This is what we were told by the government in a pamphlet mailed to every household in the UK:
https://assets.publishing.service.go…for-the-uk.pdf (PDF)
By the way, can you provide a cite of someone in government telling the public the referendum was “non-binding” and “advisory”? I’m thoroughly aware that the referendum was non-binding by default. However, I don’t recall any reporting of anyone explicitly telling the public the referendum was “non-binding” and “advisory”.
So immediately you’re in disagreement with the ERG (probably the biggest Leave group in Parliament) and the Brexit party. What makes your opinion more valid than theirs?
Maybe “incomplete” would be more accurate than “vague”, but a single question doesn’t give enough information to decide on a course of action. As we’ve demonstrated many times, there are multiple Brexit plans that technically satisfy the referendum, and in the absence of parliamentary agreement the only way forward would put the most viable options to the public in a second referendum, and one of those options must be to revoke A50 as many people will have changed their minds over the past 3 years.
Now you’re just being silly. The deadlock is between hard & soft brexiteers, remain alone doesn’t have the votes to block it. While there is (I believe) a majority of remain mp’s, many of them have still voted for some sort of brexit, particularly those from Leave-voting areas.
My point is we need a referendum with clear options that don’t need any further debate, and can therefore be implemented straight away. Any form of Brexit will still be wrong in my opinion, but if there is a clear majority for a specific option there is little anyone can do to block it.
The options on the 2016 referendum were absolutely clear.
That is what the leaflet said, however as far as I’m aware it has no legal weight. It was merely a statement of intent from Cameron’s government. Unfortunately Cameron’s government ended the following morning, and May is under no obligation to fulfill her predecessors promises.
I do agree that it was a deliberate lie from Cameron at the time, and shouldn’t have been on the leaflet. There had been debate in parliament at the time about whether to make the referendum binding, and they deliberately chose not to so that they had the option to change their mind. Unlike many other lies from the campaign however, I don’t think it’s one that will have influenced anyone’s voting choices.
Did people vote for hard or soft brexit? If you can’t answer that then the question wasn’t clear enough.
That’s a sound byte or a bumper sticker, not an argument. It relies on logical fallacies.
As has been explained to you many, many times, the referendum requested a result but did not specify the path TO that result, and no single path DOES have the support of the majority of referendum voters. The referendum itself did not ask, and it has become clear that there never was (and never will be) a consensus on what “Brexit” means, procedurally, May’s tautological slogan aside. You persist in a frankly ludicrous belief that this is not an issue, and it’s really where you part company from reality.
One could also argue, as I tried to above, that in a parliamentary democracy, something ELSE that would be democracy would be having parliament assess and dismiss the results of a non-binding referendum where a tiny majority expressed the desire for a really stupid move. You don’t live in a direct democracy, and so I don’t think supporting Brexit is “valuing democracy over EU membership.” I think it is “a simplistic justification for supporting Brexit even with reservations.”
How is that a lie? I suppose you could ascribe it as a failed promise, but the failure’s been due to party/factional politics and incompetence, not dishonesty. I think May’s methods for implementing Brexit have been the wrong ones, but there’s no question that she tried mightily to implement Brexit, at least her version of it.
It isn’t and it doesn’t.
And so what? That’s irrelevant. That’s why we have civil servants and politicians. Your statements mark you as a spoiled child who’s crying because she hasn’t got her own way.
And yet, you somehow manage to completely misrepresent what they were. Firstly by repeatedly claiming that they were some form of instruction to the government, and second by claiming that “leave the EU” with no further explanation is a meaningful, singular thing.
It’s clear you have no interest in, or knowledge of, what is actually happening regarding Brexit, no concept of what it is doing and will do to our economy, our international relations, or our society, and instead simply parrot the esteemed Ms May in incoherently bellowing “Brexit means Brexit”.
Your posts add no information to this debate, as you have no interest in discussing what would be best for the country, what leaving the EU actually entails, or even why (your interpretation of) democracy should be considered more important than the wellbeing of the country.
When you make Farage look nuanced and reasonable, you should probably reevaluate your positions, or at least your way of expressing them.
That you know it was advisory shows that, somehow, you obtained that knowledge. It seems that the government either lied about that or, by omission, mislead people. That hardly makes it better to expect them to follow it, to expect them to do something that was only ever “authorised” through lies and deception.
As for “the government” implementing Brexit, that ended when the government changed, as one government cannot bind the next. Whether you consider that as happening when Cameron resigned, or after the general election, doesn’t really matter. Neither the current government nor any future one is bound by law or custom to follow the advice given in the referendum, and as to follow it would be profoundly damaging to the UK they are ethically bound not to follow it.
I know it must seem unreasonable, but you’ve got to remember that the members in favour of those ideas got their way in a much larger sense. The UK didn’t want the Euro or a shared immigration area, and would rather dispense with or reform the CAP. The UK didn’t want the EU to be a political union at all, let alone support ‘ever closer union’. And despite the opt out, Britain has still been affected by the economic problems caused by the Euro, and is still subject to the not-so-wonderful EU rules on agriculture, among other things.
Hmm. I’d say Brexit has already given impetus to greater integration, and the debacle in Westminster has drastically reduced enthusiasm for exit referendums in other countries. It hasn’t reduced the popularity of Euro-sceptic parties, however. What are the chances the new MEPs, and nationalist governments like Italy’s, can influence the direction of the EU?
And would a narrow victory for Remain in a second referendum really give the EU the confidence we won’t change our minds again? Perhaps so, if they believe the politicians would never dare offer another vote on it.
The Euro and CAP reform sure, but a shared immigration area? Not sure what you mean there. The UK hasn’t been interested in being part of the Schengen common travel area, but that’s just border control. When the ex-Eastern Bloc countries joined the EU - something the UK was very supportive of - the UK didn’t apply any particularly onerous restrictions on the many, many young people who came here for work, or a look around, or to improve their English or whatever.
Some of those people were wrong, some were exaggerating for very understandable reasons.
There was extra cost and extra work to be done in the short term to prepare for it. As there is for many business risks. There was however never any real danger of running out of medicines, no Armageddon scenario. It was and still is under control. The only thing that causes a real problem is uncertainly. Therein lies the biggest cost.
You see, this is where hysteria clearly kicks in.
No-one, not a single person can make a sound prediction of that precision that far in advance. It is simply too complicated a scenario with too many unknown variables. Those same experts did not see the 2008 crash even 12 months in advance and predicted confidently an immediate UK economic crisis following the vote. Hasn’t happened. And do remember that those financial warnings about a no-deal Brexit were predicated on no-one do anything at all to mitigate it. They were the very worse scenarios with the very worst or no response built into it.
Climate change science is…wait for it… a science, economics is not, they aren’t even in the same ball park but your choice to invoke climate-change scepticism does you no favours.
You don’t actually know what Brexit will mean economically, nor do I, nor do the experts. They can take an educated guess at some short term implications but medium to long, all bets are off and those voting to leave are surely more interested in exactly those medium to long-term prospects.
Nor can anyone say with any confidence what remaining will mean in the medium to long term. Ask Greece, Spain and Italy about their 10 year economic projections.
You may be on my side but by christ I can see why leavers get annoyed by this. It really is scaremongering and it does no-one’s cause any good. Saying “I don’t know” isn’t a sign of a weak argument.
I meant the common travel area - bad phrasing. Border control is something the UK has always been very keen on.
It’s true the government didn’t apply any restrictions on free movement back in 2004, unlike most of the other countries in Europe. In retrospect that was probably a mistake, but they can’t have known just how many people would take advantage of it.
I don’t think it helps, to overstate the case against Brexit. I’m not sure exactly what “at least a 10% cut to the economy for decades” means, but the projection I remember was for the economy to be about 4% smaller by 2030 than it would otherwise have been (there may have been other projections more like 10%, I’m not sure). Some media reporting seemed to misinterpret that to mean that GDP would be 4% lower each year up to 2030, when in fact it equates to more like 0.3% lower per year. Not good, considering that the UK economy only grows about 2% in a typical year, but not really “devastating” either.
It depends, obviously, on what kind of Brexit you’re modelling. A crash-out no-deal Brexit will obviously be much more disruptive in the short term, and a much bigger drag on growth in the long term for so long as it continues, than a soft Brexit with a deal and a managed transition would be.
But pretty much all forms of Brexit are predicted to make the UK poorer; the only question is by how much.
This argument is largely over. One of the reasons you have difficulty recalling the various projections and the scenarios they were modelling is because for many months now nobody has argued that Brexit will be economically beneficial, or even economically neutral. The case for Brexit is no longer advanced on economic grounds by any significant voices. Instead, the principal argument is that Brexit is the Will of the People, and must therefore be implemented no matter how disadvantageous economically, socially and politically the attainable terms turn out to be. And a further referendum must at all costs be avoided lest the people betray the Will of the People by rejecting the Brexit offered to them.
Link 1:
Brexit boost, says Richard Mitchell at finance broker Rangewell.
Boost, says Prof. Patrick Minford, Eurosceptic for decades, loved Thatchers poll tax, member of Better Off Out campaign.
However:
Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has stated that the Brexit vote has already knocked about 2 percent off the UK economy, totalling £40bn and costing each household around £900.
Giving evidence to the Treasury Committee, Mr. Carney confirmed the British economy was underperforming the bank’s forecasts before the referendum and that the Leave vote was the primary cause.
Link 2:
Matthias Bopp, partner at consulting firm KPMG says if corporate taxes in the UK are low after Brexit, some companies could move there from Switerland.
Link3:
Boost says Prof. Patrick Minford (see above), and his Economists for Free Trade group.
For details see
Economists for Free Trade - DeSmog and
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/08/09/economists-free-trade-meet-independent-experts-ties-climate-science-denial-pushing-no-deal-brexit
Link 4:
Article behind paywall. Can only see first paragraph.
German economists say “Embracing free trade would limit the damage caused by a no-deal Brexit.” Hardly a recommendation.
If that’s the best you can come up with, it’s pitiful.