The people voted stay in 1975. Brexiters are the ones who weren’t satisfied with democracy back then and continued fighting to leave. Shouldn’t stay have meant stay?
Oh wait, times changed. Turns out democracy is a process of constantly voting for things, not voting for it once then bowing to the result as unbreakable truth.
This popped up shortly after I logged off on Friday; I would respond in detail but 1) others have already done so and 2)…
Oh, don’t go! You’re winning! Honest!
On the “WW3” point, while the UK having a referendum stirred up Leave campaigns in some other EU countries which could have destabilised the EU further, ironically the fact that the UK will end up far worse off if it leaves has put a damper on them for the time being. It’s all very well to shoot the odd admiral pour encourager les autres but you don’t normally see the admirals volunteering to shoot themselves.
But I thought “mob rule” was a bad thing? I’m sure various people on this messageboard have said something to that effect.
Running another referendum seems the worst of all possible worlds to me. Just as the “remain” voters haven’t been quiet since June '16, the leavers will not simply step back into line after another vote.
For it to be legitimate you’d have to have at least three options of “this deal” “no deal” or “remain”.
You then would need an overwhelming vote for one of these in order to even remotely placate the other groups.
What if you get 20% no deal 31% May’s deal and 49% remain? The problem remains unsolved. Even if it tips into >50% remain you have a sizable chunk of people who want to remain and the concerns over European control, overreach and loss of sovereignty will not disappear.
Plus, voting “remain” in such a referendum will not mean that the UK’s relationship with the EU will be unchanged. That would be very naive. You can bet that they will extract a massive political price and ensure that it will be impossible in the future for any country to decide unilaterally to leave. So a vote for “remain” will not mean setting everything back to pre-June 2016, we would be voting on a new remain deal and a full explanation will be needed of what that would mean. To not do so would mean that as soon as the EU take another step towards federalisation you could legitimately claim that the the terms of remain vote would be breached in many people’s eyes.
So good luck getting any sort of clarity from the EU over what the future is for the UK back inside the EU club.
I maintain that this was easily avoidable. The UK should have been much more disruptive and argumentative and refused to ratify one of the previous treaties and brought this to a head far sooner. A UK radically reforming from the inside is the best path but not one that any of the previous governments since 1975 ever had the balls to do. (witness a cowardly, lame-duck Gordon Brown sneaking in through the back door to sign the Lisbon Treaty in 2007)
If people are saying that it has now become practically impossible to leave the E.U. then the population concerned are quite right to be furious that they weren’t asked about it and any “remain” option in a new referendum should make clear that that will be exactly the future situation.
The things making leaving the EU so impossible aren’t really a matter of new treaties. Indeed, Great Britain was even able to keep their own currency! The big problem here is simply that if you have a massive, borderless trade union, over time people are going to take advantage of that. This leaves your economy integrally connected, to the point where leaving that trade union is going to suck a whole lot regardless of what you do.
It’s a bit like the internet. We never had a big treaty to join the internet, and we never voted on its existence, but any country that decided to unilaterally abandon the internet (for whatever reason) would suffer greatly.
But it should still be within the power of people to say whether they want to continue with that, sucking or not. The lack of openness of UK politicians and the allowance of the “boiling frog” approach of EU legislation is what has brought us to this point.
It is absolutely true to say that no-one ever asked the UK if this is the end point that they want.
The internet is just a communication tool, it passes no laws and wields no power by itself. The analogy fails because people do indeed choose to live without the internet and can certainly pick and choose which bits of it they access.
Indeed, which is fault of the U.k government, not the EU.
Well, the EU is fundamentally a rules-based organisation. That’s what makes it work. The Brexiters have sought to keep the advantages of membership without undertaking obligations.
I totally understand why the EU opposes that. Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? If every country gets to shuck the bits it dislikes, but keep what they like, pretty soon nothing of what they like remains.
It would be like a citizen declaring they shouldn’t have to pay tax or obey laws but still expect to enjoy the law and order and roads and schools run by the State.
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Yes, that is what I said.
I think the crux though is that the UK government has tended to be rather enthusiastic about the many reforms of the EU that it spearheads. It’s just there’s a culture in the UK that any politician who tries to talk about leading the EU is treated with suspicion, as if the UK leading the EU is inherently supporting the superstate bogeyman.
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People almost never get asked that question. Nobody ever asked me if a basically-universally-used video platform should run its recommendation feature in such a way as to unintentionally create a new generation of fascists - and nobody ever will, because most of the time, the effects of policy are not particularly predictable (and people don’t ask that kind of question about private corporations nearly as often as they need to). The unpredictable long-term consequences of policies is generally not on the ballot.
But that’s kind of a moot point, because in this case, the result “The UK will become deeply economically and politically enmeshed with Europe” was not just predictable, it was literally the point of joining the EU! Why else do it, if not for that reason? Because that’s what you get out of it! The treaty that would have to not be ratified is the one in 1975. Which the populace of Britain voted for.
Not in aggregate, though. We’re talking about changes on the level of a society or a country, and on the level of a society, you cannot choose to be without the internet. You personally don’t use Facebook? That’s nice, but it’s still more powerful than most government organizations, you still have to deal with peer pressure to confirm and get on facebook to reach your friends easier, et cetera. And at the same time, the internet has massive influence over society in aggregate. It’s absurd to claim otherwise - it effectively is mass media. Russian trolls used it to radicalize your neighbors and manufacture hatred for The Last Jedi (fucking really!). Even if you’ve never stepped foot online, (people on) the internet can doxx you, SWAT you, get you fired, or worse. It wields no power by itself, but that doesn’t really matter, because it is used as a tool in ways that absolutely contain “power”.
Yeah, it falls apart on the individual level, but that hardly invalidates the argument because that’s not what we’re talking about.
Even then, European political union was widely discussed in the seventies before the UK even joined, and the UK was instrumental in dusting off and relaunching the ‘European Union’ proposals of the fifties and sixties in the European Councils (predecessor of) shortly after the UK joined the EEC in 1971.
It was those issues that prompted the 1975 referendum in the first place. Otherwise, what was the referendum for?!
The claim that political union was something sprung on the Uk after we joined just isn’t true. We knew about it, encouraged it, fretted it, had a referendum on it, and led the charge under Thatcher.
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This is why such fundamental changes usually require more than a simple majority. I think the idea that the referendum was in some absolute sense “the democratic will of the people” is nonsense. Who decided on the fair way to conduct the referendum? It’s not as though you can turn on a dime and go back into Europe in 5 years if 51% now want to be part of Europe.
You could even make a pretty good case that people’s votes should be weighted according to their remaining life expectancy. Why should a 90-year-old have the same say in the next 30 years of the future of the U.K. as a 20-year-old?
Then the 1975 referendum was not the democratic will of the people either. That required no supermajority so the result of it is equally up for revision if the mood changes. It’s turtles all the way down.
That’s an idiotic idea. One person, one vote, each counting equally.
it seems oddly british to do so though.
Personally I’d be glad if the notion of referendums was banished to purgatory…
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Or maybe older voters should have more votes because they have more life experience…
Or maybe people with kids should have more votes, because they care more about the future…
Or maybe people with higher IQs should have more votes…
Or maybe more educated people should have more votes…
Or maybe rich people should have more votes because they stand to gain or lose more…
Or maybe poor people should have more votes, because they might suffer more hardship…
Or maybe women should have more votes to make up for past inequalities…
Or maybe…
Wait, I’ve got an idea! How about holding a referendum to decide who gets more votes? :D
So let’s set a more realistic challenge. Who decides if 16-18 year olds get to vote? That could easily have swung things toward Remain. Why should a 90-year-old get a vote in an irreversible change that will affect the next 30 years, and not a 17-year-old?
My point is that the argument that the Brexit vote represents the immutable and absolute democratic will of the British people is nonsense, and it’s just as self-serving on the part of Leavers as the push for another referendum by Remainers.
so why not a 15 year old? or a 14 year old? or a 13 year old? or a 12…you get the picture.
We have a set age of adulthood and it seems perfectly sensible to set the voting age there.
For Brexit, you think it should be 18, I think it should be 16. “We have a set age of adulthood” is nonsense - all you are doing is trying to make an arbitrary choice sound non-arbitrary.
There is no sense in which anyone can claim that we have established the absolute democratic will of the people. Wanting the 2016 referendum to be the final word is just as self-serving as pushing for another referendum. Of course I expect Leavers to disfavor another referendum. Just don’t claim your motivation is a noble fight for democracy.
Regardless, it would be wrong to lower the voting age for the hypothetical second referendum, as it would scream “fix!”.
Meanwhile, there’s a risk that the Government will be found in contempt of Parliament over its failure to unveil its entire legal advice over the stopgap.
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Seriously, what the hell? I thought you guys had sorted that out back in the 1640s?