You got to vote in regular elections. Not being asked your view directly is pretty much a sine qua non of representative democracy.
I was always aware in voting in 1975 that staying in would commit us to a process of development, in which the UK would have a voice on any every new proposal, on the same terms as every other member. If our existing methods of parliamentary scrutiny of what our elected government did in Europe weren’t sufficient, the remedy was always in our own hands - as is true of much of what was claimed to be “imposed” upon us.
It wasn’t on whether to join, it was on whether you approved Harold Wilson’s ‘renegotiated’ terms of membership, or not - the implication (and it was taken as such at the time) being that if you said ‘no’ then Britain would leave the Common Market.
That is utterly stupid. At a minimum there could have been multiple referendums.
- One to investigate with a neutral third party the estimated benefits and costs of leaving
- One to begin the process with the EU
- One after negotiating with the EU for what the bill is going to be. It’s obviously going to be a shit deal - the EU has every incentive to make this as punitive as they can possibly make it.
Well, not every incentive. The EU wants as much cash up front as it can get, but Britain has no obligation to pay any. Politicians being what they are, short-termism is likely to win out over long-term considerations and the EU Council will probably offer generous trade terms in exchange for a fat lump sum.
It is not the EU’s fault that reality means life outside the EU is harder than inside the EU. The EU isn’t being punitive - it’s made quite plain that the UK cannot simply pick and choose what bits of EU cooperation it likes and not have any obligations in return, not least because it if it did so, other countries would make similar requests, leading to a tragedy of the commons.
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Like I said, make it a shit deal. Before they passed laws against it (which broke up labor unions in most places), unions similarly had every incentive to make things as unpleasant for non-union workers as possible. For better or worse, the EU can’t be “fair” those countries that want to leave, especially rich ones like the UK. Either it teaches the UK a lesson here or the whole thing comes apart.
It actually makes more sense for the EU to basically embargo the UK as if they were North Korea. Not sure it’ll come to that, but it could.
Of course it’s stupid, and a measure of Cameron’s vacuity.
The possibility of submitting each stage to referendum would have depended on whether you take the view that one can decide to reverse a notification to withdraw under Article 50. The text clearly seems to me to be final: you’re out within two years of notification unless everyone else agrees to some alternative, and to base decisions on assumptions about whether they would is a dicey judgement as to their goodwill.
It would equally have been possible to say in the aftermath that, since we were legally and morally bound to the EU budget we had been party to deciding on, for the period up until the end of 2020, we should stay members until then, giving ourselves until mid-to-late 2018 to decide by debate and general election what sort of Brexit we wanted. But that too would assume there was a way of negotiating in advance of the formal notification, which was the first thing the EU squashed, though it might have made the headline financial costs of leaving less likely to stimulate Daily Mail/Express/Telegraph/Sun hysteria.
But all that is water under the bridge. It may be the biggest strategic error for a hundred years, but all we have now is damage limitation.
I voted remain, and I agree with Patrick that damage limitation is the order of the day. We read and see all the scare stories, demands from EU mandarins and scare stories from the left wing press but we have no real idea of what is actually happening; nor should we. To expect the British government to negotiate with all the cards face up is ridiculous; to conclude that the EU will not agree a compromise would go against decades of precedent.
I remain optimistic that the final settlement will be reasonable; we will hand over a lump of devalued Sterling and they will agree on the trade deals that we all need. I see today a report on the thousands of jobs in Germany that are also at stake - their government is hanging on by fingernails too, so they won’t want to rock that boat.