British voters want to be part of EU more than French and Italians, poll reveals

I think there's a lot of assumptions going into current polling. Labour is disenfranchising a lot of people, but a large number are becoming true "don't knows" and taking themselves out of polling calculations.

These are the the left of the party who are politically homeless. The greens are mopping up some of them, but Polanski is a divisive character. Some love him, and some find him superficial. Some might land in the Lib Dems as their social policies are left of labour, but there's a lot that would never even consider that. Corbyn was trying to set up a party for them, but that's never going anywhere.

One thing is for sure, this block is not voting for Farage. He's diametrically opposite to what these people believe in.

Oh awesome, that fallacy is so incredibly common, now I've got a name for it.

Labour needs to go hard Return and hold Russian-influenced Brexit traitors accountable.

They need to stop being an authoritarian and economically right party. People voted for change, and have not gotten what they voted for.

It says 50% for, 31% against, and the remaining 19% is presumably “undecided” or the equivalent. In the context of this article, they’re interchanging UK/Britain.

These are different questions, right?

"Should we join?" vs. "Should we leave?"

The first question is nonsensical for current EU members, and the second is nonsensical for non-members of the EU.

But I guess they include them to make a better comparison between these types of questions?

A shared currency and central bank for diverse economic systems is a pretty bad idea actually.

Nope, needed to become a citizen of the country I reside in.

But much harder to take into account is how the then middle aged people who might have voted to stay in EU, are now older, became more right wing and/or dumb and/or sucked deeper into algo-propaganda.

It's just racism, nothing more.

They are successfully conserving their very special worldview whenever it is threatened by reasonable arguments or common sense.

You are not wrong, but it's also true that Italy's high debt / high inflation economy of the second half of the century hit a brick wall when inflation controls were added without a consolidation of debt EU-wide.

The Italian economy sort of worked, because the high inflation of years past ate away the debt load and fixed payments (like pensions). Once that wasn't possible any longer, the automatic "adjustment" of loads ended and the political class of the time was unwilling, unable, and uninterested in solving a problem for the distant future (spoiler alert: ten years ago was the distant future).

The rational thing to do was to complement the inflation anxiety from the German, British, and Nordic economies with a consolidation of debt at the EU level, say 50% of the national debt taken over as shared debt. That would have given Italy, Greece, Belgium, and Spain room to breathe while they transitioned the setup of their economies.

I am pretty passionate about this, because the same identical problem is starting to pop up now, with COVID debt and resulting interest payments crippling government action and forcing higher and higher taxation burdens, mostly in secondary form (fees, fines, etc.). So we need to look at Italy (and Greece) as examples of what can happen today.

Yeah

Exactly this

It was a long running joke. One I used to rib a guy from wales about at work. Its a very british joke.

@chramies @Itdidnttrickledown I remember a German friend of mine (well before the referendum was even a thing) being highly amused when she heard me say "on the continent". I'd never even thought about it. I suppose "on the mainland" makes more sense. Language can really affect your worldview!

Look I'm really kinda tired of this. I got the joke from a guy I was working with from Britain. He explained it to me and I've always heard it said off the cuff. Too bad I ended up getting a bunch thin skinned people agitated over a joke that isn't even mine.