An astute online comment has some wondering whether Brexit may ever happen
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If Leave can win now, it will garner more support if the public's will is neglected.
Also the comment takes it as a foregone conclusion that triggering Article 50 would spell the political demise of the sitting Prime Minister. Isn't this a dubious assumption? We're seeing short-term market reactions today, but it is a very different thing to assert that the long-term impacts are as suicidal as is commonly believed.
Practically... it's a 52%/48% vote. Hardly a mandate. Some people say a revote might yield an opposite result, which means the current outcome is probably under the margin of error.
It wouldn't exactly be a miscarriage of democracy to not follow through and see how things unfold in the next couple of years, and maybe vote again to see if the gap widens or if our country remains split in the middle on the issue.
At any rate, this comment about the situation is frighteningly deep and chilling.
A vote is an exact count of the will of the people at a given time. There is no error. People can change their minds, but that isn't what the vote represent. That is, a vote is what people who chose to vote said they wanted, not a probabilist representation of what the people as a whole want.
The referendum was also made non-binding for a reason. It was made that way exactly so that Cameron had the freedom to do something like he has just done, maybe not specifically the way he did it, but leaving the door ajar to avoid such an incredibly damaging result.
I was referring to the fact that when a result is so close, the vote might have a different outcome simply based on who shows up to vote that day. If there's a revote, more people against leaving might show up because they didn't realize they would lose. And then if a third vote is held, the result might swing again.
Our country is clearly split right now, but the road ahead for the brexit outcome is terrifying and full of unknowns, as the commentator acutely outlined. Is it worth going through so much turmoil when there is barely an inch above a majority that voted this way?
My answer would be a resounding "yes" if the result was 70%/30%. But 52%/48%? Maybe we should spend some time thinking this through before enacting Article 50. And all the current leaders seem to think this way right now given how discreet they have become as the reality is slowly sinking in.
Normally it might not be that big a deal but it exists in the context of people frustrated with the EU and politics in general for being "undemocratic" and supposedly not listening to them. In this particular case by ignoring the result of it, you would potentially be validating those fears, and play into euro-skeptic views across the whole of Europe.
I thought it was made clear beforehand that this vote was not binding? Am I misinformed?
I think a good case can be made that in general close votes on this kind of thing should automatically have a revote in six months to a year, because seeing how the results were distributed geographically might change some minds.
For instance, perhaps many people who voted to leave did so on the assumption that the UK would remain fully intact after leaving, but now seeing the results from Scotland and Northern Ireland might fear that one or both of those will leave the UK and would prefer an intact UK as part of the EU over an independent UK that just has England, Wales, and Gibraltar.
It would also probably be a good idea to hold another vote after the negotiations with the EU on what the relationship will be after exit are done, or at least to the point that there is a good idea of what the relationship will be. If that relationship is better than stay voters thought the UK would get, some of them could swing to leave. If that relationship is worse than leave voters thought the UK would get, some of them could swing to stay.
This doesn't mean ignoring the results of the referendum, but instead taking the result as a statement from the populace and using that to inform future reforms.
You're dead on about more serious consequences, especially in the current political environment. You have candidates in the US like Trump and Sanders basically saying to the average voter, "Look, you're being played for a sucker." Nothing would prove them right more than taking a democratic referendum and throwing out the result. It never should have happened in the first place. The original signers to the agreement should have put in provisions requiring a supermajority vote to undo membership. But the fact is it did, and they didn't. Forget about crashing markets. The idea that democracy is even functioning is under threat, and people are ready to elect authoritarians to make sure their voices are finally heard. I'm not one to make light of economic consequences--they literally ruin lives--but something bigger is at stake here. The die is cast. The consequnces of rethrowing are more perilous than letting it land.
They did, however, put in 'non-binding'. The referendum actually is 'give us your opinion', regardless of whether it was pitched that way.
> The consequnces of rethrowing are more perilous than letting it land.
Nonsense. Another referendum of "Lots of you seem to have been unaware of the extent of the ramifications of this. Let's hold another referendum to make sure that we want this, before we start down the irreversible path. This time, it will be legally binding to avoid a repeat of this action". This isn't a playground, but real affects on people's lives - it's worth being sure first. You're still asking the people for what they want, and this time they will have better educated themselves about the issues for and against.
This isn't like other countries which have some kind of constitutional mechanism for holding binding referendums, Parliament always has the final say in the UK.
I guess that the silver lining is that for those Americans that might be watching, they'll be less likely to 'protest vote' in favour of Trump this coming election. It'll encourage his core voters, but it might discourage the swing voters, and those are the ones that count.
And would there now be such demands if 'remain' had been the decision? After all that would also have affected real people's lives, for the next ... 100 years? Surely that decision would need to have double-checked more than leaving the Union. There are no consitutional blocks to rejoining, after all, whereas binding the next two or three generations to an enormous political union seems a serious commitment that needs confirmation.
Getting 27 nations to agree to let you back into the club when you've already told them to fuck off? That's not a trivial task. Having the UK disintegrate into its constituent countries and then trying to reform it if you don't like the outcome? That's not a trivial task. The Leave vote is a significant change to the status quo, and was won by a pretty slim majority in real terms.
Similarly, when one leader of Leave is not happy about the win, and another leader admits a primary promise of the campaign was a lie less than half a day after the victory, doesn't that strike you as an unstable result that should be double-checked?
Checking the Leave argument in a few years can be done again and again. Checking the Remain argument can only be done once - then the UK is gone, the EU has to act harshly, and England is left having burnt all it's goodwill and political capital... and the one world-class industry England does have flees the country due to the instability (I am told that the finance industry provides 34% of the UK's GDP - that's not an applecart that you want to particularly upset, even if you hate those arses in the City)
Let's get the time scales correct here. Few people think that the European Union is something you hop into and out of occasionally. It's closer to a long contractual obligation.
So that's on the order of decades, perhaps centuries. In the future things will look very different. The EU might not exist. It might be superseded. It might decline. It might become a United States of Europe. Let us not be predicting the future this far out!
> Similarly, when one leader of Leave is not happy about the win, and another leader admits a primary promise of the campaign was a lie less than half a day after the victory, doesn't that strike you as an unstable result that should be double-checked?
That is the nitpicking of the establishment media at work, whom have a motive to jinx the results.
> the one world-class industry England does have flees the country due to the instability (I am told that the finance industry provides 34% of the UK's GDP - that's not an applecart that you want to particularly upset, even if you hate those arses in the City)
Things are not as the FT and Bloomberg make them seem.
Financial capital is becoming much less important in the world than it used to be. It is less effective at getting results. You see that even in Silicon Valley where companies are going public later and later, and soon enough they won't even go public but remain private forever. This is a cyclical phrase that occurs between finance and production.
Is it eggs or apples in one basket-cart ? ;-)
Isn't this my argument? You're saying that the country won't be back in the EU in your own lifetime, and that's something that's okay to decide on a mere 2% majority from a clearly poorly-handled referendum? That the UK, a centuries-old nation, is fine to split up because the public wasn't paying enough attention at the time and had a short-term grump? That a confirmation referendum isn't a good idea, even though the Leave party maintain that this is the clear will of the people - if it is, what is the harm in repeating it?
The money that Farage isn't going to give to the NHS after all, that could be used to finance the second referendum :)
> The EU might not exist
And this might be the trigger. Not to mention that the world's home of banking loudly proclaiming that it is not a stable place to do business... that's going to send lasting shockwaves around the world.
> That is the nitpicking of the establishment media at work, whom have a motive to jinx the results.
When the stakes are this high, pedantry is absolutely warranted. And having Farage himself state that he wasn't going to give 350M/week to the NHS is hardly the media's invention.
> Financial capital is becoming much less important in the world than it used to be. It is less effective at getting results.
If it actually is 34% of the GDP, then it doesn't matter if it's 'declining'. It's still an 800lb gorilla. I also wouldn't base a country's economic policy based on the highly faddish behaviours of Silicon Valley. If even a tenth of the finance industry leaves, that's a massive hole in tax revenues... and less to spend on welfare and health.
And, let's face it, the British are famous for having a poor work ethic. They're not going to manufacture their way out of this one - few natural resources left and a significantly declined (and expensive!) manufacturing sector. Services and networking are where the British need to make their money, and now that they're headed out of the giant European market, external clients will prefer services inside that market.
So, yes, the people in the City are arses that care not a whit for anything outside London. But destroying the UK in some sort of class warfare revenge snit is going to hurt everyone, regardless of class.
I believe it was just under 4%, not 2. Correct me if I'm wrong.
But yes, we both agree that this is a very important decision with long term repercussions.
> That the UK, a centuries-old nation, is fine to split up because the public wasn't paying enough attention at the time and had a short-term grump?
That has not occurred yet although I agree it's likely. Which doubles up on the historic nature of this result. I don't know if you know many Scots personally, but the general feeling in Scotland for some time has been to leave the Union, it's not a new idea prompted by the Europe Referendum and shouldn't be used as a primary argument against it because it very well may have in the past or would have in future, happened anyway.
You're assuming that the British public aren't intimately aware of this already, which seems suspect given the Scots already tried to make a getaway recently. Perhaps you're right, perhaps you're not.
> That a confirmation referendum isn't a good idea, even though the Leave party maintain that this is the clear will of the people - if it is, what is the harm in repeating it?
To lighten the mood a bit while being on topic:
This has been very entertaining for my clan who are chortling like hobgoblins. If you're discombobulated look up the Lisbon Treaty on the Wiki.
To get to your question: The harm is that the stakes are too high.
A rego failing to go in favour of the original result would be seen as a betrayal, a revolutionary action by the working class. Here I am without humour. Britan is on a knife edge right now and that would tip the scales. We're at the point where people will be getting killed if things go sideways and I don't think the middle class fully grasp this yet.
> The money that Farage isn't going to give to the NHS after all, that could be used to finance the second referendum :)
It's good you have a mind for efficiency. Sadly braying mobs armed with clubs notoriously find economic arguments passe. This is really the point I believe HN is missing the most. This isn't about economics. It was about economics, for decades, which is why this is an understandable misjudgment. But now the working class has turned political and unlike college summer marxists, they won't turn back easily. You can't buy them off, they've become radicals.
> When the stakes are this high, pedantry is absolutely warranted.
Very well, pedant away, but remember what they say about picking up pennies in front of steamrollers.
A discrepancy here or there is nothing in comparison to the endorphin rush of defeating one's class enemies in one fell swoop! Remember that the working class has much less to lose in comparison to all those losing out right now, George Soros looks particularly pale these days and he's not the only one whose bets just went sideways.
> If it actually is 34% of the GDP, then it doesn't matter if it's 'declining'. It's still an 800lb gorilla.
True but I'll remind you that many valuable areas of the economy are quite small portions of the overall economy. Size isn't everything and especially not in an era where valuations are artificially high thanks to quantitative easing programs.
Suppose that interest rates climb and banks collapse. Bad for the economy? Nothing of the sort, it should have happened years ago. How else is a young person in Britain going to be able to afford a shelter. That alone offsets most working class people's concerns.
They don't have a stake and hence they are not stakeholders except in the very long term which I am confident neither of us know much about.
Still, I do believe the finance has some role to play in an economy, don't get me wrong, it's just that I believe it to be overly inflated with respect to its real life importance.
> not a stable place to do business... that's going to send lasting shockwaves around the world.
Yet the highest index relative to the others in Europe. Studies consistently show people prefer being wealthy relative to others instead of being wealthy in absolute terms.
> ... destroying the UK in some sort of class warfare revenge snit is going to hurt everyone, regardless of class.
We'll see! I don't think the EU was necessarily destined for great things economically the way some people seem to assume around here.
A more philosophical way to view all this is that this is a political correction in the marketplace of ideas.
Different ways of referring to the same thing. It's a 2% swing - if 2% of people voted the other way, the outcome would have changed.
But to shorten things a bit, the British public have been arses, really. They rejected Alternative Vote a few years ago, which would have given them some of the better representation they say they want. And that wasn't a mere sliver of a majority, but a solid 2/3rds against. Now they sulk off in a huff because they don't feel represented.
And remember in your glee to destroy the middle-class: when the working class have a job, it's the middle-class that buys the goods. When they don't have a job, it's the middle-classes' taxes that pay for the welfare. The middle class needs the working class, too. We're all in this shit together, and we all need each other - this kind of divisive class bollocks just hurts everyone. Unless the working class is going to go all hippy and start forming volunteer communes to help each other, talk of mobs with clubs is just scoring an own-goal in the long term.
One final thing:
> How else is a young person in Britain going to be able to afford a shelter.
The poor have always been in fiscal trouble. It's nothing new. The poor have frequently not been able to afford their abodes - that's why there's council housing. And for people on less than an average wage, living expenses have always taken everything. Housing is more expensive now, sure. But clothing and food is less expensive, not to mention that ye olde poor never had a luxury like a low-end smartphone. But however it works out, if you're of less than average wage, you basically spend everything on survival and always have. Maybe the odd luxury now and then, but it's not like the poor of yesteryear were buying investment properties.
We don't have the same model of the world so we reach different conclusions. The Brexit is just one jigsaw piece in a bigger shift. Let's be clear, I don't hate the middle class. They have many good ideas and values. I'm quasi-middle-class myself in some ways. However they also are less unaware of their 'sins' because the mainstream press and television is not about to bite the hand that culturally and literally feeds it. What is happening in the present is a kind of historical correction.
If you'll allow for it, I'll offer you an alternative view of what is going on based on money and power relations. Do you recall Orwell's idea about the proles, the outer and inner parties? How two side against one periodically? Something like this but more complex is going on.
We are not all in this together at all and this is why:
There isn't three classes of people, there are at least six.
In the lower classes there exists the poor and the working class. These are not the same people. Working class people have skills and capital in the form of tools. The poor live in council estates, the working class typically don't. There is of course some overlap, but they are very aware of the difference.
In the middle class there is the upper and lower with which I'm sure you're familiar. Most of their assets are in property or their service sector jobs.
In the upper class there is two classes, the financial capitalists and the mercantile capitalists. Always at war. In America these are personified in part by Wall St and Silicon Valley. They even have different stock exchanges.
What is going on in the present is that the mercantile capitalist and working classes are at war with the financial capitalists and most of the middle classes whose primary assets are in property or finance. This is why the alliance is arson friendly, it's not their assets that will burn up in the conflagration.
The stock market and currency markets will swing around, but the factories remain standing. The fields remain extant and commodities still stay or slosh beneath our feet. The merchant capitalists will be fine, as will those with the ability and means to work for them. Exports will be up, imports may decline.
This will be a minor heresy to you perhaps, but the middle classes actually consume the majority of welfare through indirect subsidization e.g. below cost university education and the majority of David Graeber's bullshit jobs. A portion of the middle class does work for the production capitalists doing something useful but it is a distinctive minority of what I consider the real upper middle class.
The majority of tax paid comes from rich and goes to the middle class. The finance capitalists and production capitalists have always been at war with each other and the reign of the financiers was supreme in a globalizing world. That trend is now in reverse and the cycle is swinging back to the production capitalists. This means the virtual side of capital, in the form of artificially high share prices and property prices is about to crash it won't recover for generations.
Thanks to an artificial oversupply of educated labour plus artificial government regulations restricting property development, the middle classes are about to suffer an absolute and relative real decline in wages over the next decade. That or it will shrink rapidly to a much more manageable size (in my country I see it already occurring with the civil service, where the young {police/doctors} receive much lower rates of pay than in the past). At the same time as this they will also suffer a loss of their primary asset's value i.e. their houses. Best case scenario: Stagnation.
This all makes sense to the working classes because they intuitively think of the middle as being closer to the core and themselves towards the peripheral. When the middle class economy see-saws they are likely to have their situation improved. Not just because of rival goods such as housing but also the types of wages and types of jobs the economy will be wanting in the future. Technology is deskilling the middle class, not the working class. Robotics won't be able to replace working class jobs for many decades but all the people who deal with information i.e. the financiers and the middle class kind of jobs, those are on the receiving end.
Basically I am saying that the world's class system is reverting from a diamond shape back to the traditional hierarchy. Does fewer middle class jobs and more low wage work sound familiar? Growth at bottom and top away from the middle.
This could all be wrong and you're free to nitpick but those are the broad strokes as many people see it.
> The poor have always been in fiscal trouble.
The poor by definition, but not the working class. Up until the 70s in the States they received huge wage increases and then stagnation in real terms since then.
> The poor have frequently not been able to afford their abodes - that's why there's council housing.
Throughout most of history working class people have owed their homes. The concept of council houses and even mortgages for them are relatively recent. Most people's grandparents built their own houses. My parents owed two houses in their twenties and they were the humblest of working class workers. Of course the standard wasn't as high as it is today, certainly they were smaller, but they owed them outright and that's more than I can say about the 'average' person with a 30 year loan today.
> But clothing and food is less expensive, not to mention that ye olde poor never had a luxury like a low-end smartphone.
Clothing and food and almost nothing else. Education. More expensive. Energy. More expensive. Housing. More expensive. This is all since the early 70s when we reached some kind of inflection point and wages stagnated since then.
It is true that technology has made technology objects cheaper like electronics and computers but here is the rub. Outside of computers technology has not improved the average person's life for decades. You've probably heard all this before so I won't sidetrack.
>And for people on less than an average wage, living expenses have always taken everything. Housing is more expensive now, sure. But clothing and food is less expensive, not to mention that ye olde poor never had a luxury like a low-end smartphone. But however it works out, if you're of less than average wage, you basically spend everything on survival and always have. Maybe the odd luxury now and then, but it's not like the poor of yesteryear were buying investment properties.
Regrettably you're wrong. It was normal for below average income people to own their house, have a boring but reasonable job, along with owning some stocks. Yes, that's right, a great many people owned stock or bonds. Also land. Standards of living have been stagnating for a long time and many people are suffering from present-ism. Most households also contained a cook in the form of a mother which cut down on living expenses considerably and most households had one job with the ability for mom to find part time work if times got tough. Now most households both people work and they are living paycheck to paycheck. Did I mention people had savings in the past?
The media has fed everybody wife's tales about the recent past. The New York Times might as well be Pravda. I don't buy it. The statistics don't back any of it up. It reminds me of the way in the Soviet Union everybody thought everything was getting better and better, but it wasn't.
Anyway now you probably want to hit me so I'll stop here.
> Throughout most of history working class people have owed their homes.
Not true, in the UK at least. And working class people, as you're defining them, have only been around for a couple of centuries anyway.
For example, the link below shows that in 1918, 77% of the UK dwellers were renters. Home ownership has increased every decade since, except the current decade.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt...
Unless, of course, that wasn't a typo, and you actually did mean 'owed' :)
> Up until the 70s in the States
Up until the 70s in the States was a very unusual time, and the US itself was abnormally prosperous. It's not a good baseline. It's also not the UK experience.
> This will be a minor heresy to you perhaps, but the middle classes actually consume the majority of welfare through indirect subsidization
No, no heresy there. The middle-class sometimes wonk on about 'dole bludgers' here in Australia, but try and get them to hand back their tax rebate for whatever and you'll get a story about how somehow someone on the average wage (in a well-off country) is 'doing it tough'. However, welfare cutbacks will still affect everyone who isn't financially independent.
I guess it's going to balance out in the UK - if the Leave stalwarts get their way, all the Polish tradesmen will be shipped back home... and the middle-class won't have the money to employ tradies to fix things. Fewer tradesmen, fewer jobs for them anyway :)
> Most households also contained a cook in the form of a mother which cut down on living expenses
This bit genuinely puzzled me. Earlier you said it was a bad sign of the times that the young couldn't afford shelter. Yet you paint a society of mothers having to live with their kids in some sort of indentured servitude as an example of the good times? That multi-generation families are bad when the kids live with the parents, but good when the parents live with the kids? Odd.
Ultimately, the problem is that the referendum was won on lies that were revealed by the liars themselves. On the first day, Farage admitted that the NHS wasn't going to see the money that they advertised (and others have pointed out that the actual funds to the EU were half of the claimed amount). In the following days, Bojo said that immigration wasn't going to see significant reduction. So, the two major heartstrings, "those damned immigrants" and "all that money for ourselves", aren't going to happen anyway. Nor should one forget that a mere dissatisfaction with the government is not the same as wanting to have your country destroyed - far from all Leave voters wanted to dissolve the UK... it doesn't seem that the actual will of the people was to dissolve the UK and upset the apple/egg basket/cart that much.
The long-term (at least as long as politicians are concerned) impact of the Brexit is unlikely to be good- mostly because the EU has a strong reason to make an example of Britain that convinces other countries to stay in- and is also likely to be complicated. Further, politicians rely on wealthy backers, and these are going to be dismayed at the short-term implications of the Brexit more than anyone. So the new PM would have everything to lose and little to gain by invoking article 50 immediately. They could put it off a year. And then decide that issues arose requiring it to be delayed a year after that, and later... it could go on indefinitely.
In the case of Brexit, there are a lot of good reasons for the elected representatives to ignore the result. For one thing, while 52% of people want to leave, 48% of people don't. That's no better than a coin toss. Of the people that voted, there are many reports that they did it "as a protest", or didn't understand what leaving the EU meant. Additionally, a large part of the "leave" demographic is going to be dead well before the consequences of the Brexit are fully realized. Why should someone who will have to deal with the consequences for 10 years get the same say as someone who will have to deal with the consequences for 90 years?
Anyway, given the coin-toss like results, 50% of the people are going to be unhappy regardless of the eventual outcome. I would stick with 50% of unhappy people and a strong currency, personally, as opposed to 50% unhappy people and a weak one. I guess that's why I don't win elections, though.
How is a referendum different from a direct instance of democracy. I really want to know.
I don't like democracy, so don't get confused about my political orientation. That's not the problem here.
> The point of democracy is to elect representatives
That is Republicanism.
> that can think about solutions and their consequences better than the average person.
That is epistocracy. Sometimes it is known as the original purpose of the aristocracy before that got a bad rep for a century or two after the last time Europe went into a complete meltdown during the Revolution.
Definitions aside I believe you are horribly underestimating the probability of violence breaking out if this referendum result is ignored. It is close to 100%. CFAR says when you're a 100% sure that you're actually only correct 66% of the time.
Taking that as a given, this means you have a 66% chance of riots and worse. The working class are not going to lie down on this one. For them this will be the straw that broke the camel's back. I know them personally and assure you this will be seen as nothing less than a complete betrayal by elites. For them it means there is no hope left.
Well known pragmatist President Snow would be agog at what I'm seeing expressed on HN, what seems sensible to many people here is suicidal.
Also, the UK does not have a democracy. They have a parliamentary democracy, which means they believe that elected experts or elites can decide matters better than popular votes. If elected officials feel that their careers are worth sacrificing for the good of the country, that is in lawful keeping with the boundaries of their parliamentary democracy, just as it would be just for the people to vote out their elected officials if they feel that would be a superior decision for the country.
See: https://twitter.com/goodwinmj/status/746979915896070144
There may not be a Labour political party by next elections. Labour is disintegrating as we discuss this.
This comment ignores ideology. For diehard anti-eu supporters triggering Article 50 isn't some grave decision. They don't care about the ramifications and consequences (or more distinctly, they don't agree that they will be bad). Maybe Boris and Farage really didn't want to win, but that doesn't really matter, they did and their party will force them to follow through on it.
If Boris Johnson or whichever leader of the "Leave" movement replaces Cameron, they need to trigger Article 50 (and accept whatever consequences that arise from the exit). Failure of which will cast doubt on their conviction for leaving the EU. This will cast a pall over their time in office.
Cameron's move to resign is a shrewd and calculated one. While he is already culpable for calling the referendum in the first place, he is placing the responsibility of triggering Article 50 on the people who so fervently called for it.
* not really that long, but longer than most