Sure, what a better move from an organization that is more and more compared to the USSR than completely ignore the result of a direct consultation of the citizens. Especially when anti-EU parties are gaining traction is a lot of other countries.
If the UK does not leave the EU despite the will of the people, it will be the clearest message ever sent to everybody in Europe that they have basically lost the right to decide for themselves. That would probably not be without consequences.
Democracy is not a right, it's a responsibility. That means if you want to decide for yourself you have to actually educate yourself on the ramifications of the decisions.
Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave. That's not democracy that's just a tantrum.
Some countries favor direct democracy and think representative democracy is not democratic enough. Are they wrong? Please american overlord, show us the way, we so want to be right.
Personally, I think they are wrong for very clear and real reasons.
I think protecting the minority is important. I don't think something magically happens at 50.01% that makes that idea suddenly better than at 49.99%. The majority does NOT have the right to abuse the minority.
It seems like they are in a number of states, on a number of issues, should we not desire a correct government over a popular one? Whether it's a majority that is wrong, or a representative class that is wrong, or a despot that is wrong, should we not have a voice to point out what we see as errors?
You probably don't actually believe that popular opinion constitutes truth, it's just convenient pretense for your argument. If you really do, pick up a history book or some modern polls.
When the majority decides that a minority should be mistreated, is that justice?
If the majority is misinformed by a powerful minority, will they not act against even their own best interests?
When the majority is short sighted, is disgracing the future the proper thing to do?
An ideal government is one that uses the truth to optimize according to some anthropic value system in the short and long terms. These do not arise from popular opinion, just as they don't form under the force of authority. Unfortunately, they are probably impossible to form at all.
People are selfish, stupid, and short-sighted and that doesn't go away once you reach any particular number or proportion of them making the decisions.
Democracy can (arguably) produce morally just decisions, but that isn't the same as producing factually correct ones.
The fallacy is that you keep talking about "truth" as if it was such a simple thing to identify.
Where is the truth between legalizing marijuana or not? Where is the truth between allowing somebody who is 20 years and 11 month old to drink or not? And I'm not even getting near real controversial topics such as gay marriage, abortion, polygamy and co.
There is no truth, just what the majority considers "good" or "desirable" at a given point in time.
And yes, sometimes we realize decades later that it was dumb. or rather, we like to judge with our eyes what people did 100 years before us and want to pretend we would have known better, that they were just morons.
Here's the crux. We currently decide both values and facts by deciding for actions and policies, and decisions using popular opinion will therefore make errors about facts. How we negotiate facts and values should be different.
We could define what our values are, decide if it is just to use potentially violent force to enforce laws that forbid substances that have detrimental health effects and flesh out what we mean by a detrimental effect, what the threshold of that is for different age groups -- these are things that are pretty anthropic, can't be decided otherwise.
We can then collect facts about which substances fit into our decided categories, and avoid making mistakes that fail to serve the values we chose.
If (because the fact process, being human, is imperfect) we find new values for facts, we can adjust policy and actions without readjusting the values side of decision making.
There is such a thing as truth, and while we can't have a perfect method of arriving at it, we have methods better than polls.
People legislate taste, they ignore big problems because "we've always done it like that", etc. This is plain to see. Nobody benefits when a state fails to live up to its purpose, provides both insufficient freedoms with insufficient controls.
Sure, an unfeeling despotic utilitarian robot would be an immoral form of government -- we have to take into account anthropic value systems (which will not converge, and require consensus-making in some form) -- but to accept there's no one true system of mores doesn't require assuming there's no single truth.
The Brexit referendum didn't offer people a choice of priorities. It offered them a binary in vs out decision where the differences between different ways of implementing each choice were arguably wider than the difference between the choices. Then voters had to try and map their actual priorities onto this decision based on dubious information from media and politicians who had their own interests at heart.
No, democracy is great when you place limits on what the majority can do. The majority does not get free reign to do whatever they want; there is a reason most democratic countries place limits on the majorities ability to enact their will; the US constitution is designed explicitly to limit the power of the majority, so as to prevent the abuse of the minority.
And none of that I would disagree with. We're not discussing whether or not the population should have ability to leave the EU via referendum, however.
I was referring to the tendencies of some to cry out that democracy doesn't work when people don't vote the way they want them to, or to portray the other side as "undecuated or "racist" just because your side lost.
Leave voters were unavoidably uneducated "on the ramifications of the decisions", because Leave had no post-vote plan.
The referendum wasn't a choice between two courses of action. It was a choice between carrying on as normal, and "leaving the EU", where the specifics were undefined. Nobody could educate themselves as to the ramifications, because it wasn't - and still isn't - possible to know what they would be.
Leave voters might claim they voted for restored sovereignty, or reduced immigration, or not sending the EU £350MM/week, but they didn't, because none of those things were on the ballot.
I see, so when people don't vote "the right way" it's because they are stupid, or throwing a tantrum. Good, that makes for good debates. The media and the "elite" in the UK tried that for a year and we saw the outcome.
There is an article in the constitution to allow a country to leave the union, so it is a right the people have.
Well, then we should maybe change the rules of elections. Maybe before people are allowed to vote they should take a test to make sure they know what they are doing. Or we can simplify and say that you need a master's degree to be allowed to vote, organizing the test may be too involved.
Also, maybe old people should not be allowed to vote since they're gonna die soon anyway, what do they care?
Also, maybe only land owners should be allowed to vote, after all, if you don't own land maybe you're not really part of the destiny of the country.
Also, maybe you should have been a citizen for at least 10 years to be allowed to vote, to make sure you've had time to integrate the values of your new country.
How about we stop assuming that just because things didn't play out the way the elites wanted them to it must mean that people are stupid, racist, uneducated? I can only imagine the reactions if the "remain" had won, and we were now talking about the UK leaving anyway.
What do you mean, little information?! There's plenty of information on how bad EU is (occupation of Greece, austerity, one country deciding to invite millions of migrants then forcing others to help them, wasting money supporting 2 parliaments, "unelected" leaders, the failure that is Euro, ...).
If it is in a single coordinated economic block, then you don't get the positive effects of different countries trying different things, and the good ideas being copied when proven successful. i.e. the same competition that actually made Europe such a successful part of the world over the last few centuries. The EU is anti-European.
> Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave.
That's not my job - that's what civil servants and politicians are paid considerable amounts of money to determine.
Just like a marketing director doesn't expect to have to present the dev team with the architecture of the latest web app; he or she states the requirements, we execute it.
Well, executing according to the plan will lead to political suicide because the Leave voters couldn't be bothered to understand the economic ramifications, so they're going to be out of a vote anyway.
If a customer asks for you to build a building that will collapse, do you go for it or do you steadfastedly refuse your customer's idiocy.
If they want a building that will collapse, you should build it, of course. Doing otherwise would be negligent, and assuming your customers are stupid for wanting such a thing is unprofessional at best.
No. I know what endemic corruption, tax evasion, abuses to the social state, refusal of investing in economies beyond tourism and construction, have done to Southern Europe's economies, which have the same low interest rates than the healthy economies in the EU.
I believe the poster is referring to Mikhail Gorbachev, who said “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.”
But who knows; perhaps Mikhail read something in the Daily Mail.
I think most people accept that it isn't the best idea to allow a simple majority to have unlimited power. Just because you can get 50.01% of the people to vote for something doesn't mean it is 'undemocratic' to not do it.
In the United States, for example, we have a constitution that explicitly sets out rules for what a majority can't do. I don't think setting limits on what the majority can do means that people have 'lost the right to decide for themselves'.
If the British Parliament decides to drag their feet on brexit, that doesn't mean they are preventing people from deciding for themselves; the people decided to vote those MPs into office!
> Sure, what a better move from an organization that is more and more compared to the USSR than completely ignore the result of a direct consultation of the citizens
It's certainly not a given. May is not very remain though. It would take political bravery to go against the referendum result.
It would be easier for a new non Conservative party government to avoid Brexit as remaining can be part of the manifesto, which somewhat explains the urgency with which Labour MPs are trying to eject Corbyn, who can not be relied on to make remain a manifesto pledge.
Labour MPs are trying to eject Corbyn because they were never happy he was elected leader of the party in the first place. They wish they could take a page from the Conservatives and select a new leader without the people's voice.
Can somebody in the UK explain to me what happened to the Liberal Democrats? Did they implode after tying their hitch to the Cameron wagon in the last parliament?
Because it seems to me like a bulk of these supposed Blair-ite 'Labour' supporters who want Corbyn out so they don't have to be sullied with ugly old words like "socialism" and "wealth redistribution" more properly belong in a party closer to Canada's Liberal Party, and it is Corbyn who is inheriting the mantle of the more traditional Labour constituency? Why have the Liberal Democrats not done better out of the cataclysm in British party politics over the last few months?
Yes. They got burned badly for 'breaking their promises' after being elected into the coalition.
What nobody seems to have realised is that they didn't have anything close to a majority, so of course they weren't able to completely prevent the Tories from doing everything.
It's a shame IMO because what we clearly need right now is a Centralist party, especially with Labour going further and further to the Left under Corbyn.
They did pretty badly in the last general election, probably as punishment for their time in the coalition. They didn't have many seats to start with but they have even less now.
However since the last general election we have seem what the Conservative Party can do when they are unrestrained and this has helped the LibDems make their argument that they were actually a significant player in the coalition government. There is likely to be a decent recovery in the next general election for them, particularly if they go in with a remain manifesto pledge. I doubt it would be enough for a majority government but possibly enough to force a coalition, which would not guarantee a remain deal and could result in them being punished in the subsequent general election.
At least part of it is them getting screwed by the first past the post system. There was a swing towards labour in the last election in many seats that were split three ways, this took the seat rightward from Lib-Dem -> Conservative even though the voters were heading in the opposite direction.
They made an election promise around university tuition fees. When they were elected and become coalition leaders they reneged on that promise, and then continued to fuck over their core voters (bringing in damaging NHS budgets; really awful benefit reforms (and refusing to investigate increase in death by suicide linked to those reforms) etc.
They got in by focusing on marginal seats. They lost most of those in the last election. They used to get protest votes, but those went to UKIP or the green party, or even labour or conservative.
> Because it seems to me like a bulk of these supposed Blair-ite 'Labour' supporters
It's the labour MPs who want to get rid of corbyn. He's very popular with the party members.
If Brexit gets brushed under the carpet, and the EU continues its legacy of greed, stupidity and incompetence in every area it involves itself in, then I imagine the next referendum will be a lot more bitter and painful, if not outright violent.
I can't think of anything the EU has been involved in over the last couple of decades that isn't accurately described as such: the Euro? the Lisbon treaty debacle? the immigration catastrope? Greece? Unemployment? Agricultural policy? God forbid they ever get an army: they would probably attack their own citizenry, declare a great victory, and people like yourself would start cheering
You could disprove it by coting a single area where they are a widely acknowledge success, but that is of course impossible: even the Remain campaign was unable to come up with anything beyond vague threats of doom, which have now proven false
I think this is a big reason why Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US have such large backing. Not saying I agree with either of them -- but people feel ignored, and the establishment's response is to call them ignorant.
If we decide we need to "save the majority from themselves" is it still a democracy?
> Not leaving will create a moral danger. Wouldn't it?
I'm not seeing it.
> It will make it too easy for people to vote according with their guts knowing that they will be saved.
Sure, it will make people take non-binding single-issue policy referenda issued as a sop to get people to vote for a party in a general election despite disagreement on an important point with the policies of that party far less seriously.
OTOH, the main effect that has is making such non-binding referenda far less likely to actually be offered in the first place, forcing people to seek to consider the whole of their policy preferences in general elections, resulting in governments that better represent the public will including the way it balances priorities between preferences in different policy areas.
> It will also empower anti-EU parties in other countries in EU.
So far, I've heard people argue that:
(1) Britain voting to stay in the EU, given the special deals it already had on top of the special deals that were negotiated condition on the Brexit vote failing would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU,
(2) Britain voting to leave the EU, independently of what happens later, would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU,
(3) Britain actually leaving the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU,
(4) Britain not actually leaving the EU after voting for Brexit would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU,
(5) Britain getting favorable treatment in negotiations for post-EU status if it left the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU,
(6) Britain getting unfavorable treatment in negotiations for post-EU status if it left the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU
I tend to discount such claims when presented without a credible argument to how they would do so compared to alterantives...
It would be a disaster for British Democracy. Imagine if the reverse happened.
I would also regard the morning after regrets with a grain of salt. The political establishment (Labour & Tories) were against leaving. The politically influential corporate sectors (especially banking) were against leaving. The media was generally against leaving. The leavers are pretty underrepresented, it would seem. It's not surprising that leave voters seem to have vanished, or changed their minds.
Some may have, but even if there was a massive swing (say from 52% to 45%), the un-regretful leave voters are half the country. They won the vote. How can they trust democracy if they are "robbed" of their democratic right.
Not leaving will create a mockery of democratic process. It would delegitimize the EU, & even the British polity.
Can we stop claiming 52% is any sort of clear majority? 52% doesn't mean "most people want this", it means "the country is evenly split, so we flipped a coin, and it came up Leave". You need much more than 52% of the population behind you to have a revolution (of any sort).
There's a reason that most functional democracies have a constitution can only by changed by meeting a higher bar than simple majority: it's too important, too sensitive, and too irreversible to be decided without something closer to consensus. I would argue that that logic applies here.
If the UK had voted to stay, and this headline was actually "Why it's time to accept the fact that Remain may never happen" would you be making the same argument?
Why does the status quo matter? Would a 51% remain vote be more valid than a 55% leave vote, simply based on whether or not it preserves the status quo?
Status quo matters in this narrow context of discussing the validity of reversed headlines and responses to them because "Remain may never happen" would be nonsense with a reversed result; remain is what happens until some action by the government changes it, so if remain won, remain would immediately be happening, just as it was happening before the referendum.
Simple questions like "would I find this argument acceptable if the outcomes were reversed" are important to consider, especially for a subject like ignoring/reversing the outcomes of democratic elections. If that sort of semantic point makes that impossible to realize, then I don't really know what to tell you.
> Simple questions like "would I find this argument acceptable if the outcomes were reversed" are important to consider
They can often be useful to consider, certainly, where they make sense.
> If that sort of semantic point makes that impossible to realize, then I don't really know what to tell you.
You could just recognize that sometimes the trick of reversing values doesn't result in a parallel (or even coherent) scenario to consider, because not every situation is symmetric in the way required for that to be a meaningful thing to consider.
If the remain vote had prevailed (and preserved status quo / done nothing / stayed put / whatever your word choice of preference is for "remain"), and leave voters were making the argument that their result is invalid due to insufficient majority percentage, and should consequently be ignored, would you consider the argument valid? Are you being obtuse on purpose?
That definition of 'most' is common in textbooks, but it's generally considered a bit too naive and that 'most' does not express a simple majority.
Suppose you have $1000 and say "I've spent most of my money on drugs and hookers". Many people feel that this means that not much money is left, and it would be kind of misleading if you've spent $501 on drugs and hookers and have a generous $499 left.
I think I remember vaguely that you can use ultrafilter logics for getting a better semantics for 'most'. Or, some sort of thresholds as a poor man's solution, I guess.
That's exactly why putting up this vote to remain or leave was a very poor decision in the first place. The drastic change of leaving the EU, decided by half the votes, many of which were very ill informed about what that actually means, is a giant political mess. I don't think I have ever seen such a unfortunate outcome from a political decision in my lifetime.
Going forward, the UK should look at the referendum as a very weak signal by the public. There will be no "revolution" and definitely not a violent one if the government looks at the effort and outcome of leaving the EU but ultimately decides to remain.
It was not decided that if there would be <60%, there would be another referendum or the other side will win.
Staying in EU is a horrible idea as far as Britian is concerned. If they don't have to pay to corrupt government officials of poorer countries in the EU, it is already a win (for citizens of those countries and for Britain)... but I can see why the corrupt unelected EU officials don't want them (or anyone else for that matter) to leave.
That's very true. However, if you start breaking it down you will find that Scotland, Northern Ireland and London were strongly in favor of the EU, and the rest of the country were not.
There is obviously a strong disagreement on the matter. The humane thing to do would be to allow for further devolution, allowing Northern Ireland and Scotland to become independent and join the EU. London would be tricker, but Europe has had free cities before and could again. Or, perhaps Edinburgh could absorb the people that want to be part of the EU.
Any polity where issues split 50/50 (and America is currently in this situation in most cases) is going to be inherently tyrannical.
> There's a reason that most functional democracies have a constitution can only by changed by meeting a higher bar than simple majority: it's too important, too sensitive, and too irreversible to be decided without something closer to consensus.
In the general case I agree, but I think this vote is a bit different in that it was arguably about reverting another constitutional change - the ongoing abdication of many functions to an EU government with much less democratic accountability to the UK public - which was never legitimized by popular vote at all.
The last relevant UK referendum was the 1975 one on "European Communities membership", and at the time the EEC was pitched to voters as a purely economic arrangement, with none of the aspects of supranational government later introduced by Maastricht. That economic phrasing found just over two-thirds support, while polling conducted around the same time on political integration found (IIRC) just under one-third support.
As far as I know, every time European political integration has been put to a referendum, it's been rejected. The "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe" was rejected by the French and Dutch populations in 2005; after that it was temporarily shelved then sneakily repackaged as the "Treaty of Lisbon" in 2008. Ireland held a referendum and rejected that too, but since that was the wrong answer it was forced to hold it again and voters were basically told to vote yes or else.
So the situation is not at all like the formation of something like the USA, where state populations explicitly agreed to political union. Political union is happening against the wishes of national populations. I don't think national leaders, even democratically elected ones, have the right to take power away from the populations they represent, any more than they have the right to say "hey, guess what, we're not going to have any more elections, we'll just stay in office forever".
If just a single digit % of the population took more than passive/peaceful stance then it would be game over. As I recall from studies the Nazis took control with far less than 50% support (I want to say < 30%).
While I certainly agree with that, I would also think that a lot of people that wanted peaceful revolution no longer want it; these are not the types of determined people that turn to violent revolution.
The Brexit was a piece of political propaganda, sold as something easy and hugely beneficial. When it becomes clear that the promises will not come to fruition, few will want to pay an even greater price. The Brexit leaders have all quit their jobs, there's no more leadership pushing this forward.
No one is blocking the Brexit. The Leave campaign simply cannot figure out how to make it work. They lied about almost everything in their entire campaign, so it's not really hard to see how it wouldn't actually work.
I mean look at the 2 main people who were driving the Leave campaign - they both resigned! When your leadership doesn't even want to see the Brexit through, you know you have a problem.
Revolution is a young man's game. In this case if you look at the demographics of the vote it was old people who voted to leave.
In another ten years this vote probably would have gone the other way.
In fact I'm really confused as to who such a complex geopolitical strategy decision was put in front of the citizenship in the first place. "What if they say yes?" Is the sort of question your government should be able to answer before asking the question. If they can't then maybe they shouldn't be making geopolitical strategy decisions either.
If you want a revolution, that's the one you need. Elect some grown ups instead. Then send us your all of the old leaders because they're still doing better job than mine.
It was put in front of the citizenship in the first place as a ploy by Cameron to quell discontent from Eurosceptic MPs in his own party. There's some suspicion that he didn't expect to ever have to do it, since the Tories were predicted not to achieve a majority. He certainly didn't expect Leave to actually win.
The vote is a reflection of discontent but it has no political articulation whatsoever. No plan. No actual idea on how to run a successful government that can ameliorate the issues at hand.
Votes of discontent tend to generate a lot of trouble on the short term, but give a little time and we're back to business as usual because, hey, it turns out actually governing is a hell of a lot more complicated than complaining about things and it turns out that bureaucrats who have been at it for a few decades are actually not the dimwits that are portrayed in the media.
I have very little sympathy for the established political parties, but it's very clear that there is very little in the way of actual plans and solutions outside of the status quo either.
Heck my impression is that this only became an issue more because of a strange interplay of Tory outliers with with a very small but loud group of brexiteers and UKIP politicians who preferred to misinform and pander to a voting bloc rather than having to deal with real, difficult problems.
"Legitimacy" is a fundamental idea our political system (in most of the world) is based on. I think it is underestimated how fragile this legitimacy is (or the meta-idea that a government must have legitimacy). If the political class continues to ignore the wishes of the people, the people will stop giving them legitimacy - and do what ever the fck they please to put it bluntly. We are not facing a revolution - the extreme scenario is rather a failed state, or a "area of reduced governance". The light scenario is a massive power gain for populist parties.
Note, I'm very much pro-EU and anti-Brexit. But I believe it would be madness to ignore the referendum.
The most pragmatic solution would be one that let's everybody keep their face. Find a solution that de facto leaves the status quo unchanged, but de jure let's Britain leave. Maybe formalize the special statuses Switzerland and Norway have, and give Britain an associate status. Or let Britain leave and change the statutes to allow England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland to become individual members. Or or or... I'll leave it to the EU bureaucrats to figure out.
Many people felt that the EU was too undemocratic. Too often it decided what to do, without letting people vote on it. And when people did vote against the EU's plan, the EU found ways to ignore or bypass the vote.
This was a big part of the reason for the Brexit vote. If that vote gets ignored, there's going to be trouble. I don't know what form it will take, but there will be trouble.
That's how democracy works. You elect people so they decide things for the people. Sometimes they can in turn elect other people.
It's impossible to put everything up for vote (and the results would be disastrous unless the majority of the population would be highly educated).
Well, that's how representative democracy works. It's not how democracy works.
But even in a representative democracy, there's still this line out of history: "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". If the EU (or the US Congress) makes decisions that alienate too large a chunk of their citizens, then you wind up with a government in power that does not have the consent of the governed, and which therefore is viewed as illegitimate by a large chunk of the people. And then comes trouble, in one form or another.
What most people are missing is the third option, how Britain can both avoid leaving the EU and staying in the EU: Namely that the EU in it's current form stops existing before the Brexit can be completed.
There are compelling (or at least popular) arguments both from the left and the right against the EU in it's current form, but for some kind of international European organization. It's not too far fetched that (due to various crises like in Greece, the Brexit, etc.) the EU would break apart at some point. In that case, due to necessity and realpolitik, I don't believe it would leave a void, but would be replaced by a leaner organization, more individual multilateral treaties etc., and hopefully something more democratic. And as I said this idea is popular with the left and the right - I believe this restructuring could be positive and utopian, or regressive and apocalyptic (you choose which side is which).
What you claim such a high risk and costly endeavour that it's ridiculous to contemplate it happening in the span of 10 years. Organizations collapse long before they have such large reforms, and we're talking about a union of a couple dozen countries that given the opportunity for reform, would pull a dozen different ways with no consensus.
As much as I'm opposed to Brexit, we can't simply un-ring this bell and pretend it never happened. The issues which lead to the Leave result aren't going to disappear, and ignoring the result will just add further to the (already scary) rise in far-right sentiment in the UK.
They wouldn't just say no we're not doing that, they would have another vote. Probably on the really bad deal they'll get from Brussels. So instead of the really vague yes or no of the last election it would be a vote of the actual plan--agree to leave the EU, but still pay them a ton of money, allow immigration, etc etc.
I think it is already spawning change. It's waking up the complacent establishment who thinks they can keep shitting on the working class. The right wing is already capitalizing on this by blaming the problems on immigrants. Hopefully, the left wing wakes up too and brings forth some candidates who can address the real root causes instead of blaming it on immigration.
> It's waking up the complacent establishment who thinks they can keep shitting on the working class.
How so? Theresa May has just formed the most right-wing, anti-working-class Cabinet in living memory, while Labour are busy tearing themselves apart. It doesn't seem the establishment is waking up in any meaningful way.
Yeah, no argument there. I guess my point is that the rise of Trump and the passing of the Brexit has made a lot of people actually realize there is a problem. They still don't want to face it, and you can see with Labour they have no effing clue how to handle it, but at least they see that they can't just continue with business as usual and expect the people to stay happy.
>Hopefully, the left wing wakes up too and brings forth some candidates who can address the real root causes instead of blaming it on immigration.
And if the real root cause is immigration? If the answer is so-obviously-not immigration policies, then what? Nobody seems to have an answer.
In every modern Western society - it seems Liberals/Leftists are always so fearful of losing the minority votes that they'll prefer no answer over one that could offend their voting base.
You are right, the vast majority of liberal and leftist politicians are afraid of offending their base, but it's not their voting base. It's their funding base. Money drives politics in the US, and that comes from fossil fuels, pharma, defense, banking/finance, tech, and other capitalist interests. It does not come from minoroties or any of their actual voters. Politicians could care less about their constituents, they just need to balance what their corporate backers want against what their constituents want, which is usually very different.
So, the root cause lies there. Until we somehow change this, money and corporate interests will continue to rule, at the expense of the people. The longer it goes on without more politicians addressing this, the more people will fall into the right wing fascist trap of blaming immigrants.
The UK cannot afford to not have free trade with the EU, and a stipulation of free trade is to allow open immigration and travel. The main reason that many people even voted for leaving was to stop the EU immigration! So, just based on this 1 thing, it doesn't seem like it has a chance of happening.
Additionally, there is the whole thing about sending money to the NHS instead of the EU that turned out to be false.
And, many Leave voters actually didn't even want it to pass, they were just doing it as a protest vote.
So, half the stuff the Leave campaign said has turned out to be a lie and some portion (not really sure how big) of the voters didn't even want it to pass. Expecting the Brexit to happen just seems completely crazy.
The EU does not allow member countries to negotiate trade deals privately. All trade deals must go through the EU, which means any trade deals applies to all EU countries. It's an all or nothing thing. So even though Poland might want to allow free trade with the UK, they simply cannot do it. It must go through the EU, and the EU has said very strongly that they will not allow it. Free trade means free movement. No exceptions.
Once you understand that, the Brexit is just even stupid to consider.
At this point, the mass immigration is actually unstoppable. It could be managed when people got information about foreign countries from state-controlled (or aligned) media.
Now, when everybody and his dog are on the Internet, they can see what life in other countries actually is. And want a piece of it. And unless you bring machine guns (and maybe even then), you can't stop hundreds of millions of migrants who just want better life for themselves and their children.
I am pro-Remain, but democracy is democracy; ignoring the popular vote would create much more dangerous precedent than any bad things that may happen from Brexit.
It isn't like a vast majority voted for Brexit; the vote was very close.
The number of people who would be happy with parliament dragging their feet would be pretty close to the number of people upset with them. I don't think that will cause some massive shift in voting patterns.
Majority rule without checks and balances is mob rule.
And a simple majority can take away something that 49% of the population thinks is important. This is where your democratic utopia goes to die.
Open voting is a blame shedding trick. If 'everybody' agreed with your bad idea then it's not your fault when the consequences happen. Even if you were the one who put it in people's heads in the first place.
As a citizen of a country in crisis, who to blame might be of some importance, and organized media will certainly get you fixated on that aspect. But maybe the fact that there's a crisis is a little more important, and you should try to avoid then in the first place instead of just having an audit trail.
Here in Switzerland, we have direct democracy, with referendums every two months. Some bad decisions were taken, but most of them are easily reversed when proved wrong.
In the case of the U.K., it's news to absolutely no one that there are some fundamental and ancient grudges between regions. Voting on things for spite isn't entirely out of the realm of possibilities.
It is a common complaint that Europeans have no grasp of how goddamned big the US is, and make "helpful" suggestions to fix our problems with solutions that simply don't scale with geography. It's a big place full of people who either came here to be left alone, or were kicked out of Europe because they wouldn't leave other people alone. People sort themselves and there's plenty of physical and emotional space for echo chambers if you want them.
Neighboring states are not as different as neighboring countries, but we have 50 of them and among those you can find two that completely disagree with each other on nearly every topic you can imagine. If Europe voted that Switzerland should pay off the Spanish national debt, I bet you'd be pretty pissed. If they tried to take your guns, you'd probably start loading.
Hell, even Roman politicians had things to say about the ways a straight democracy can go bad. Bread and circuses.
Switzerland is not a part of European Union. And Germans were paying for Greek debts more than once.
(US is no exception; banks bailouts were paying for someone else's debts. The difference is most banks returned bailout money when things got better, though; good luck with that in the case of Greece).
There are legitimate ways to be critical of the UK’s EU membership as a long-term economic strategy. Reasoning through these criticisms carefully and cogently might be possible. And afterward, it’s not out of the question that someone could come up with a plan for how the UK could leave the EU in order to bring real growth and prosperity to the UK (and maybe the EU also?).
But that’s not what happened, and it’s not what’s going to happen. The Brexit vote happened with no plan for how the follow-through would work. It’s as if my family were to vote against the current foundation of my house, and then start ripping it up without first voting for a new foundation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadIf the UK does not leave the EU despite the will of the people, it will be the clearest message ever sent to everybody in Europe that they have basically lost the right to decide for themselves. That would probably not be without consequences.
Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave. That's not democracy that's just a tantrum.
In the United Kingdom parliament is dissolved every five years or sooner and elections are called to elect a new parliament.
Representative democracy is manifestly a right of the British people.
British citizens voted for their MPs, and if those MPs drag their feet on brexit, it is still a representation of the will of the people.
I think protecting the minority is important. I don't think something magically happens at 50.01% that makes that idea suddenly better than at 49.99%. The majority does NOT have the right to abuse the minority.
Democracy is great up until the point people dont vote the way you want them to vote.
It seems like they are in a number of states, on a number of issues, should we not desire a correct government over a popular one? Whether it's a majority that is wrong, or a representative class that is wrong, or a despot that is wrong, should we not have a voice to point out what we see as errors?
How do you define "wrong"?
You are obviously free to point out what you see as errors, but if you can't convince the majority, then what else is there to do?
When the majority decides that a minority should be mistreated, is that justice?
If the majority is misinformed by a powerful minority, will they not act against even their own best interests?
When the majority is short sighted, is disgracing the future the proper thing to do?
An ideal government is one that uses the truth to optimize according to some anthropic value system in the short and long terms. These do not arise from popular opinion, just as they don't form under the force of authority. Unfortunately, they are probably impossible to form at all.
People are selfish, stupid, and short-sighted and that doesn't go away once you reach any particular number or proportion of them making the decisions.
Democracy can (arguably) produce morally just decisions, but that isn't the same as producing factually correct ones.
Where is the truth between legalizing marijuana or not? Where is the truth between allowing somebody who is 20 years and 11 month old to drink or not? And I'm not even getting near real controversial topics such as gay marriage, abortion, polygamy and co.
There is no truth, just what the majority considers "good" or "desirable" at a given point in time.
And yes, sometimes we realize decades later that it was dumb. or rather, we like to judge with our eyes what people did 100 years before us and want to pretend we would have known better, that they were just morons.
We could define what our values are, decide if it is just to use potentially violent force to enforce laws that forbid substances that have detrimental health effects and flesh out what we mean by a detrimental effect, what the threshold of that is for different age groups -- these are things that are pretty anthropic, can't be decided otherwise.
We can then collect facts about which substances fit into our decided categories, and avoid making mistakes that fail to serve the values we chose.
If (because the fact process, being human, is imperfect) we find new values for facts, we can adjust policy and actions without readjusting the values side of decision making.
People legislate taste, they ignore big problems because "we've always done it like that", etc. This is plain to see. Nobody benefits when a state fails to live up to its purpose, provides both insufficient freedoms with insufficient controls.
Sure, an unfeeling despotic utilitarian robot would be an immoral form of government -- we have to take into account anthropic value systems (which will not converge, and require consensus-making in some form) -- but to accept there's no one true system of mores doesn't require assuming there's no single truth.
I was referring to the tendencies of some to cry out that democracy doesn't work when people don't vote the way they want them to, or to portray the other side as "undecuated or "racist" just because your side lost.
>Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave. That's not democracy that's just a tantrum.
You're being just as prejudiced as you claim he is if you don't even bother to acknowledge what he said and merely assume its do to his prejudice.
The referendum wasn't a choice between two courses of action. It was a choice between carrying on as normal, and "leaving the EU", where the specifics were undefined. Nobody could educate themselves as to the ramifications, because it wasn't - and still isn't - possible to know what they would be.
Leave voters might claim they voted for restored sovereignty, or reduced immigration, or not sending the EU £350MM/week, but they didn't, because none of those things were on the ballot.
There is an article in the constitution to allow a country to leave the union, so it is a right the people have.
Also, maybe old people should not be allowed to vote since they're gonna die soon anyway, what do they care?
Also, maybe only land owners should be allowed to vote, after all, if you don't own land maybe you're not really part of the destiny of the country.
Also, maybe you should have been a citizen for at least 10 years to be allowed to vote, to make sure you've had time to integrate the values of your new country.
How about we stop assuming that just because things didn't play out the way the elites wanted them to it must mean that people are stupid, racist, uneducated? I can only imagine the reactions if the "remain" had won, and we were now talking about the UK leaving anyway.
Structural economic issues that span a whole continent happen regardless of whether it's in a single coordinated economic bloc or not.
Those truism by themselves are completely meaningless unless you can show that what they're missing out on is better than a unified free market.
That's not my job - that's what civil servants and politicians are paid considerable amounts of money to determine.
Just like a marketing director doesn't expect to have to present the dev team with the architecture of the latest web app; he or she states the requirements, we execute it.
If a customer asks for you to build a building that will collapse, do you go for it or do you steadfastedly refuse your customer's idiocy.
By whom, exactly ?
Geniuses like Farage ? By The Sun and the Daily Mail?
But who knows; perhaps Mikhail read something in the Daily Mail.
In the United States, for example, we have a constitution that explicitly sets out rules for what a majority can't do. I don't think setting limits on what the majority can do means that people have 'lost the right to decide for themselves'.
If the British Parliament decides to drag their feet on brexit, that doesn't mean they are preventing people from deciding for themselves; the people decided to vote those MPs into office!
Are you talking about UK?
It would be easier for a new non Conservative party government to avoid Brexit as remaining can be part of the manifesto, which somewhat explains the urgency with which Labour MPs are trying to eject Corbyn, who can not be relied on to make remain a manifesto pledge.
Interesting times.
Because it seems to me like a bulk of these supposed Blair-ite 'Labour' supporters who want Corbyn out so they don't have to be sullied with ugly old words like "socialism" and "wealth redistribution" more properly belong in a party closer to Canada's Liberal Party, and it is Corbyn who is inheriting the mantle of the more traditional Labour constituency? Why have the Liberal Democrats not done better out of the cataclysm in British party politics over the last few months?
What nobody seems to have realised is that they didn't have anything close to a majority, so of course they weren't able to completely prevent the Tories from doing everything.
It's a shame IMO because what we clearly need right now is a Centralist party, especially with Labour going further and further to the Left under Corbyn.
Particularly university tuition fees, which was an important issue for much of the base.
(It's pretty sad what happened, and I think even now they get very little of the credit they deserve for their work in the previous parliament)
I wonder if they regret that now, as it would have provided a safety valve for Conservative -> UKIP defectors.
However since the last general election we have seem what the Conservative Party can do when they are unrestrained and this has helped the LibDems make their argument that they were actually a significant player in the coalition government. There is likely to be a decent recovery in the next general election for them, particularly if they go in with a remain manifesto pledge. I doubt it would be enough for a majority government but possibly enough to force a coalition, which would not guarantee a remain deal and could result in them being punished in the subsequent general election.
They got in by focusing on marginal seats. They lost most of those in the last election. They used to get protest votes, but those went to UKIP or the green party, or even labour or conservative.
> Because it seems to me like a bulk of these supposed Blair-ite 'Labour' supporters
It's the labour MPs who want to get rid of corbyn. He's very popular with the party members.
Citation needed
Thanks
It will make it too easy for people to vote according with their guts knowing that they will be saved.
It will also empower anti-EU parties in other countries in EU.
I think this is a big reason why Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US have such large backing. Not saying I agree with either of them -- but people feel ignored, and the establishment's response is to call them ignorant.
If we decide we need to "save the majority from themselves" is it still a democracy?
I'm not seeing it.
> It will make it too easy for people to vote according with their guts knowing that they will be saved.
Sure, it will make people take non-binding single-issue policy referenda issued as a sop to get people to vote for a party in a general election despite disagreement on an important point with the policies of that party far less seriously.
OTOH, the main effect that has is making such non-binding referenda far less likely to actually be offered in the first place, forcing people to seek to consider the whole of their policy preferences in general elections, resulting in governments that better represent the public will including the way it balances priorities between preferences in different policy areas.
> It will also empower anti-EU parties in other countries in EU.
So far, I've heard people argue that: (1) Britain voting to stay in the EU, given the special deals it already had on top of the special deals that were negotiated condition on the Brexit vote failing would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU, (2) Britain voting to leave the EU, independently of what happens later, would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU, (3) Britain actually leaving the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU, (4) Britain not actually leaving the EU after voting for Brexit would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU, (5) Britain getting favorable treatment in negotiations for post-EU status if it left the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU, (6) Britain getting unfavorable treatment in negotiations for post-EU status if it left the EU would empower anti-EU parties in other countries in the EU
I tend to discount such claims when presented without a credible argument to how they would do so compared to alterantives...
I would also regard the morning after regrets with a grain of salt. The political establishment (Labour & Tories) were against leaving. The politically influential corporate sectors (especially banking) were against leaving. The media was generally against leaving. The leavers are pretty underrepresented, it would seem. It's not surprising that leave voters seem to have vanished, or changed their minds.
Some may have, but even if there was a massive swing (say from 52% to 45%), the un-regretful leave voters are half the country. They won the vote. How can they trust democracy if they are "robbed" of their democratic right.
Not leaving will create a mockery of democratic process. It would delegitimize the EU, & even the British polity.
There's a reason that most functional democracies have a constitution can only by changed by meeting a higher bar than simple majority: it's too important, too sensitive, and too irreversible to be decided without something closer to consensus. I would argue that that logic applies here.
They can often be useful to consider, certainly, where they make sense.
> If that sort of semantic point makes that impossible to realize, then I don't really know what to tell you.
You could just recognize that sometimes the trick of reversing values doesn't result in a parallel (or even coherent) scenario to consider, because not every situation is symmetric in the way required for that to be a meaningful thing to consider.
http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/remembering-what-ni...
"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it"
Obviously the side that wins isn't going to be in favour of having another go.
Suppose you have $1000 and say "I've spent most of my money on drugs and hookers". Many people feel that this means that not much money is left, and it would be kind of misleading if you've spent $501 on drugs and hookers and have a generous $499 left.
I think I remember vaguely that you can use ultrafilter logics for getting a better semantics for 'most'. Or, some sort of thresholds as a poor man's solution, I guess.
Going forward, the UK should look at the referendum as a very weak signal by the public. There will be no "revolution" and definitely not a violent one if the government looks at the effort and outcome of leaving the EU but ultimately decides to remain.
Staying in EU is a horrible idea as far as Britian is concerned. If they don't have to pay to corrupt government officials of poorer countries in the EU, it is already a win (for citizens of those countries and for Britain)... but I can see why the corrupt unelected EU officials don't want them (or anyone else for that matter) to leave.
Can you give any proof of those corruptions?
And, by the way, calling them unelected is a good way of showing a lack of knowledge about the EU
It also wasn't decided that the referendum was binding.
There is obviously a strong disagreement on the matter. The humane thing to do would be to allow for further devolution, allowing Northern Ireland and Scotland to become independent and join the EU. London would be tricker, but Europe has had free cities before and could again. Or, perhaps Edinburgh could absorb the people that want to be part of the EU.
Any polity where issues split 50/50 (and America is currently in this situation in most cases) is going to be inherently tyrannical.
Secession is the humane way forward.
In the general case I agree, but I think this vote is a bit different in that it was arguably about reverting another constitutional change - the ongoing abdication of many functions to an EU government with much less democratic accountability to the UK public - which was never legitimized by popular vote at all.
The last relevant UK referendum was the 1975 one on "European Communities membership", and at the time the EEC was pitched to voters as a purely economic arrangement, with none of the aspects of supranational government later introduced by Maastricht. That economic phrasing found just over two-thirds support, while polling conducted around the same time on political integration found (IIRC) just under one-third support.
As far as I know, every time European political integration has been put to a referendum, it's been rejected. The "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe" was rejected by the French and Dutch populations in 2005; after that it was temporarily shelved then sneakily repackaged as the "Treaty of Lisbon" in 2008. Ireland held a referendum and rejected that too, but since that was the wrong answer it was forced to hold it again and voters were basically told to vote yes or else.
So the situation is not at all like the formation of something like the USA, where state populations explicitly agreed to political union. Political union is happening against the wishes of national populations. I don't think national leaders, even democratically elected ones, have the right to take power away from the populations they represent, any more than they have the right to say "hey, guess what, we're not going to have any more elections, we'll just stay in office forever".
edit: Most, as Johnson remains as Foreign Secretary.
I should note that following this has been my first real exposure to some of the finer points of British politics.
The Brexit was a piece of political propaganda, sold as something easy and hugely beneficial. When it becomes clear that the promises will not come to fruition, few will want to pay an even greater price. The Brexit leaders have all quit their jobs, there's no more leadership pushing this forward.
I mean look at the 2 main people who were driving the Leave campaign - they both resigned! When your leadership doesn't even want to see the Brexit through, you know you have a problem.
The public voted for them to Leave. So they left.
In another ten years this vote probably would have gone the other way.
In fact I'm really confused as to who such a complex geopolitical strategy decision was put in front of the citizenship in the first place. "What if they say yes?" Is the sort of question your government should be able to answer before asking the question. If they can't then maybe they shouldn't be making geopolitical strategy decisions either.
If you want a revolution, that's the one you need. Elect some grown ups instead. Then send us your all of the old leaders because they're still doing better job than mine.
Maybe, but you're assuming that the specific young people who are currently strongly pro-EU wouldn't change their minds as they got older.
I used to be strongly pro-EU (and still love the idea of it in many ways); it's only in the last decade that my opinion's shifted.
The vote is a reflection of discontent but it has no political articulation whatsoever. No plan. No actual idea on how to run a successful government that can ameliorate the issues at hand.
Votes of discontent tend to generate a lot of trouble on the short term, but give a little time and we're back to business as usual because, hey, it turns out actually governing is a hell of a lot more complicated than complaining about things and it turns out that bureaucrats who have been at it for a few decades are actually not the dimwits that are portrayed in the media.
I have very little sympathy for the established political parties, but it's very clear that there is very little in the way of actual plans and solutions outside of the status quo either.
Heck my impression is that this only became an issue more because of a strange interplay of Tory outliers with with a very small but loud group of brexiteers and UKIP politicians who preferred to misinform and pander to a voting bloc rather than having to deal with real, difficult problems.
Note, I'm very much pro-EU and anti-Brexit. But I believe it would be madness to ignore the referendum.
The most pragmatic solution would be one that let's everybody keep their face. Find a solution that de facto leaves the status quo unchanged, but de jure let's Britain leave. Maybe formalize the special statuses Switzerland and Norway have, and give Britain an associate status. Or let Britain leave and change the statutes to allow England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland to become individual members. Or or or... I'll leave it to the EU bureaucrats to figure out.
This was a big part of the reason for the Brexit vote. If that vote gets ignored, there's going to be trouble. I don't know what form it will take, but there will be trouble.
But even in a representative democracy, there's still this line out of history: "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". If the EU (or the US Congress) makes decisions that alienate too large a chunk of their citizens, then you wind up with a government in power that does not have the consent of the governed, and which therefore is viewed as illegitimate by a large chunk of the people. And then comes trouble, in one form or another.
There are compelling (or at least popular) arguments both from the left and the right against the EU in it's current form, but for some kind of international European organization. It's not too far fetched that (due to various crises like in Greece, the Brexit, etc.) the EU would break apart at some point. In that case, due to necessity and realpolitik, I don't believe it would leave a void, but would be replaced by a leaner organization, more individual multilateral treaties etc., and hopefully something more democratic. And as I said this idea is popular with the left and the right - I believe this restructuring could be positive and utopian, or regressive and apocalyptic (you choose which side is which).
Actual, people-dying-in-the-streets riots.
Anything is possible, but not everything is politically tennable.
How so? Theresa May has just formed the most right-wing, anti-working-class Cabinet in living memory, while Labour are busy tearing themselves apart. It doesn't seem the establishment is waking up in any meaningful way.
And if the real root cause is immigration? If the answer is so-obviously-not immigration policies, then what? Nobody seems to have an answer.
In every modern Western society - it seems Liberals/Leftists are always so fearful of losing the minority votes that they'll prefer no answer over one that could offend their voting base.
So, the root cause lies there. Until we somehow change this, money and corporate interests will continue to rule, at the expense of the people. The longer it goes on without more politicians addressing this, the more people will fall into the right wing fascist trap of blaming immigrants.
The UK cannot afford to not have free trade with the EU, and a stipulation of free trade is to allow open immigration and travel. The main reason that many people even voted for leaving was to stop the EU immigration! So, just based on this 1 thing, it doesn't seem like it has a chance of happening.
Additionally, there is the whole thing about sending money to the NHS instead of the EU that turned out to be false.
And, many Leave voters actually didn't even want it to pass, they were just doing it as a protest vote.
So, half the stuff the Leave campaign said has turned out to be a lie and some portion (not really sure how big) of the voters didn't even want it to pass. Expecting the Brexit to happen just seems completely crazy.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/21/may-gets-hol...
https://infacts.org/mythbusts/uk-wont-single-market-without-...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-wa...
The EU does not allow member countries to negotiate trade deals privately. All trade deals must go through the EU, which means any trade deals applies to all EU countries. It's an all or nothing thing. So even though Poland might want to allow free trade with the UK, they simply cannot do it. It must go through the EU, and the EU has said very strongly that they will not allow it. Free trade means free movement. No exceptions.
Once you understand that, the Brexit is just even stupid to consider.
At this point, the mass immigration is actually unstoppable. It could be managed when people got information about foreign countries from state-controlled (or aligned) media.
Now, when everybody and his dog are on the Internet, they can see what life in other countries actually is. And want a piece of it. And unless you bring machine guns (and maybe even then), you can't stop hundreds of millions of migrants who just want better life for themselves and their children.
And _this_ would be the moment when everyone will go nuts and anti-establishment and vote for UKIP.
The number of people who would be happy with parliament dragging their feet would be pretty close to the number of people upset with them. I don't think that will cause some massive shift in voting patterns.
And a simple majority can take away something that 49% of the population thinks is important. This is where your democratic utopia goes to die.
Open voting is a blame shedding trick. If 'everybody' agreed with your bad idea then it's not your fault when the consequences happen. Even if you were the one who put it in people's heads in the first place.
As a citizen of a country in crisis, who to blame might be of some importance, and organized media will certainly get you fixated on that aspect. But maybe the fact that there's a crisis is a little more important, and you should try to avoid then in the first place instead of just having an audit trail.
It is a common complaint that Europeans have no grasp of how goddamned big the US is, and make "helpful" suggestions to fix our problems with solutions that simply don't scale with geography. It's a big place full of people who either came here to be left alone, or were kicked out of Europe because they wouldn't leave other people alone. People sort themselves and there's plenty of physical and emotional space for echo chambers if you want them.
Neighboring states are not as different as neighboring countries, but we have 50 of them and among those you can find two that completely disagree with each other on nearly every topic you can imagine. If Europe voted that Switzerland should pay off the Spanish national debt, I bet you'd be pretty pissed. If they tried to take your guns, you'd probably start loading.
Hell, even Roman politicians had things to say about the ways a straight democracy can go bad. Bread and circuses.
(US is no exception; banks bailouts were paying for someone else's debts. The difference is most banks returned bailout money when things got better, though; good luck with that in the case of Greece).
But that’s not what happened, and it’s not what’s going to happen. The Brexit vote happened with no plan for how the follow-through would work. It’s as if my family were to vote against the current foundation of my house, and then start ripping it up without first voting for a new foundation.