What will the UK do wrt Brexit?

And if you lose that vote, then a 3rd and 4th referendum. The public gets a free choice in the matter so long as it is the correct one.

Yep, the last time a British monarch overruled Parliament was over three hundred years ago, in 1708, over the Scottish Militia Bill.

A few years ago, the leader of the Green Party in Canada – which is as much of a fringe party here as it is in the US – wrote to the Queen to ask her to intervene in supposed election irregularities. The Queen replied with a nice letter saying, in effect, “Dear lady, I don’t think you understand how this works.” :smiley:

They thought they had a UK-acceptable proposal, i.e., having cake and eating it, as the Brexiteers had proposed. The agreement that has now been voted down twice is, in effect, the EU’s restatement of the bleedin’ obvious (,I’m no expert on the minutiae, but as a reasonably well-informed citizen, even I knew that’s what it was) - just gussied up a bit to try and help Mrs M get it past headbanging Brexiteers in her own party.

And that’s one of the governing miscalculations on her and her government’s part: that honouring the referendum result meant insisting on incompatible “red lines” to try to keep her party together.

The other was to call a general election having already set the clock ticking on withdrawal. Not only did it leave her in a much weaker position, dependent on the DUP, who don’t actually represent majority opinion even in their part of the country: it also rather revealed that the Brexit process per se wasn’t that salient with the voters, the swing away from the Tories being probably more to do with the side-effects of 10 years of restraining government expenditure. Neither major party really put it to the electorate that the process must involve hard choices rather than “just get on with it”. Likewise, there seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of the EU’s inevitable position, namely that it wasn’t down to them to resolve the unresolvable contradictions and help a self-lamed government over its self-created stile - rather, to expect them to come up with a workable proposition to meet the principles they outlined from the beginning.

That silly argument keeps being repeated.

*“It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen. “When you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”
*
Fortunately we are not in Looking Glass World (though I sometimes wonder).

In a democracy there is no objection to the public voting on the same question again after an interval of three years - especially since a) the consequences have become very much clearer to everyone, and b) the government has been unable to come up with an acceptable way of implementing the earlier vote.

I don’t think that this is the terrible conundrum that people are making it out to be. In many cases in family or business life, you have a goal that you have decided to reach, but disagree on the way to get there.

A married couple, for example, can decide that they want to move to a different part of the country. Then they have to worry about which party will get a job there first, if any or both, whether to wait until the oldest child graduates from school, whether to stay for a while to care for an elderly parent who is terminal, do we sell the house or rent it, etc. Maybe one party wants to move because they like the new location and the other party wants to move simply to get away from the old location.

Both parties can agree that they want to move, yet disagree on the specific way to get there or even the reason for moving. These difficulties do not mean that the decision to move itself is wrong and that they should scrap the whole idea.

Live debate in the House of Commons on ruling out no-deal:

This will continue for the next few hours until the vote.

This is a perfect example of how analogies to politics really don’t work.

Moreover, a lot of the time married couples do decide the original decision was wrong and scrap the whole idea.

No, the dumb decision would be to put your house on the market because “well we’re going to move, so”, having resolved not one of those questions.

Brexit is putting your house on the market, selling it, then moving into a dingy flat five hundred miles from your workplace, while fixating on the money you save on rent, ignoring that you no longer own your home, are now subject to the whims of a landlord, and you spend more than what you saved on your mortgage on commuting costs.

This is both accurate and unfair, isn’t it?

From this outsider’s POV, the current government, headed by Theresa May, has genuinely attempted to put together a framework for the UK to leave the EU that satisfies most parties’ objectives… Except for the issue of Northern Ireland. Right?

Which in turn, objectively speaking, boils down to four possibilities. Am I missing anything?

1 - The reintroduction of a “hard border” between NI and the RoI
Pros: It’s exactly what Brexit represents at some level, “going back to before 1973”
Cons: Troubles Part II, in all likelihood

2 - No “hard border”, but NI is governed according to UK regulations, RoI to EU regulations
Pros: You’ve discovered a way to have mutually impossible outcomes occur at the same time, like opening Schrodinger’s box to find the cat is still both living and dead
Cons: What you’ve really achieved is a kind of “wink-wink, let’s play pretend” attempt at enforcing regulations, in reality you’ve just made a free-flowing, no-border Ireland a kind of Wild West lowest-common-denominator zone, the only difference being which region things are originating from.

3 - No “hard border” and a single set of regulations, because NI is run according to EU regulations
Pros: This is the status quo
Cons: After Brexit, it would represent a separation of NI from the rest of the UK - a step towards a de facto union with the Republic

4 - No “hard border” and a single set of regulations, because the RoI is run according to UK regulations
Pros: Brexiters would surely agree to this
Cons: The Republic of Ireland would never, ever agree to this (and would mean its own exit from the EU)

It seems to me that the best any Brexit position that has come up is Option #3, “as a temporary measure”, with no specification as to what the permanent condition on the horizon would be.

So why not make it explicit and permanent?

NI joins in a customs union with the Republic. Whether that means full legal union with the Republic or not is a separate question. They can remain “culturally attached” to the UK - currency, foreign policy, etc. - until such time as a latent referendum to fully join with the Republic passes, which (also objectively speaking) seems like a foregone conclusion within a generation or two, especially of the Republic makes “autonomous zone/cultural sphere” concessions to the Orangemen and friends similar to what Mainland China did with Hong Kong and is suggesting it would do with Taiwan.

Yes, that means the DUP loses its mind. And their “10 seats” are part of the necessary coalition. But they could be overruled, no, if 10+ more seats decided that was the most palatable scenario?

It’s that, or accept option #1, and Troubles Part II, which should always have been understood as part of the cost of a Hard Brexit.

Brexit is three people in a car travelling somewhere. One of the people thinks they know a shortcut to their destination along a side road. The people discuss between themselves and take a vote - one person is persuaded to go along with the person suggesting a shortcut, while the other thinks they should continue along their original route. So they go along with the majority decision and take the shortcut. After travelling along the supposed shortcut route for a time, they find that there is a chasm splitting the road, with no bridge to cross. The person who originally suggested the shortcut thinks they can, with a fast run-up, jump the car over the chasm, and continue on the route that may be a shortcut. The person who wanted to stick to the original route thinks the risk of the car falling into the chasm is too great, and they should turn back and continue along the original route. The person in the middle, who decided the vote, is now getting twitchy and sweating profusely at the idea of their pending imminent demise and is having second thoughts about the shortcut.

I should add that, for the analogy to work, the car’s door locks and windows aren’t working and no-one can leave the car until they get to their destination.

Out of curiosity, I’ll bet you voted Remain, right? Indeed, I’ll bet that all of the Brexit critics in this thread voted Remain.

Is there anyone in this thread who voted Leave who feels like the middle passenger in this example?

And that the other two people find the map and notice it says “road subject to intermittent washouts”, and the shortcutter says to the waverer “but you already chose to take this route, no backsies!”

It would make sense for Brexit critics to vote Remain. :slight_smile: Call me boring, but I don’t the risk of falling in a chasm is worth the conjectured possibility of getting to a destination a few minutes early.

Yeah, the person that advocated for the shortcut is saying to the others: “we already voted, and by changing your mind you would be defying democracy and the will of the people in the car!”.

I agree, but I mean the critics now. Posters are giving examples of how the Leave voters were misled and now that we know the consequences, the Leave voters are like the middle passenger in the car.

Well, are any Leave voters saying this or is it all Remainers? Forgive me if I don’t accept these analogies unless they are from someone like the middle passenger who did vote Leave and take them as sour grapes from the losers in the referendum.

You forgot to mention that the person who wanted to take the original route has been crying and throwing a temper tantrum ever since the car changed directions.

Also, there’s three more people in the back seat having the same argument, but they aren’t cooperating because they want to be in the front seat more than they want to find a bridge past the chasm.

No.

Something like EEA/Norway/Switzerland would have been a compromise.

Theresa May’s Deal is a hard Brexit.
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It’s far easier to dupe someone than to convince them they have been duped, UV.