Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 922 points – Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll
theguardian.com

Only one in 10 feel leaving the EU has helped their finances, while just 9% say it has benefited the NHS, despite £350m a week pledge according to new poll

A clear majority of the British public now believes Brexit has been bad for the UK economy, has driven up prices in shops, and has hampered government attempts to control immigration, according to a poll by Opinium to mark the third anniversary of the UK leaving the EU single market and customs union.

The survey of more than 2,000 UK voters also finds strikingly low numbers of people who believe that Brexit has benefited them or the country.

Just one in 10 believe leaving the EU has helped their personal financial situation, against 35% who say it has been bad for their finances, while just 9% say it has been good for the NHS, against 47% who say it has had a negative effect.

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National parks maybe

I think you are confusing conservationism with conservatism. These two topics are completely unrelated. The very first sentence on the wikipedia page for conservationism expresses that.

If you were referring to presidents who most influenced the proliferation of national parks, I think Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt would be the two that are most responsible. As you probably know, both were famously progressive (the opposite ideology of conservatism).

I think you didn't read much of the page you shared. Conservationism ~ ecology is a 20th modern movement, the origin of it is conservatism of natural resources for industrial use, not preservation of nature. So yes, the origin of conservationism is related to conservatism, the notions evolved to be less related today.

You are being really weird right now. Re-defining words is a common behavior for people who are desperate to create a fictional narrative. In this case, I think you are so worried about looking foolish that you will say anything.

The very first line of the wikipedia entry for conservationism says:

Not to be confused with Conservatism.

Just stop.

I'd rather continue because I know the few people who read this thread without being too influenced by the massive downvoting may learn something, and maybe you will too.

Here are the relative quotes you may have missed

The early conservation movement evolved out of necessity to maintain natural resources such as fisheries, wildlife management, water, soil, as well as conservation and sustainable forestry

Some say the conservation movement is part of the broader and more far-reaching environmental movement, while others argue that they differ both in ideology and practice. Conservation is seen as differing from environmentalism and it is generally a conservative school of thought which aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their continued sustainable use by humans.

The early years of the environmental and conservation movements were rooted in the safeguarding of game to support the recreation activities of elite white men, such as hunting.[29] This led to an economy to support and perpetuate these activities as well as the continued wilderness conservation to support the corporate interests supplying the hunters with the equipment needed for their sport.[29] Game parks in England and the United States allowed wealthy hunters and fishermen to deplete wildlife, while hunting by Indigenous groups, laborers and the working class, and poor citizens--especially for the express use of sustenance--was vigorously monitored.[29] Scholars have shown that the establishment of the U.S. national parks, while setting aside land for preservation, was also a continuation of preserving the land for the recreation and enjoyment of elite white hunters and nature enthusiasts.[29]

While Theodore Roosevelt was one of the leading activists for the conservation movement in the United States, he also believed that the threats to the natural world were equally threats to white Americans. Roosevelt and his contemporaries held the belief that the cities, industries and factories that were overtaking the wilderness and threatening the native plants and animals were also consuming and threatening the racial vigor that they believed white Americans held which made them superior.[30] Roosevelt was a big believer that white male virility depended on wildlife for its vigor, and that, consequently, depleting wildlife would result in a racially weaker nation.[30] This lead Roosevelt to support the passing of many immigration restrictions, eugenics legislations and wildlife preservation laws.[30] For instance, Roosevelt established the first national parks through the Antiquities Act of 1906 while also endorsing the removal of Indigenous Americans from their tribal lands within the parks.[31] This move was promoted and endorsed by other leaders of the conservation movement, including Frederick Law Olmstead, a leading landscape architect, conservationist, and supporter of the national park system, and Gifford Pinchot, a leading eugenicist and conservationist.[31] Furthering the economic exploitation of the environment and national parks for wealthy whites was the beginning of ecotourism in the parks, which included allowing some Indigenous Americans to remain so that the tourists could get what was to be considered the full "wilderness experience".[32]

Etc.

You've worked hard to defend your position that something good has come from political conservatism. And still, you've provided no evidence that conservatism has ever resulted in anything good.

Racists can find value in progressive policies. In your example, racists found value in the policies of the leader of the progressive party. That does not make those policies conservative policies. They are just progressive policies that some conservatives (or racists) find some value in.

Conservatives neither need nor want your defense of them. They are proud that their policies are designed to harm and deceive people. Harm is their platform. It always has been. Why are you doing such intense gymnastics to defend conservatism? What good can come from your defense of the indefensible?

You are either misunderstanding my intentions or using a straw man argument, I am not defending conservatism. I wanted to point out at that national park may be something that is considered good today, and that, surprisingly, it started with conservative ideas (industry, capital preservation, racism). Most people today probably don't know about that because they associate national park with environmentalism, which is rather a left progressive idea. That's why I wrote this initial comment.

You are using the progressive policies of a progressive leader of his time as an example of something good that came from conservatism. It's not a good example to support your position that something good has come from conservatism.

Progressive leaders created the national park institutions, but not the concept of conserving natural space, which was initially done to conserve natural resources for human use (sometimes with capitalists reasons or racist reasons), not to preserver nature as we know them today. See the wikipedia page for more details about that.

I mean, thanks for the good faith effort I guess, but you're still objectively incorrect as a matter of the historical record.

You would have done better to single out the Interstate freeway system as "conservative," since it was created under Eisenhower. But even that is a weak example since it wasn't opposed by liberals at all.

Let me know what you think I wrote that was objectively incorrect. I get the feeling most people reading this thread and following the downvotes think I'm claiming the USA national parks were solely created by conservative, which I didn't. I wanted to point at that conservative ideas was what started what later gave birth to national parks as we know them, and not only in the USA. Maybe some national parks locations we know today wouldn't exist if it hadn't been protected for conservative reasons initially. Note also, that I used the word maybe, from the beginning, because it's certainly not the only reason they exist today. I admit guilt to use a short, surprising sentence without further explanation to raise questions, but it seems almost all reactions got negatively oriented from there because of how touchy politics is here, especially if it doesn't follow the left main stream. This saddens me because with the default ranking system, this interesting thread got buried, and fewer people could read it.

I appreciate your persistence in explanation, your point became more clear.

Right on. Just chiming in to say that everything you say is totally congruent with what I learned about the conservation movement in my environmental studies courses. I get plenty of reminders geographically, too, since I live not too far from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory on Gifford Pinchot Drive, as well a Muir Knoll, named for preservationist John Muir. The conservationists and the preservationists were ideological rivals—a store of resources for judicious human use vs. nature's value pro se—and the modern environmental movement is much more aligned with the preservationists. The conservationist movement was more c*nservative, relatively.

I guess sometimes on social media, you run across a Two Minutes Hate gathering, where nuance is not welcome, without being able to realize it in advance.

Yeah that's what is described in the wikipedia article but people here read conservatism, they see red and can't discuss anymore.

Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive, part of the "progressive era" in US political history. There isn't a way to spin it such that he can accurately be called a conservative. The conservative position on national parks, at least in the west, would be that they should remain open for resource extraction. We see this at play with the recent bullshit surrounding the Bears Ears National Monument de-designation under Trump and the ongoing effort to allow drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

You are simply objectively incorrect.

More straw man arguments, I never called him a conservative.

The conservative position on national parks, at least in the west, would be that they should remain open for resource extraction.

Yes, that's the point, but also consider that this how it started, before progressive politics made it about nature preservation. Read the Wikipedia page or the quote I have taken have of it if you're feeling lazy.

You are simply objectively incorrect.

You are simply not trying to understand what I mean because you'd rather confirm the bias you have formed about me when you've seen the downvotes on my comments.

Horseshit. I've spent literally decades reporting on land-use issues in the rural west. That, together with the reintroduction of wolves in the intermountain west, is kind of my life's work as a journalist thus far.

I actually don't even know where to start with how wrong you are.

So the wikipedia page about the history of conservationism is completely wrong? I'm not claiming anything more than what's on it. Maybe it's important for your job to read this page.