Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattBearman | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's fair to blame leave voters, the whole thing was fundamentally flawed. While it was obvious what remain meant, "leave" was never actually defined, and so open to interpretation.

Forgetting for a second the whole thing was just a ploy to win over UKIP voters, it is ridiculous that this far down the line leave still hasn't been defined. A small part of me thinks that maybe May is playing the 4D chess long-con, and deliberately being as incompetent as possible to drive us to a last-minute remain outcome. Ockham's Razor says otherwise though

View on HN

I don't think it's fair to blame leave voters

They actively chose something that you say was poorly defined but which was widely understood to be a very dramatic and potentially dangerous shift for the country. If you can't blame them for picking a poorly defined option out of some jingoistic notion of what the UK should be, what can you blame anyone for?

You could probably blame the people responsible for the referendum in the first place, trying to use the notion of a Brexit vote as some sort of political brinkmanship game against the EU and then running for the hills when people didn't vote the way they expected them to.

Like that David Cameron clown, for instance.

That's like saying a woman can't leave an abusive marriage until she's secured a new husband.

You can criticise them for wanting to leave the EU for poorly justified reasons, however you can't really blame them for the execution.

> you can't really blame them for the execution

I think one can. Britain is a democracy. An old one. If one votes for a dramatic departure from the status quo without asking how it will be executed, that's a failure of civic duty. Voters own a share in their democracies' successes and failures; economically, politically and morally.

Well, one might blame the EU for being so bad that a majority of the voters preferred the poorly-defined, widely-understood-to-be-potentially-dangerous option rather than remain.

As an aside, I think terms like 'jingoistic' aren't helpful to discussion. I've never quite understood why it's jingoistic to prefer UK sovereignty but not jingoistic to prefer European sovereignty.

"Jingoistic" has a specific connotation of aggressive patriotism. The typical Remainer's level of support for the EU rarely approaches such a level, and tends to be based upon seeing membership of the EU as a benefit to their country (in a similar way to being a member of the UN, say) rather than a replacement for it.

The average person could not possibly make an informed decision in this referendum, because it affects every area of every part of the brittish society.

On top of that it has been proven that the leave campaign lied and broke the law regarding funding.

There was a big promise of 350 Million a week to the NHS. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to vote for. Unfortunately it was backtracked on within hours of the result. Is that really democracy?

You can blame the Murdoch press (and others) in the UK for constantly pushing the narrative that the EU is a corrupt bureaucracy making absurd laws and stealing your rights and money.

I mean, can you believe this?

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1800/1*piGY6KAwYsDSweClC...

https://s-i.huffpost.com/gen/1521502/thumbs/o-SUN-FRONT-PAGE...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com