Brexit has already damaged a lot of things as well as waste over 2 years of politicans' time, distracting them from working on things the UK needs handling. Leave voters have a lot of dirt on their hands.
A referendum is a survey of the population. Most rigorous surveys, never ask a simple Yes/No question to the final objective. A survey questionnaire has a detailed set of questions which considers various aspects of the final decision. Ideally, these questions should be discussed and ratified within the parliament. Then, based on answers to these questions - you can have a next round of discussion in the parliament. You can decide to make your final decision for Yes or a No.
It's almost as if we are intentionally ignoring all these years of progress made by science to solicit public opinion.
Please note, I'm not talking about Brexit but the act of indulging into a referendum in general.
As someone who has actually interacted with leave voters it most certainly didn't mean that for everyone. Taking such an extreme position and then claiming that it's what the people voted for is farcical.
The Friday in me wants to reply with "You need to vote on the bill, to know what's in it."
But the actual approach to withdrawal was always going to be incredibly complex. There are obvious, valid reasons for staying in the EU and obvious, valid reasons for leaving the EU. Almost any headline coming from Europe is going to be anti-Brexit; almost every headline about the issue is going to be highly biased.
The pro-Brexit arguments assume that the UK was getting less than it was giving to the EU - sacrificing money, border sovereignty, financial sovereignty for economic incentives that the UK is likely able to negotiate for anyway. The anti-Brexit arguments coming from outside of the UK are mostly impassioned moral attacks insulting anti-globalists, or fearmongering.
The EU has been on a slow decline, and the Brexit may hasten that decline, along with renewed trade pressure from the US and China. Britain holds more cards than every other EU nation besides Germany. It doesn't make sense for them to lend their weight to non-contributing economies.
I'm personally hoping that Brexit, combined with a lot of the more nationalist governments that are beginning to pop up across Europe, is going to lead to the EU moving away from the combined European government it's been angling towards and back to the combined economic network it originally began as.
The UK can only deny entrance to EU citizens under very limited circumstances, on pain of being dragged through EU courts. Does that sound like sovereignty to you?
That's a good point. In fact, you can't cross borders in the Schengen area as an EU citizen unless you show some proof that you are, indeed, an EU citizen - for example, a passport.
Although other documentation, like national ID cards will do, they can cause trouble. I don't know if it's official policy or what, but I travel by land and sea around the EU very often and I've had problems with over-zealous border officials many a time.
For instance, I've been delayed twice at the French border from and to the UK by French officials, who pretended they couldn't determine whether my Greek national ID card is valid (allegedly, because it doesn't have an expiration date; Greek ID cards currently don't) and kept repeating that "if you had a passport, things would have been so much easier, now we have to call a specialist to examine this document" wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
[The funny thing is, I was travelling with my cousin's ID card by mistake, but they didn't realise because we look very much like each other- "specialist" guy, my arse]
So while officially you can travel without a passport in the Schengen area, in practice, you better have some ID.
Ahh, French customs officials. The epitome of kindness and courtesy.
I agree that you never should travel without ID, but not accepting a Greek id just borders on ridiculous.
I very rarely had to show ID on inter-Schengen flights. But I'm certainly not stupid enough to not carry one.
The only European country where I actually carry my passport is England. Since you can't use the automated gates with an ID. But I never had trouble with my (Swiss) id.
but the funny man with the silly hair said we did! he said it on TV and the daily mail said it as well!! i trust him as he says we have a plan, plus one time he got stuck on a zipwire - that's so relatable! what a nice down to earth guy.
Ahh, you mean the dude who promised 350million Euros a week for the NHS?
The funny man who was caught in multiple lies, when he was Brussels correspondent for The Telegraph? So brazen and repeated that not even The Telegraph could keep him on?
Funny man, indeed. Alas with grave consequences for the whole country.
I always thought the "general" idea with the EU was to team up to have a larger market to make deals with other large markets like the US and China.... not measure participation / contribution rates internally.
It seems short cited to simply measure internal numbers and then face larger markets as a group of smaller fragmented markets....
I think it was a smart and good idea, and Germany has really leveraged it well, but they're (maybe France?) the only ones that are going to be able to. The EU is in many ways a CDO that Germany has been trying to sell the world.
But the referendum was just approving that some exit should happen and Parliament should work toward it, with no commitment to any particular approach.
We didn't need a referendum to enact the minimum wage, legalise gay marriage, or many other key positive shifts for British society, and nor have we had referenda for populist ideas like becoming a republic, removing the House of Lords, or reintroducing the death penalty.. so why we got a referendum for such a poorly understood and complex concept as EU membership is beyond me.
So you think people shouldn't have a say on whether the minimum wage should be raised or on whether gays should be able to marry. Because, obviously, whatever the elite chooses is going to be okay for you, right?
I'm guessing they're not the elected representatives of the people, right? Otherwise, there wouldn't be a problem with them making the decisions they've been elected to make.
The people get a say by voting at general elections for parties that present a broad balance of deeply considered positions that reflect their views. This is why we have parties in Parliament and not just a giant bundle of one-issue politicians.
People felt strongly enough about progressive politics and the policies that went with that to vote Labour numerous times in the 90s and 2000s.
Anyone who felt so strongly about throwing the country into a tailspin by exiting the EU could have quite easily voted for the UK Independence Party in at least 2 general elections.
It’s a question of form, generally referendums work by getting the people to accept a text instead of the Parliament. People can argue on what the consequences of the text will be, but not what’s in it. In the UK they voted on an abstract question.
California and other places have shown referendums can be be a mess. Sometimes you do need people in government who can at least know some of the lay of the land / consequences making decisions rather than the population voting on broad concepts that may not even get them what they want.
I don't think it's fair to blame leave voters, the whole thing was fundamentally flawed. While it was obvious what remain meant, "leave" was never actually defined, and so open to interpretation.
Forgetting for a second the whole thing was just a ploy to win over UKIP voters, it is ridiculous that this far down the line leave still hasn't been defined. A small part of me thinks that maybe May is playing the 4D chess long-con, and deliberately being as incompetent as possible to drive us to a last-minute remain outcome. Ockham's Razor says otherwise though
They actively chose something that you say was poorly defined but which was widely understood to be a very dramatic and potentially dangerous shift for the country. If you can't blame them for picking a poorly defined option out of some jingoistic notion of what the UK should be, what can you blame anyone for?
You could probably blame the people responsible for the referendum in the first place, trying to use the notion of a Brexit vote as some sort of political brinkmanship game against the EU and then running for the hills when people didn't vote the way they expected them to.
I think one can. Britain is a democracy. An old one. If one votes for a dramatic departure from the status quo without asking how it will be executed, that's a failure of civic duty. Voters own a share in their democracies' successes and failures; economically, politically and morally.
Well, one might blame the EU for being so bad that a majority of the voters preferred the poorly-defined, widely-understood-to-be-potentially-dangerous option rather than remain.
As an aside, I think terms like 'jingoistic' aren't helpful to discussion. I've never quite understood why it's jingoistic to prefer UK sovereignty but not jingoistic to prefer European sovereignty.
"Jingoistic" has a specific connotation of aggressive patriotism. The typical Remainer's level of support for the EU rarely approaches such a level, and tends to be based upon seeing membership of the EU as a benefit to their country (in a similar way to being a member of the UN, say) rather than a replacement for it.
The average person could not possibly make an informed decision in this referendum, because it affects every area of every part of the brittish society.
On top of that it has been proven that the leave campaign lied and broke the law regarding funding.
There was a big promise of 350 Million a week to the NHS. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to vote for. Unfortunately it was backtracked on within hours of the result. Is that really democracy?
You can blame the Murdoch press (and others) in the UK for constantly pushing the narrative that the EU is a corrupt bureaucracy making absurd laws and stealing your rights and money.
As a well educated, highly paid remaincuck (seriously, are you 12?), maybe I can enlighten you.
Something like 40% of our trade is with the EU. Having an open trading environment, especially for the things we do really, really well, is what helps keep the UK as one of the richest countries in the world.
The majority of the UK runs at a loss. We have a significant number of high earners who come from abroad, many (most?) from the EU who contribute significantly to our tax base and productivity.
The majority of the laws we've enacted, because the EU required us to, would have been enacted anyway. We're unlikely to change most of them materially post-Brexit. There are important exceptions, of course. We'll probably be a lot less nice to our rural community post-Brexit, for example, as they've received a lot of funding on the coattails of French farming unions courtesy of the CAP.
The one big exception is with free movement of people. This was a big driver of Brexit and, although it's had a small, negative economic effect; it's had a huge negative political effect. But almost entirely of the "they're taking our jobs" variety. Something that doesn't really impact high earners (other than tradesmen are now cheaper and better).
Now, I don't happen to think that Brexit will be a disaster. I just think it was stupid. It's dumping our economy back a decade and it'll take a decade to get back to where we are now. Also, as it's likely to royally stuff up our financial services and biopharmacy industries, we might end up with a more balanced economy by accident.
I also happen to believe that, long term, the UK being out of the EU is probably the right thing to do. We've been a brake on what they've wanted to do for a generation. We're just not culturally aligned. But Brexit was a bad idea, badly executed.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and trollish comments to HN? Your substantive comments are great, but a lot of your other ones are obviously bannable stuff. We're trying to prevent HN from sinking completely into internet slime, and it's really bad when users who are capable of being good contributors keep pushing it in there.
It's nice to postulate that the PM and cabinet are some cabal of highly intelligent villains who decided it was simpler to just leave the EU than fix the NHS, but it doesn't line up with reality. Nobody expected the vote to go the way it did, not the guy who called it and especially not the guy who ran the leave campaign.
I and many others were not so surprised. The polls were wrong because privately many people are unhappy with the EU, and that wasn't reflected in public opinion polls.
If nothing else, the result showed a major disconnect between the policies of the main parties and the wishes of the electorate, and it will be good to have that democratic deficit rectified.
An alternative viewpoint would be that it's entirely the fault of the politicians. Firstly, for not doing any preparation for the consequences of a leave vote prior to the referendum. Secondly for spending over two years prevaricating over implementing the result, leading to a lot of unnecessary uncertainty. Time to stop dithering, grasp the nettle firmly, and get on with it.
I don't think blaming voters for their democratically expressed views is fair.
The referendum asked the populace if they wanted to remain or leave the EU. And the politicians got the answer, and it wasn't particularly surprising, even if they weren't personally happy with it. They are supposed to represent the electorate democratically, after all.
Let's face it though. British science was already headed in a downward spiral before Brexit. Decreasing student positions, postdoc positions, selling off shares in research partnerships and observatories, and more. EU consortia were already planning for the UK to be an unreliable partner.
Plus, anyone who was capable of applying for research jobs on an international level found the salaries quite pathetic.
I guess about 51% of the population didn't see this coming or they didn't care. I remember the propaganda going on around that time... The best scene was a politician rebutting a scientist because "what does an expert know about anything" especially economics.
I tend to agree with Aristides or Socrates (rip by vote) that people are idiots and democracy can't work without education.. atleast about the issue that is being voted.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadA referendum is a survey of the population. Most rigorous surveys, never ask a simple Yes/No question to the final objective. A survey questionnaire has a detailed set of questions which considers various aspects of the final decision. Ideally, these questions should be discussed and ratified within the parliament. Then, based on answers to these questions - you can have a next round of discussion in the parliament. You can decide to make your final decision for Yes or a No.
It's almost as if we are intentionally ignoring all these years of progress made by science to solicit public opinion.
Please note, I'm not talking about Brexit but the act of indulging into a referendum in general.
- There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside. (David Davis, 10 October 2016)
- The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want. (Michael Gove, 9 April 2016)
- Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards (John Redwood, July 17 2016)
- The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history (Liam Fox, 20 July 2017)
- Let’s give our NHS the £350m the EU takes every week.
- A vote for leave will be a vote to cut immigration.
But the actual approach to withdrawal was always going to be incredibly complex. There are obvious, valid reasons for staying in the EU and obvious, valid reasons for leaving the EU. Almost any headline coming from Europe is going to be anti-Brexit; almost every headline about the issue is going to be highly biased.
The pro-Brexit arguments assume that the UK was getting less than it was giving to the EU - sacrificing money, border sovereignty, financial sovereignty for economic incentives that the UK is likely able to negotiate for anyway. The anti-Brexit arguments coming from outside of the UK are mostly impassioned moral attacks insulting anti-globalists, or fearmongering.
The EU has been on a slow decline, and the Brexit may hasten that decline, along with renewed trade pressure from the US and China. Britain holds more cards than every other EU nation besides Germany. It doesn't make sense for them to lend their weight to non-contributing economies.
But here's the rub. The UK never gave that up.
England (and by default Ireland) are not in the Schengen accord[1].
You cannot get into the UK from Europe without passing border control and showing your passport (Id for some countries).
Even if you stretch that argument (our borders are porous and any EU citizen can move the UK to work) that argument still doesn't wash.
You have to be documented and all.
The UK never gave up control of their borders.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
That's what agreements and accords are for.
Or are you suggesting that UK unilaterally grants rights, which they don't receive in return?
Ironically, the UK was one of the most open and welcoming countries, when ex eastern European countries were granted the freedom of movement.
They took a lot of opt outs, from the Euro to parts of judical agreements and then some from the EU.
They could also have opted out to some extent. But probably the lure of cheap employees sounded just too good to be true.
'Sovereignty is the full right and power of a governing body over itself, without any interference from outside sources or bodies.'
Sounds to me like a pretty conclusive definition.
Although other documentation, like national ID cards will do, they can cause trouble. I don't know if it's official policy or what, but I travel by land and sea around the EU very often and I've had problems with over-zealous border officials many a time.
For instance, I've been delayed twice at the French border from and to the UK by French officials, who pretended they couldn't determine whether my Greek national ID card is valid (allegedly, because it doesn't have an expiration date; Greek ID cards currently don't) and kept repeating that "if you had a passport, things would have been so much easier, now we have to call a specialist to examine this document" wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
[The funny thing is, I was travelling with my cousin's ID card by mistake, but they didn't realise because we look very much like each other- "specialist" guy, my arse]
So while officially you can travel without a passport in the Schengen area, in practice, you better have some ID.
I agree that you never should travel without ID, but not accepting a Greek id just borders on ridiculous.
I very rarely had to show ID on inter-Schengen flights. But I'm certainly not stupid enough to not carry one.
The only European country where I actually carry my passport is England. Since you can't use the automated gates with an ID. But I never had trouble with my (Swiss) id.
but the funny man with the silly hair said we did! he said it on TV and the daily mail said it as well!! i trust him as he says we have a plan, plus one time he got stuck on a zipwire - that's so relatable! what a nice down to earth guy.
The funny man who was caught in multiple lies, when he was Brussels correspondent for The Telegraph? So brazen and repeated that not even The Telegraph could keep him on?
Funny man, indeed. Alas with grave consequences for the whole country.
It seems short cited to simply measure internal numbers and then face larger markets as a group of smaller fragmented markets....
We didn't need a referendum to enact the minimum wage, legalise gay marriage, or many other key positive shifts for British society, and nor have we had referenda for populist ideas like becoming a republic, removing the House of Lords, or reintroducing the death penalty.. so why we got a referendum for such a poorly understood and complex concept as EU membership is beyond me.
I'm guessing they're not the elected representatives of the people, right? Otherwise, there wouldn't be a problem with them making the decisions they've been elected to make.
People felt strongly enough about progressive politics and the policies that went with that to vote Labour numerous times in the 90s and 2000s.
Anyone who felt so strongly about throwing the country into a tailspin by exiting the EU could have quite easily voted for the UK Independence Party in at least 2 general elections.
Forgetting for a second the whole thing was just a ploy to win over UKIP voters, it is ridiculous that this far down the line leave still hasn't been defined. A small part of me thinks that maybe May is playing the 4D chess long-con, and deliberately being as incompetent as possible to drive us to a last-minute remain outcome. Ockham's Razor says otherwise though
They actively chose something that you say was poorly defined but which was widely understood to be a very dramatic and potentially dangerous shift for the country. If you can't blame them for picking a poorly defined option out of some jingoistic notion of what the UK should be, what can you blame anyone for?
Like that David Cameron clown, for instance.
How's the view up there on that high horse?
I think one can. Britain is a democracy. An old one. If one votes for a dramatic departure from the status quo without asking how it will be executed, that's a failure of civic duty. Voters own a share in their democracies' successes and failures; economically, politically and morally.
As an aside, I think terms like 'jingoistic' aren't helpful to discussion. I've never quite understood why it's jingoistic to prefer UK sovereignty but not jingoistic to prefer European sovereignty.
On top of that it has been proven that the leave campaign lied and broke the law regarding funding.
I mean, can you believe this?
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1800/1*piGY6KAwYsDSweClC...
https://s-i.huffpost.com/gen/1521502/thumbs/o-SUN-FRONT-PAGE...
Something like 40% of our trade is with the EU. Having an open trading environment, especially for the things we do really, really well, is what helps keep the UK as one of the richest countries in the world.
The majority of the UK runs at a loss. We have a significant number of high earners who come from abroad, many (most?) from the EU who contribute significantly to our tax base and productivity.
The majority of the laws we've enacted, because the EU required us to, would have been enacted anyway. We're unlikely to change most of them materially post-Brexit. There are important exceptions, of course. We'll probably be a lot less nice to our rural community post-Brexit, for example, as they've received a lot of funding on the coattails of French farming unions courtesy of the CAP.
The one big exception is with free movement of people. This was a big driver of Brexit and, although it's had a small, negative economic effect; it's had a huge negative political effect. But almost entirely of the "they're taking our jobs" variety. Something that doesn't really impact high earners (other than tradesmen are now cheaper and better).
Now, I don't happen to think that Brexit will be a disaster. I just think it was stupid. It's dumping our economy back a decade and it'll take a decade to get back to where we are now. Also, as it's likely to royally stuff up our financial services and biopharmacy industries, we might end up with a more balanced economy by accident.
I also happen to believe that, long term, the UK being out of the EU is probably the right thing to do. We've been a brake on what they've wanted to do for a generation. We're just not culturally aligned. But Brexit was a bad idea, badly executed.
hope that helps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Its actually precisely the opposite.
Berxit is distracting the populace so that politicians don't have to fix things have been broken for quite some time.
Anybody with a battle bus clearly knows what they're doing.
If nothing else, the result showed a major disconnect between the policies of the main parties and the wishes of the electorate, and it will be good to have that democratic deficit rectified.
I don't think blaming voters for their democratically expressed views is fair. The referendum asked the populace if they wanted to remain or leave the EU. And the politicians got the answer, and it wasn't particularly surprising, even if they weren't personally happy with it. They are supposed to represent the electorate democratically, after all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVXekzwkz10
Plus, anyone who was capable of applying for research jobs on an international level found the salaries quite pathetic.
This whole progression was sadly, not unexpected.
I tend to agree with Aristides or Socrates (rip by vote) that people are idiots and democracy can't work without education.. atleast about the issue that is being voted.