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Comment by songshu | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Brexit is that "leave the European Union" is not a policy, it's an outcome. All of the thinking about how to do it should have taken place before the vote, and then we could have voted on that (this is actually the way legislation is typically developed in the UK, and the job of our sometime venerated civil service). Compare it to the recent Irish referendum on abortion, where there was a clear plan for what would actually happen following a vote for change.

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Agreed. This is also the reason why just because a group of rebels can retain enough cohesion to overthrow a government doesn't mean they can govern effectively.

When a vote is for 'status quo' or 'not status quo' then there'll be a lot of people voting for 'not status quo' that want radically different and incompatible things.

I think you're kind of splitting hairs, all policies can be viewed as outcomes. "Bring back grammar schools" is both a policy and an outcome. "Improve education" is only an outcome because it doesn't discuss how to achieve it. "Leave the EU" is 100% achievable and has an obvious way to achieve it, it's policy just not detailed policy.

Realistically they should have planned more, but planning is limited when you're going into negotiations with an unpredictable third party. If other countries had voted to leave the EU, or the German or French elections had been different then the negotiation would be very different. Even the UK election after the vote could have wildly changed our brexit policy.

The trouble is that of the two obvious options, one is pointless ("Norway") and the other ("Canada") breaches the peace treaty in Northern Ireland.

Fortunately we're something like (top of my head) ten times as important to the EU as either of those, and so even the most hardened remainer would privately admit that we should have more leverage in negotiations.

Presumably Norway isn't in the ECHR, which would be significant. Neither is it obligated to join the Eurozone. It's more complicated than you're painting it.

Norway is part of the ECHR. In fact, just like the UK it was a founding member of the Council of Europe which agreed to create the ECHR at the Congress of Europe at which Winston Churchill was a delegate from the UK.

The ECHR is a separate institution to the EU anyway so I'm not sure why it would be relevant. Leaving the EU does not leave the ECHR, and there has been no referendum to suggest that the UK should do that.

You're right on Norway being a member of the ECHR, I wasn't sure as I stated in my post, but you're vastly oversimplifying by implying there's no connection https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3614979...

There is no direct connection. But a respect for human rights is required to belong to the EU. Leaving the ECHR would cast the UKs commitment to human rights into question (at the very least it would be an indication that the UK has a different conception of human rights to the rest of the EU) and would mean that the EU would have to scrutinise whatever legislation took its place to ensure that the UK did still intend to retain a conception of human rights close enough to the other member states.

None of this means that the recent referendum gave any mandate for leaving the ECHR.

Russia is in the EHCR, so I think it’s very reasonable to say it’s a separate institution.

Oh, probably, but leverage for what? Nobody can agree on things to ask for which the EU haven't already explicitly ruled out.

Cameron did the 'either / or' thing three times, once on House of Lords reform, once on Scots independence and latterly on Brexit. Won the first two, came a-cropper on the third.

Personally, I'm against referendums of any kind.

It was for Alternative Vote, not House of Lords reform.

Thanks, memory fails... a condition of the coalition was having the vote of course.

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