h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In Southern UK house prices ... in 2018 terraced properties, selling prices were over £345,000

Other areas were
London Area £480,000
East of England £280,000
East Midlands £187,000

Are the East midlands worth living in?

Yes parts of it are very nice the people are friendly and genuine, its an 8 out of 10 sort of place.
However it is vulnerable if a lot of jobs go.

So, hypothetically, if you were a Remain voter, approaching retirement, with a house in Southern England that might sell for the £345,000 as mentioned in #101, and a reasonable pension from many years of employment in, let's say teaching... where would be a good place to retire to, post-Brexit?

As an aside, and perhaps a conversation that many families have had in the last 2 years, when I told my then 81 year old mum how I'd voted, and she told me she voted Leave, I told her I was shocked. Her exact words were "You'll understand when you're older"!

At the time of the Referendum I had the ear of many first time voters. In fact in my A level classes I made sure my students were registered, even doing this in my lessons. We watched some televised debates, discussed both sides. Their questions were future oriented, to do with travel, mobile phone roaming, education or employment opportunities and so on. The day after the result, I had several in tears, asking what that future had become.

A lot of consequences are unintended. We may be positive that we know what the future will bring, but are we right? The closest I can come to making predictions is to guess what the odds are. If things look to be more or less 50/50, I will hedge my bets as much as possible.

I have lived or worked in Turkey, Spain and France, So Not the UK it is in a turmoil of self doubt. Everyone thinks they know best but this is becoming a self destructive xenophobic crisis. The big problem was brexit supporters had the larger vote, but any credibility was lost as they fell short of getting a solid mandate!

They simply failed to get a majority of the population and this cast doubt on the credibility of the vote. This was made worse when the politicians decided to meddle!

I thought that politicians were *paid* to meddle.

No they are paid to be a representative for their constituents.

Strictly speaking, there's a debate (as far as Westminster politicians are concerned, at any rate) whether politicians are 'delegates' or 'representatives'; does the electorate delegate their views to politicians or are politicians there to represent the best interests of the electorate? There is no clear answer to this, of course.

"No they are paid to be a representative for their constituents" [Still Incognita]

I'm not sure whether to or .

It would take a lot of effort from a large number of constituents to even get their attention sometimes. This is not a local problem, but rather a widespread one. The only time you or I can have any detectable effect is when we're at the voting booth. That's it.

We send our representatives to Washington or London or whatever other countries' capitals are, and the political parties take over. The parties can control them by granting or denying them support in the next election. I read somewhere that in much of Europe, it's taken for granted that this will be how things are done.

There are exceptions, though, thank Bob!

I'm in a constituency that was strongly remain, with a Tory MP. She's had a fair amount of support from remainers for speaking out against the government, but criticism from leavers for not toeing the Tory line 'on which she was elected'.

What should an MP do representing a constituency that is very divided in its views?

As Paul's post suggests, the party system grew up as a way of avoiding this question, really. Naturally, as the electorate has been extended, this system becomes less useful in dealing with such problems and, consequently, the Brexit farce is both a manifestation of the breakdown of the party system and another nail in its coffin.

After the recent vote on the deal, I checked my local MP to see if they were representing my views.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46885027

My MP, Edward Leigh, has not represented my views once in nearly 35 years. I have never voted for him, but unfortunately a very large majority of my fellow constituents have. They believe, like him, that we should quit the EU.

That's the way this country's political system works. If we had PR though we might possibly have true representation..but that's never going to happen.

That was the other significant vote that was lost.

And yet, some day these might be remembered for good things that were happening. I won't regret not living long enough to see the full extent of the seas rising. If there were a good time for living in the moment, this may be it.

Re Dangerous xenophobia....

I managed to find my way to a pro-Brexit page on facebook () the other day after a 'friend' shared a really gobsmacking picture along the lines of

over a picture of the British flag, words to the effect of 'if we survived the war we can survive Brexit.... No Deal' -Just WOW.
(the comments underneath were then along the lines of Don't forget we are GREAT Britain (oh dear)

1. Yes we 'survived' - *just* and only through cooperation with others.
2. An awful lot of people rather famously did NOT survive it (and the previous one).
3. Through fighting both of those wars we went from being the richest country in the world to a much smaller, far less significant power with a massive transfer of that power both economic, political and military transferring to the other side of the pond. Do they *really* think this is good thing.
4. There just must be so many other things - wars are very very very negative in impact.

I really had no idea until seeing this, what sort of mindset was at play with a lot of brexiteers.

I noticed a councillor somewhere got in the news for trying to point out this sort of thing to his fellow councillors over the weekend.