Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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I can think of a few reasons. While the polls show that the remain vote would probably win if the referendum was held today, there's still a very large portion of the electorate who still favors brexit (even in a no-deal scenario). Clearly this portion of the electorate would (IMO rightfully) feel cheated if the UK backtracked. As a European I do not favor Brexit but I'm also a democrat. Cancelling Brexit would send a very bad signal IMO, the populists would be able to claim that the EU is un-democratic and that it doesn't respect the will of the people. How could you contradict them? France made the same mistake with the referendum on the European constitution almost 15 years ago (which was rejected, only to be effectively replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon a few years later), it left some scars and is often cited as an example of european un-democraticness by eurosceptics.

An other possibility would be a 2nd referendum but then you sort of have the same democratic problem (you can't keep asking the same question until you get the answer you want) and on top of that you'd probably need three options if you held a referendum today: no brexit, soft brexit with the current proposal or hard brexit. I don't think any of these three options could get an absolute majority so I don't really see how you'd deal with the outcome of such a vote, whatever it may be.

I guess the lesson to all the democracies in the world is that you shouldn't ask a question if you're not able to deal with all the potential outcomes. Cameron held the referendum because he fully expected "remain" to win and he quit as soon as he lost. Since then it's a shitshow because nobody can agree on what "brexit" means exactly.

At this point I think we should all brace ourselves for a hard brexit scenario, a big jump into the unknown for everyone involved.

> you can't keep asking the same question until you get the answer you want

…Yes you can.

A general election is always the same question, and sometimes we come up with different results.

Which we enforce for 4 years or more. We don't just drop them and redo the elections if we don't like the winning party.

We didn’t just drop the idea of Brexit either. The country has [supposedly] put more than two years hard graft into figuring this out. The unanimous result of the research time invested is that it’ll be worse for everyone.

Now that we have much more information, it’s not unreasonable to reconsider.

The first referendum was on whether we should leave the EU. The second is on whether we should still leave on these terms. There's a subtle, but key, difference IMO.

Bad example, as May called an election in 2017, 2 years after the prior election.

I don't think that's a fair analogy.

More realisticly this is would be the next election on the same idea. Treat the options like a political party.

The leave party made a lot of promises and people voted for them. They came into power. The leave party has no been shown to be pursuing, criminals, and incompetents over the period of their rule. Why not have the next election now so that the parties rule can be assessed?

Every election is a really a referendum on the promises and actions of the previous one. The US did it with prohibition, the UK could do it here.

Not in the UK, where in fact snap general elections are a thing, and Theresa May called one in 2017. In the absence of a snap election or no-confidence vote the election cycle in the UK takes place every five years. The point being that elections can be monstrously frequent under the right conditions in the UK.

Are you suggesting that the UK should vote every 4 year or so to decide whether they should be in the EU? I mean I guess at this point there are no bad ideas...

> Are you suggesting that the UK should vote every 4 year or so to decide whether they should be in the EU?

Or maybe it shouldn't, in general, vote at all on that as a separate question (after first resolving if people really want to go forward with the current exit process now that there is more clarity on what that entails) except perhaps to confirm it reject an exit under a deal negotiated after a government-decided invocation of Art. 50 provides a concrete choice, since it's a complex question involving potential for negotiated terms that intersects with every other policy area; maybe the UK should vote for a Parliament and let Parliament balance the issues, proposing referenda only when the public have he information about the choices that makes the decision meaningful.

The first referendum on Brexit was a fairly naked political ploy to punt on exactly that Parliamentary duty with the hope of creating partisan advantage in a general election.

Maybe it would be a good idea that all EU countries have a periodic referendum on EU membership. If a rich and powerful country really wants to keep a smaller, more troubled country in the union, they will have to make it worth it for the citizens of that country. It would improve the balance of power and integration in the union.

A second referendum, ideally, would be to confirm that the public were happy with what was "negotiated", rather than just a repeat:

* Yes please leave with the deal we got.

* Yes, we leave, but with no deal.

* No, let us stay after all.

The big problem really is that no deal will make a lot of people happy. The people that voted remain will be unhappy, and the people that voted leave voted for different reasons. So even among the people that voted to leave previously I can imagine changing their minds.

Anyway the whole thing is a mess, from start to finish.

Also this would probably end up with a high majority remain vote, since the leave voters would be split between options A and B. Similar to the issues with First Past the Post.

There's no reason, in theory, that it couldn't be a ranked vote (so people could vote, e.g. 1) Leave the EU with this deal, 2) Remain in the EU).

While ever there's the prospect of no deal, there's probably a bias towards Remain anyway (as many who want to leave probably don't want to leave without a deal). This avoids that.

Or 2 questions

1. Do you want to remain? 2. Do you accept the negotiated deal?

As a remainer, the idea of a vote split is nice, I don't think its fair or defensible and just stores issues for later as Brexiteers wont accept the result.

I'm not sure how that would work - say you get Do you want to remain? -> no; Do you accept the negotiated deal? -> no. Does that mean we should leave without a deal, OR does it mean we should negotiate for a different deal? Likewise, Do you want to remain -> yes; Do you accept the negotiated deal? -> yes - does that mean we should remain OR that we should accept the deal (you can't do both). You could _want_ to remain, but also find the negotiated deal acceptable. I don't think it gives a clear answer.

Its 2 questions that everybody answers.

Obviously if we choose to remain, the negotiated deal wouldn't be needed. That's just an issue with the current wording.

I'm not in favour of an open ended renegotiate option, we've had that, its a bit of a mess, but if parliament wants to put forward an actionable, achievable plan then I would be happy to vote on that.

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