Political Wire wrote:
A Guardian reader summarizes the predicament well:
The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: Will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50?
Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?
Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-manoeuvred and check-mated.
If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over – Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession … broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.
If you subscribe to a theory by a random reader of a newspaper, sure. This is only a predicament if you assume two things:
1. The results of invoking article 50 are actually as dire as claimed here.
2. Boris Johnson knows these dire things will happen but ran on doing them anyway.
Which frankly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. What makes far more sense is that Johnson believes that leaving the EU will be better for the UK than staying, and that's why he made it a central plank to push for. Having succeeded, it seems pretty unlikely he'd change his mind.
Quote:
The possible ramifications of exiting the European Union are becoming much clearer to U.K. voters since the vote: market turmoil, recession, Scottish independence, Irish unification, among others.
David Cameron has now forced the leaders of the Brexit campaign to take ownership of their victory. It’s quite a parting gift.
[/quote]
Again, only if the opinion of said reader is actually correct. For those who believe that the UK leaving the EU is actually a good idea, then being allowed to take that action and take credit for it *is* a good thing too. If Cameron really wanted to sabotage this, he could have chosen not to step down, pushed a halfhearted effort to invoke article 50, managed to "fail" at it, then hand the mess over to whomever comes along after him. By setting that business aside entirely, he certainly hands it over to his replacement, to succeed or fail, but at least it'll be entirely in their control (including the credit/blame).
I did find the end of day market results the day after the vote interesting. UK was down 4%. France down 8%. After the initial shock reaction by the markets, the results weren't that bad for the UK at all. I suspect the bigger losers in this are going to be the countries in the EU that have been being propped up by the more successful/productive nations. As more countries start looking at this equation and realizing that being part of a deal that grants them trade benefits with nations who are still costing them more than the trade is netting them, we may just have seen the first trickle from the floodgates. Hard to say this early though.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that this vote was a referendum on socialism in general, but it does have some interesting aspects of that question with regard to nations rather than individuals within nations. From what I've heard, a lot of the anger stemmed from the sense that the people in the UK had so little influence or control over decisions made by the EU, but were increasingly seeing their lives being changed as a result of those decisions. How much of this is political hoopla is hard to know, but the core was certainly already there. And it's interesting that this is a form of the same kind of anti-socialism that we see here in the US. It's all about decisions being made "far away" that increasingly seem to micromanage people's lives.
People seem to forget that part and parcel of the trade deals that the EU manages includes price and quantity controls. So, for example, factories in the UK may be restricted from producing more than X amount of a given product and/or forced to sell it at a given price, so that they don't overly compete with a similar industry in another country in the EU. It's no different than the trade/tariff stuff that all nations do, except that in this case it's not being done by the government of your nation to benefit your nations economy, but may be imposed on your nation to your detriment, but to the betterment of another EU nation that the EU leadership feels needs an economic boost, or otherwise believes that "the good of the whole" is better off as a result.
Again. There's no way to know whether this decision will ultimately be better for the UK, or worse. I actually suspect better, but I'm the eternal optimist when it comes to free (or maybe just "free-er") markets. It does somewhat jar the whole grand unified European "plan" that's been steadily grinding along for the past several decades though. I suspect that the EU will be worse off absent the UK, than the UK will be worse off outside the EU. But that will certainly depend on what they do going forward from today.