Sorry about the lack of posts on my front over the weekend; Saturday and Sunday seems to conspire to make sure I don't get much time in front of a computer. However, I've got some spare time this morning to do things, and part of my plan for this morning involves "catch up on what I've missed, post things and try to resist the urge to get back into bed and go '[i]eeee, warm[/i]'".

[quote=@Archmage MC]
Question, whatever happened to Brexit? And why did you guys attempt it anyway? Was it because of the liberals being super stupid?
[/quote]

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Brexit is still happening, but the negotiation hasn't formally started yet between our government and the EU. At some point, our Prime Minister is going to trigger Article 50, where she'll go "so, hey, uh, we're leaving", and then there's up to two years of negotiations, and then we see what happens. It's all a bit of a mess, because our Tory government didn't really plan ahead for the vote to leave, there's been some legal challenges about whether parliament should get to discuss and vote on any deals made, and so on. Anyway, the date for the negotiations to start is [i]probably[/i] going to be towards the end of March. It will likely be not a very pretty negotiation.

As for why we attempted it, and why it happened, it's hard for me not to be really biased, and I'd urge you to go and read up on reasons why people voted to leave to get a more rounded idea. I live in London, and like most of the people in London, I voted to remain ([i]Boo! Hiss![/i]). It's not so much a failure of the liberals - consider that the official stance of our incumbent right-wing Conservative government was to stay within the EU, and I doubt anybody would consider them "liberal" in any sense! - but rather a combination of economic inequality across the country, our slightly strange relationship between the media and politicians, and a general sense of people's distrust of politicians and politics.

It's a difficult thing to write about fairly, really, because I'm sad about how the whole campaign was run. The "remain" people didn't make a good case for why we should stay within the EU, likely because the cases for why we should remain didn't fit particularly well into good sound-bites, and the European Union had always been treated as something like a scapegoat by our tabloid newspapers, who'd basically blame everything on the EU. The "leave" camp made ridiculous promises that they couldn't keep, and after the referendum they all pointed the finger at one another for saying these things. I voted to remain mostly because there was no coherent plan for what leaving would actually get us, and the way in which the leave campaigners generally ended up hiding behind patriotism and anti-immigration didn't make me feel particularly confident. 

Then comes the problem after the referendum; there was no really clear case for why we should leave, promises made about what we could get should we leave turned out to be not worth the bus they were painted on and our government was quite clearly unprepared for it. During the campaign, there was a rather unpleasant anti-immigrant aspect to the whole affair (see: Nigel Farage's [i]Breaking Point[/i] poster, the assassination of MP Jo Cox by a neo-Nazi) that wasn't seriously tackled by the Remain campaign. Presumably they were concerned that they'd be told off for saying that everyone who wanted to leave was a racist who hated immigrants (clearly this isn't the case), but the Leave camp didn't do a particularly good job of distancing themselves from those people, and the Remain camp didn't do a particularly good job of holding them to account about it. Everyone focused on other subjects; sovereignty, trade, jobs, etc. etc. Nearly everyone seemed to find discussions about immigration distasteful.

Move forward to now, and the most important thing for our Prime Minister isn't sovereignty or jobs or access to the EU market for trade, but rather controlling our borders. Despite the fact that there were clearly other reasons for why people would vote to the European Union beyond "we've got to keep the immigrants", [i]keeping out the immigrants has become the highest priority[/i]. We were constantly told that this wasn't really a referendum on whether we should let people from Eastern Europe live in the United Kingdom, and then after the referendum, the people in charge of deciding what the most important things are in the negotiations sat down and went "okay, this was clearly about not letting people from Eastern Europe into the country". 
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So, anyway, it's going to happen. Article 50 will probably be triggered towards the end of March, I'd guess. There's two years of negotiation time at most, and then the United Kingdom is out of the European Union.