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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Gove: "The British public has had enough of experts"

Raab, later: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing,”

Experts: at this point you might want to consider stockpiling your essential medicines...

Come on, this is hacker news. We're all (supposedly) experts. You wouldn't let random members of the public rewrite your pull requests. We have to stand up for the idea that knowing the difference between a good plan and a bad plan matters.

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Either the issue is too technical for the electorate, and you don't hold a referendum in the first place, or it's not, and you do, and then you live with the results. What you don't do is try to cancel the referendum if you don't agree with the outcome. That's disingenuous.

And yes, this is Hacker News, but no, I don't think politics can be reduced to technical issues. I'm not British and I don't have an axe to grind regarding Brexit. But it seems reasonable to frame the issue in terms of taking a cut in GDP in order to protect national sovereignty. Which goes to show that the issue goes well beyond economics.

When a government is clearly deadlocked and damaging the country rather than delivering on its promised better deal, people don't insist there is anything "disingenuous" about suggesting that the country might be better off calling another election rather than the living with their mistakes for the originally-proposed full five year term. Why would a referendum in which the EU status quo lost narrowly to a range of optimistic alternative visions of the future, most of which are now ruled out be any more irrevocable?

It seems far more disingenuous to frame the issue in terms of taking a cut in GDP in order to protect national sovereignty when the Leave campaign's key argument was framing it as the precise opposite: their headline claim was about how much more money our government would have to spend on public services. Sure, some of the people that voted Leave would have accepted the "less EU jurisdiction for less GDP" tradeoff, but certainly not enough of them to have won the referendum if they believed that was the choice they were making.

But you would let the product owner do whatever he likes with the code. Does the Government serve the people or should the people serve the nation?

At other times on HN we've had the "would you commit a change that you knew would be unsafe, illegal, or even get people killed" discussion. Such as the VW "defeat device". Brexit is another one of those - the worst-case scenarios are extremely bad, and rather than addressing them seriously they get dismissed by the government and Brexiteers.

I have no idea what 'should the people serve the nation' means. Sounds like you wrote something that sounded cool but completely forgot that phrases should actually mean something.

In a representative democracy, the people elect others to represent them in the legislature (and sometimes if it is separate, the executive). There are different ideas as to how representatives should operate/vote. But you would hope that for issues that are too complex for the public at large, the representatives would make the decisions as they are in a better position to do so. Government being accountable to the people has proven to be the best form of governance, but governance by the people has never and will never end well.

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