I thought it had zero chance of getting anywhere in the first place.

It's probably not my place to comment it, but still, what did people expect? "We didn't like the result, so we'll throw a childish tantrum in hopes that decision will be changed" or something like this?

Pretty much. From what I could note, most of the protesters were students, not uniformly so, but typically. So childish tantrum is a fitting term for it!

Well if your country is walking head first into disaster, looking childish is probably the least of your concerns. XP

RIP Boaty McBoatface.

It isn't "decided". While I don't expect a second referendum either, it must be debated in the Parliament (since the petition has more than 100000 signatures). Which I think will happen sometime next week. And this really isn't the time to take Cameron's word for it when it comes to the result of votes...

As there shouldn't. What, you're going to keep voting over and over and over until you get the end result you're looking for?

Pure childishness.

That petition was created by a leave campaigner a month before the vote because they thought that brexit wasn't going to win.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/second-ref...111458194.html

However as everyone knew from the petition put up after the riots and looting a few years ago nothing on the UK gov website will ever be heard.

And I'm over here wondering how painful EU want to make this exit for UK...

Problem for the EU is any pain they inflict will just rebound and be felt by them as well and in the long run can hurt them more than they hurt the UK, just look what happened to the EU due to the Russian sactions.

Likely very painful, but I think it will backfire in there faces. The heavy handed approach is what gave the Remain camp so little to work with besides fear, and that one of the reasons they lost. If David had come back with something that could be called a carrot, Remain would have almost certainly won.

And your habit of threatening to leave to get your way is why we're kinda happy the Leave won. Mostly we want to get done with that shit, and don't feel like we owe you. You want something? Negotiate for it like a normal country.

It's not about wanting to hurt the UK but a conflict of interests. 'Leave' claimed it could retain access to the common market without paying a membership fee or accept free movement of workers. It's not in the interest of the other EU countries to agree to that at all. Nothing personal but that is business.

There are 27 EU nations who can veto a future trade deal between the UK and the EU, each will ask for some form of compensation. The question is whether the UK is willing and able to pay that price.

I haven't been following the thread properly but I think I should point out Norway and their relationship with the EU. Like the British seem to want, Norway is out of the EU but it has trade deals with the union for free exchange of goods. They are also a part of the Schengen Area, something the UK is not, and they allow freedom of movement of workers as well so there's another thing down. They also have to comply with quite a lot of EU legislation to take part in said common market and yet they are denied a right to vote on whatever decisions the EU makes.

I've also seen this number floated around but I'm not sure of its source so take it with a grain of salt. Apparently Norway pays to the EU, per capita, about 85% of what the UK currently does to have access to said common market.

As someone who considers himself European I'm saddened that the monetary integration we walked towards as ended up empowering the isolationists and is growingly forcing public opinion away from peaceful cooperation to cynic distrust amongst European nations.

The UE is the single largest experiment in peace ever designed in our written history but, like others have said, I'll hardly miss the British after having them threaten to leave virtually every election cycle and having to give them so many concessions that ultimately ended up being for naught. Hopefully European politicians can take some time to think and realize that they were the ones that created the current distrust of European institutions.

I still believe in the idea of the European Union of 1993 and hope we can get back to that soon for the sake of not only my poor strugling country but also all other European nations.

Erm sold to me? I'm 24 I wasn't alive back than, I was asking those who voted in that Ref roughly 40 years ago. It's very easy to understand being tricked into thinking this was just a single market they was voting and than got conned into a political union would create anger.

Let's be honest the UK was conned into the EU, the political union there is no else way to say it. They voted for a single market, and as time went one the true horror showed itself, those who voted back then got angry and got ignored until now.

The old people who voted leave and voted back than also finally got their voice heard.

Good on them.

EU got stupid the moment it's top leaders admitted to creating a united states of europe.

What fools.


I voted out and I'm only 24. I will never regret this decision and will gladly do what I can to help out in the aftermath.

Though I do hope this would teach those who voted leave as a protest voted or treated the ref as a game. To take their votes seriously and that each one matters.

Personally I feel that things went down hill right after Greece was hanged out to dry.

Greece did cause its own financial problems. But the fact is if they had been able to devaluate their currency they would have been fine. But being forced to be humiliated by Germany over a whole year simply makes the entire EU a hostile place. If EU was truly interested in greater integration then they should have cut Greece a break. But instead they played hardball and got what they wanted, kicking the ball down the road, but also massively damaged the image of the EU and makes everyone reconsider what it means to be in Greece's shoes.

It's sad how the EU twisted into the 'strongman everyone toward the true vision' crap to be honest. Each nation state has a strong identity, with its own wants and needs, yet the EU mostly focused on hammering its way through to get to one superstate sooner rather than latter, upsetting its members and in some cases wrecking there economies.

It should be focusing on communication and finding common ground for its members. People who talk with each other about there troubles and solutions, are more likely to find solutions -together-, even if there no 'strongman' telling them too or else. Such a method will take much longer to create a single state, but have far firmer foundations.

Devaluing the euro? That's plain insanity. The only way to save Greece would have been an exit out of the euro zone, but that's something that neither the Greeks nor the Eurozone wanted to do. So this whole let's-blame-Germany shtick is silly.

The UK wasn't conned by some evil machinations of continental european leaders. If you want to blame somebody, blame the then-leaders of the UK who failed to read the direction it was going in a desperate attempt to revive the struggling economy. But stop it with playing the UK off as victim. And oh, Westminster could have refused to ratify Maastricht, but they didn't. It was not something forced upon them by the EU.

To quote out of the Treaty of Rome of 1957:

To quote out of the Merger Treaty of 1965 that established the Council and Commission of the EC:

You missed my point, which is that they couldn't devalue because they are in the EU. That they were in a crisis exactly because of this artifical restriction they got into, and that normally what happens is that the richer nations bail them out. That's how cities are rescued by federal governments in real life, and how it should have worked if EU wanted to keep the EU together.

Instead, EU decided to go hostile. Instead of treating Greece like a member of one's own family who neded help, EU treat Greece like a tenant. EU decided to suddenly behave as if every nation in the EU is in it for itself, thus unravelling the entire argument about greater integration.

I am not saying EU did the wrong thing. EU has the right to do this. It is just that the decision permanently harmed the prospect of greater integration, perhaps forever. Germany has approved of the idea of screwing any of its own member nations if they felt like it, instead of helping each other like what a single nation would have done. It is what they sowed, and they will reap the result.

"You" as in "the UK people". Obviously.

What Kakurin-san said. The EU didn't con you into joining. We can barely be said to have wanted you to join. (Remember, you had to apply three times.) And as soon as you joined, you tried to rearrange everything to suit you. The reason you're leaving is ultimately that you failed to completely hijack the European project, not that you were deceived in any way. (You as in the UK, not you personally.)

It is, I suppose, possible your own leaders conned you. But I have as little sympathy for the 70s' voters as I do for last Thursday's. (OK, maybe a bit more. We are in the information age now.)

Such bailouts generally come with strings attached, just like Greece's bailouts did. We wouldn't want indigent cities to treat the federal government like their own personal piggy bank, would we? The difference is that Greece had more room to negotiate.