How should he respond instead? Complacency?
Personally, if you are interested, I feel like Brexit leaves everyone worse off overall. The UK will continue to implement just as stupid up-tight fear laws and stifle creativity and productivity in exchange for perceived 'safety'. The EU's copyright proposal is bad, but Theresa May's approach to solving the UK's perceived moral and ethnic threats is likely worse.
I do get your point though, I think my mind is just clouded with disappointment and a feeling of loss for my country of origin and all my friends and family who live there.
Tell me, what supposition(s) would have you believe EU-exit to be the correct choice? If you are engaging honestly you should have an answer for that.
To exit the EU I think a fundamental member nation like the UK would need to observe, without cynicism, that the EU was somehow now incompatible with the UK's long-term socio-economic plans.
The UK would then need to make a thorough exit plan that demonstrably showed, again without cynicism, how the UK and its people would prosper and continue to support its allies and uphold it's principles and commitments.
This plan would then need to be proposed to the people in clear terms, without bias, without a marketing budget in an engaged bipartisan, honest manner.
In this day and age it really is not hard to see what is wrong with politics. It's so easy to imagine a 'better' way of doing almost anything. There is far too much polarity, one-upmanship, ego, self serving, and down-right 'fuck you' to the opposition. Trump and others literally fuck over the previous incumbent's changes just for the status and message it sends. Almost nothing is done for 'the people', everything is done for show and status. There simply is no substance any more.
I agree for the most part. And to be clear I’m not a British citizen so I don’t have a strong stake in this, but I am a EU skeptic and it bugs me when people assert that the Brexit position must be mentally deranged or some such. That’s a rhetorical cheap shot that speaks to the base instead of contributing to conversation.
With my Brexit hat on, I think we agree in spirit. I think the Leave movement DOES feel that the EU is and has been for some time moving against the long term interests of the UK. I even agree with this view myself.
However I think the thresholds you set for moving on it are too high and too optimistic. Politicians didn’t want Brexit, and those same politicians would be the ones responsible for creating such a plan. It’s not like you or I can negotiate with the EU terms for Brexit without the UK government’s participation. And that wasn’t going to happen. You clearly have your own cynicism, I just think you need to extend it to both sides of an issue. And that’s being realistic, not cynical :)
The mistake that was made, I feel, was in letting this be decided by a simple majority. They should have used a 3/5 or 2/3 threshold instead.
To be clear, many UK euro skeptics exist in parliament and are delighted with the vote [1]. That's a recent article but as far back as I can remember (1980/90s) the Tory Eurosceptics particularly have disliked Europe in principle. And the vote leave campaign was basically a quasi-coup conducted by the Eurosceptics fronted by Boris Johnson (MP) who is essentially a public school version of Trump.
Essentially D.Cameron said to his Eurosceptic members 'if I get in we'll have a vote'[2], and it backfired - the Eurosceptics mislead the public, he lost and had to resign and they got May into government without anyone even having to vote for her. In the face of such machinations you have to give me a pass on my own cynicism, it's hard to have any good faith confronted with such dishonest nonsense.
To say politicians didn't want Brexit is really misunderstanding a fundamental element of the UK's socio-political climate.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/09/tory-mps-br... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_...
Also try talking to any Texan outside of Austin.
With people like May at the helm the UK is already well on its way to a special episode of Black Mirror.