sera sera. That's the point at which it starts to step across from an unconscious prejudice to a conscious one.