TiredAndEmotional:
Rjan:
TiredAndEmotional:
You’re talking to a dyed in the wool remainer Robbo, he thinks he can talk us out of the referendum RESULT!!! 
I’m a left winger more than I’m a Remainer. I’m sympathetic to the criticisms of the EU institutions, but I’m still pro-European.
I’m not anti-European, I am anti EU and there is a distinction.
Indeed, but is that because you want to see the EU take on a different form, or is it because you’re some incoherent libertarian like Carryfast?
Clearly if Brexit becomes a lightning rod for working class nationalist and fascist thinking (which it has) then that is a far graver threat than any faults with the EU itself, because ultimately we will end up retreading the path that Europe went down in the 20s and 30s.
There it is, the name calling, everyone who voted leave is a ■■■■. You’ve driven free thinking, free speech and with it real freedom into a corner with that rubbish down the years and can’t see the damage that has caused.If you want an example check out the rubbish in the Toys R Us/ Maplins thread to see what it degenerated into. Are you the Stasi in disguise?
Your mistake is assuming that Nazism was defined by the German people voting for gas chambers. It wasn’t. It was their allowing themselves to believe a welter of more subtle propaganda designed to deflect blame away from their own ruling class.
In the UK, workers were marching for food in the 1930s. After the war, the national debt stood at 250% of GDP as well as the country being physically smashed and run down by war. One in every hundred of the UK population was killed. The military casualty percentage for the UK (which more accurately represents what would otherwise have been the wage-earning population) was about 1 in 30 - Germany lost one in every three soldiers (as did the USSR). It was the second time in 30 years that workers had been yoked into blaming other nations for their own woes.
By comparison, today nobody is dead, nothing is smashed. The national debt is a fraction of what it was immediately before the welfare state was set up and the country rebuilt far greater than it was before. Why then are we saying that workers can’t have secure incomes? Why are we saying we can’t afford houses? Why can’t we afford public hospitals? Why can’t we afford social security (which in real terms, and housing costs aside, is now half what it was in the 1970s)? What happened after 1945 was the outright rejection of free market principles and the confidence, manifestly proven correct, that the state could democratically reorganise and deliver an economy that met all workers’ basic needs (including economic security).
It is said things have changed, but our overall national fortunes certainly haven’t changed - productivity (except of late, under austerity) has risen consistently, and the overall wealth of the nation has risen consistently. It is simply that the massive wealth we produce has, since the 1980s, been passing increasingly through the hands of owners rather than earners.
When people insist today that the debt is too high, that there must be austerity, and that the problem lies with the other nations in Europe, you see the same logic as 1930s workers who moped along the highway to London basically begging for food - the same food that came from the magic money tree during the war and after (workers had a better diet in 40s wartime than they had had in 30s peacetime, and they had a better diet under 50s rationing than in the 30s free markets).
And from the same magic money tree - more specifically, the power of the state to organise the economy efficiently and for maximum public interest, and to borrow and to tax to fund productive investment - came housing, schools, hospitals, roads, railways, pensions, and countless other things that provide the very foundation of a decent life and continued productive economy. The economy boomed with abundance all over Europe once it was wrested out of the hands of private wealth and the sucker straws of idle private profit swept off.
The problems we are currently facing is that almost the entire economy has been handed back to private hands with next to no regulation in the public interest, and what public services we retain have had sucker straws jabbed back in at every knuckle or snapped into inefficient pieces and sold off, and the unearned wealth of the rich (and the runaway salaries of the management class) is once again standing almost entirely untaxed.
Bearing in mind that the worker in Britain is paying more tax on the money he uses to put food in his mouth and put the gas on, than the wealthy pay on the unearned dividend income that funds their mansion houses, supercars, and yachts. Unearned income being that which the rich collect whether they lift a finger on a daily basis or not.
And don’t tell me that workers gain from producing supercars and building mansion houses for the enjoyment of the wealthy, because they would gain all the same from producing cars and houses for themselves. That would be the fallacy that the rascals or rioters who smash windows create a living for the glassmaker - whereas the glassmaker’s time could be far better employed than servicing the economic demands of glass-smashers.
The UKIP political faction - to which many working class Brexiteers have apparently been drawn - does not represent wealthy socialists, or even wealthy philanthropists. It represents the ■■■■■■■■■ of the self-interested monied class. It’s main donor, Banks, owns a diamond mine. It can count amongst it’s avowed supporters the likes of Mike Ashley - the man who runs a warehouse so Dickensian that workers fall ill from overwork, and who doesn’t even pay the legal minimum wage (until he was overwashed with public scandal). Farage might well be a good laugh down the pub, but no one else in UKIP appears to be. Most bosses are a good laugh in the pub, so long as there is no suggestion that they ought to be paying better wages or higher taxes.
Why any working class person with a clear head, other than one who is sympathetic to fascism in principle, would want to align themselves politically with radical right-wingers who are all making a killing by exploiting workers, I cannot fathom.
Particularly when, at the same time, these supporters of the right-wing shun even those on the left who have long been anti-EU (but for different underlying reasons) - including Corbyn himself, and including MPs like Dennis Skinner and Frank Field, neither of whom are otherwise political bedfellows inside Labour, but both of whom are working class, neither of whom would remotely promote the free-wheeling, free-marketeers of UKIP as an elixir for the working class.
If it is not because these working class supporters of the right are confused or blinded with anger - and I’m willing to allow that for the most part it is - then it must be because they fundamentally support the policies of the right-wing. The same policies that, merely in milder form, have already produced the misery against which they are rebelling.
If you say to me “Rjan, yes I am sympathetic to socialism and I want to see workers do better”, then I’d be curious to understand your account of why so many working class Brexiteers have aligned with the radical right and shun the pro-Brexit left-wingers.
But if you say to me “no, I’m not sympathetic to any kind of socialism at all”, then you’re just kidding yourself that you stand apart from the fascists. The Germans didn’t vote for gas chambers or a ruinous dictator. Hitler had some enthusiastic democratic support, and some more ambivalent support. The average German knew little or nothing about what went on in concentration camps - many of which were mere prisons with hard labour initially, holding first political prisoners and also increasingly the perceived detritus of German society. By time they became death camps, the war was on.
The folly was simply in refusing to do before the war what all the European working class did afterwards, which was expropriate the productive economy from private hands, have the state grab the capitalist economy by the neck, and insist that it delivered in the public interest. And at the same time, reject the pre-war ideas and themes, which layed the blame for failure and struggle at home at the door of other European nations (none of whom were doing appreciably better). Nazism required no more than this from the German people, that they be willing to blame other nations (mainly so, as well as a gaggle of scapegoat groups), and that they refuse to confront the misconceived management of the economy based on private ownership. Private ownership being a system in which everybody has one vote per deutschmark, but relatively few people actually held most of the deutschmarks.
And a right-wing Brexit will require no more from the British people, than that they revel in the (rather marginal) success of the referendum, whilst leaving the economy in the same private hands, and therefore totally free of democratic influence.
Private hands who, incidentally, will openly admit that further personal enrichment is their only concern, whilst asking us to believe that we too will somehow benefit from a system they carefully manage to promote their enrichment. An all the more astounding an invitation given that their enrichment has already materialised, whilst our enrichment as workers is apparently failing to occur and what we already had has become precarious.
I really do wonder whether it will take another actual war before the working class learn it’s lessons again, and return to the post-war economic logic based on solid public services, social security and a policy of full employment, rather than the pre-war Tory logic in which there was an acceptance of poverty, unemployment, and squalid housing, and the impotence of the state to do anything about it, which meant you ultimately had guys who’d fought the first world war marching for food.
What would we poor downtrodden masses do without our saviours such as Rjan? 
The answer is you’d send your kids to the fronts to fight for “the nation” whose rulers are swindling you - you wouldn’t be the first, simply one of many millions who in ignorance or folly have done so before.
. That has got to be some sort of trucknet record for the longest post that wasn’t a story