Warnings over Brexit from the big powers

Isn't that what they are doing now?

The public have been promised "Brexit means Brexit". Something called Brexit will (and will have to be) delivered eventually.

I think we can see the power of the Leave campaign diminish. The specific demand for a points based immigration system was swatted away like a fly and Farage was left as the only Brexiteer demanding a points based system regardless of whether it achieves its object or not and he gained no real support from the usual suspects in the Telegraph, Mail and Express which went to some length (although not altogether accurately) to explain why a points based system won't work.

It's particularly noteworthy that many businesses and organisations in Australia now deeply oppose their points system, as they do in the US. It really just creates another bureaucracy, complete with idiosyncratic interpretation of the rules, corruptible officials, politicians and others working around the rules for people in the know, etc, etc.

Can we get our cards on the table please, Remainer?

Are you arguing against the "points based system" (which has been discounted by the Government anyway) as a specific system?

Or do you oppose any controls on immigration? On the grounds that they are, I don't know, "racist" or something, like climate change seems to be nowadays?

We never know with those on the defeated (but still in denial) Remain side, so it is best to be clear...

Personally I would also personally advocate not accepting jobless incoming migration from less developed member states. The latter is harder to get within the EU, but discussions were heading that way before the Brexit vote. .

It is a state of mind. The zeitgeist.

Isn't that what they are doing now?

The public have been promised "Brexit means Brexit". Something called Brexit will (and will have to be) delivered eventually.

I think we can see the power of the Leave campaign diminish. The specific demand for a points based immigration system was swatted away like a fly and Farage was left as the only Brexiteer demanding a points based system regardless of whether it achieves its object or not and he gained no real support from the usual suspects in the Telegraph, Mail and Express which went to some length (although not altogether accurately) to explain why a points based system won't work.

I agree with you. It is moment of madness that is already passing.

This is very uncharitable.

It is clear that what people mean by "points based system" (wait don't we have one now?) is application of data analysis methods to choose immigrants who are unlikely to commit crimes and likely to be net tax payers. There's nothing impossible about that or even particularly difficult and the establishment, though it seems to oppose it for nebulous reasons, cannot morally justify that opposition.

That is the establishment all over (Nulli isn't part of it, but definitely aspires to be) agree with all our dogmas and shibboleths or you are mad.

I supported Brexit, but it is still hard not to see it as yet another milepost along the road of our long, slow, steady decline since WW2. We have been overtaken by other countries economically, and this will continue, Brexit or no Brexit.. Our influence in the world diminishes with each passing year, Brexit or no Brexit.

Suez is always mentioned as the event that made us realise we no longer had an Empire.

Brexit will likely be pointed to as the event that made us realise that the EU wasn't going to make up for that.

I don't think this country - by which I mean the population as a whole - ever actually cared much about the empire.

We never fought a mass mobilisation war for empire, and reading fiction books set in Britain written in the 19th century doesn't give the impression that most people thought much about it at all.

Why does this country need "a role"? The purpose of Britain is to maximise the quality of life of the British and their descendants, not to serve other countries. We do not need a "white man's burden" to justify our existence.

Which books are you referring to? I am not disputing your point necessarily, just interested in why you make it.

It doesn't need a role in Dean Acheson's sense, which is a good thing because it never found one.

But it is hard to deny that collapsing from the the largest Empire in the history of mankind to a small country of no great import on the edge of Europe within a couple of generations has been a trauma to the national psyche.

You could argue we have handled it well, far better than the Romans so far, but then we perhaps we haven't yet experienced the full consequence of decline and decay? With the barbarians at the gates of the western Empire yet to come ...

I am not sure how much it would help to cite individual books, as it would not be surprising for the empire to go unmentioned in individual books, and I cannot cite every such book I have read.

But how much do you recall India being mentioned in Dickens or Bronte?

Well I have read all of Dickens novels, but only one Bronte. Wuthering Heights.

The latter didn't venture much outside a small area of West Yorkshire as I recall, but Dickens?

I have to say, you are on the whole correct, I think? There is the American passage in Chuzzlewitt (in the 1840's closer in time to a former colony that we are to the days of Churchill) but apart from that every single novel is resolutely parochial as I recall.

No, not true, in Barnaby Rudge there are many descriptions of the consequences of the American War of Independence. Not India as such, but the first British Empire, all the same.

But your point is basically true of Dickens I have to say. His narrative sweep was domestic and very narrow. Absolutely love him, though I do.

Remember though, with Dickens and the Brontes, you are talking about the first half of the nineteenth century. Until the Mutiny India was controlled by a private Company and was not even a British Colony.

So why WOULD any of these Georgian and early Victorian authors write about India? You need to delve into Macaulay, and of course Kipling for the locus classicus of the Raj.

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The empire was an ephemeral phenomenon to most British people, a source of vicarious pride in the same way that coming second in the Olympics is a source of vicarious pride, and probably not much more important than that.

The empire was an ephemeral phenomenon to most British people, a source of vicarious pride in the same way that coming second in the Olympics is a source of vicarious pride, and probably not much more important than that.

That may have been the perception but i'd argue that it was objectively more important than that in terms of allowing us to set the rules of the game so to speak. Just as a world without the 'American Empire' would have been very different to the one we live in now, i suspect that the British Empire ensured that we were never threatened. Indeed, the empire probably contributed to us not being defeated by Spain or France.

This is very uncharitable.

It is clear that what people mean by "points based system" (wait don't we have one now?) is application of data analysis methods to choose immigrants who are unlikely to commit crimes and likely to be net tax payers. There's nothing impossible about that or even particularly difficult and the establishment, though it seems to oppose it for nebulous reasons, cannot morally justify that opposition.