But they did. And something even more disastrous could happen in America, if good judgment doesn’t prevail.
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This can be seen right now in what is going on in Britain. For Cameron, it was the decision to call a referendum on Britain’s European Union membership.
The vote for Brexit was a great shock; the morning after the vote, the disintegration of the European Union seemed practically inevitable. (Tony Blair, the Labour prime minister, handed over to Gordon Brown in 2007.) The reason is because of living in a parliamentary democracy, where one votes for parties rather than individuals.
The topsy-turvy immediate political outcome of the Brexit vote has left many in the country gnashing their teeth.
Other European leaders want to minimise the uncertainty of British limbo on their economies.
Cameron told The Daily Telegraph it had been “a privilege to serve the country I love”. This is in large part due to the different nature of government in the two countries.
The Europeans seem to understand that the Brexit vote is a wake-up call about dissatisfaction with the EU that’s almost as widespread on the continent as it is in Britain.
She is expected to immediately start putting together a new cabinet, a complex political balancing act in which she will try to satisfy opposing camps in her party. That process could take as many as two years – assuming May will actually do so, and I’m not too sure she will.
Before she can get to work, Mrs May has to wait for Mr Cameron to formally end his six-year term. Now more than ever, the EU’s defenders must find ways to make their influence felt.
May will become prime minister on Wednesday, after her only rival in the race, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out. In theory at least, Britain’s future would be decided by about 0.23 percent of the total population.
By becoming a high-profile policy maker, Davis runs the risk of being the target of public ire if negotiations disappoint either side of the Brexit debate. Seven have come since the Second World War.
However, Britain did join a campaign of strikes against Islamic State group targets in Iraq the next year and expanded them to Syria in 2015. Rather than treating Brexit as the negotiation of a divorce, they should seize the opportunity to reinvent the European Union – making it the kind of club that the United Kingdom and others at risk of exit want to join. May became the only candidate to lead the country.
May isn’t unelected, per se.
May worked in finance, including at the Bank of England, before being elected as MP for the London commuter town of Maidenhead in 1997.
The confident, easygoing product of a privileged background – the first prime minister to say he liked to “chillax” – Cameron said he hoped to be remembered as a social reformer. A single form of “associate status” for Britain, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey was proposed in a report by a European Parliament committee this week. However, this hasn’t prevented Remain campaigners from stoking the idea that the Leave contingent knowingly misled voters in the build-up to the referendum.
The angry populism of Britain’s rebuke to its elites is a sobering reminder for America in this crucial election season.
Cameron was re-elected in 2015 with an unexpected Conservative majority after campaigning on his economic record and vision of a “modern, compassionate Conservative Party”.
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European leaders should recognize their own mistakes and acknowledge the democratic deficit in the current institutional arrangements. The party is led by Jeremy Corbyn, an unrepentant old-school leftist who unexpectedly became leader past year. [Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images] That means support for London’s independence has more than doubled since the question was last posed to city residents in the wake of Scotland’s failed independence bid in 2014.
