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Comment by RafiqM | Hacker News Reader

> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it

Essentially, they want to honor the will of the people. The will of the people, by democratic vote, was to leave the EU.

With that in mind, they have no options that are in any way good:

1) Push ahead and exit with no-deal (economically disastrous)

2) Push ahead and exit with the proposed deal (economically bad while also not really exiting)

3) Declare it a bad idea and just don't do it (political suicide for everyone involved & creates distrust in democratic process)

4) Hold another referendum where it's going to have to be a decision between staying in or exiting with no deal (also political suicide & creates distrust).

There's no way for anyone to win here. I think the best option is for the PM to "take one for the team" (i.e. the country) and take option 3/4, knowing that it will be the end of her and her party.

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> 4) Hold another referendum where it's going to have to be a decision between staying in or exiting with no deal (also political suicide & creates distrust).

I've never really understood this reasoning given how Leave as completely nebulous with no real details. Is it really such a betrayal to go back and say "alright here's what Leave actually means is this what you actually want vs Remain"? That's been my issue with the whole vote from the beginning, leave was so nebulous there was no actual consensus behind what it should have actually meant.

Granted it was kind of impossible to have the details before the actual vote because the actual deal had to be negotiated but I don't see how the situation hasn't changed enough for another referendum to be appropriate.

For US viewers, it's kind of like if the Republican party held a national referendum that said "repeal and replace Obamacare in two years", and the vote passed.

Then then they're on the hook to do the actual replacement part and realize that there never was a replacement but they have this hard deadline to get it done.

The fact that the vote was held at all is total madness. They were trying to call a bluff and it blew up in their face. The whole "post fact era" thing only works up until you the point where you need to actually implement policy.

Yeah, to me the initial referendum, because of the complete lack of information on what the actual deal would be, is about as useful as an opinion poll for actually informing the future of the UK re the EU.

(US user)

There was a lot of information about what the deal would be. It would involve not sending millions of pounds to the EU, better healthcare, total control over immigration, etc...

Sure some of it was lies, but lies are a form of information. They had a bus and everything.

The anti-Brexit side was seemingly more vague, saying that it would be bad without really giving people anything to be excited about.

You misunderstand I'm talking about the actual policy remain is easy there's no negotiations to go through so the government's actions are known. Leave though involves 2 (or more if the UK pushes back the date somehow) of negotiation with the EU so it's impossible to know what was actually going to come out of it.

On top of that there's a whole spectrum of brexits people could have been voting for so even the government doesn't know what people actually want out of a leave vote!

To me it seems like that a revote would have to deal with the literal fear mongering the stay side has been pushing out. My personal favorite is the food shortages, while every other country outside of the EU manages to import food, apparently if you try to leave, you wont' be able to find the food you want on the shelves any more!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/02/brexit...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brexit-food-shortages-stockp...

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/brexit-foo...

The EU would not blockade Britain, as many of these articles seem to imply (how else would you just run out of something simply because you have to import it from a 'foreign' country now?). Britain would have to pay any tariffs the EU imposes to others of course, but it would also be in their best interest to not set them so high that people in Britain stop buying their products at all. Any 'shortages' would be brought about by shear mismanagement.

The issue with the food is about the regulations on their import into the UK, having been in the EU for so long most of those rules are just the EU rules or really old out of date rules that were superseded by the EU food regulations. If there's a no deal Brexit all those EU rules go away and boom suddenly there's a big question about what food is legal to import.

I don't get how going back to the people is political suicide and creates distrust. I mean the first question was do you want to leave and the vote was yes. The second would be that now we know the facts were not entirely as advertised do you still want to go ahead? Not sure how that is betrayal, political suicide and the like - it seems fairly fair and sensible.

Think about practically any political issue, in the US or elsewhere. "Fair" and "sensible" are rarely anywhere near the primary considerations, are they?

I do think what you suggest would be fair and sensible. I do not believe the voters will see it so reasonably.

I'm from Ireland, where we had something similar happen. People still talk about how the govt will just hold multiple referendums till they get the answer they want on an issue. This is in reference to referendums that happened 10 and 20 years ago. It doesn't matter that these decisions have proven positive for the country - there's still resentment and bitterness, and this was an issue with far less emotional weight than brexit.

I remember these referendums and in at least one case there was no explanation of the the referendum was the first time around. We were just expected to rubber stamp it. Also on one or other of them concessions were gained on the second time round. So it wasn’t just like the ”keep voting til you get the right result” thing that you hear people spouting ... does anyone actually believe we’re that soft?

Well that's what I'm saying - this is what you hear people spouting, it doesn't matter that there were good reasons for everything, you just have the distrust of the democratic process left at the end of the day.

Distrust not without good reason I’d say!

> it seems fairly fair and sensible

You must be new here :-)

So, option 2 (May's deal) is off the table. It's not gonna happen. That was today's vote. Maybe if they stall for another couple months and vote on it again in February or early March it might force the issue, but I doubt it.

Option 4 (second referendum) isn't necessarily on the table, because the UK cannot hold a referendum in the time they have left until the Article 50 deadline in March. They would have to ask the EU for an extension, and there's no guarantee that they'll get one.

Option 3 (pass an Act of Parliament to revoke the Article 50 invocation) is possible, but just like May's deal, I don't think the current Parliament has the votes, and there isn't time for a general election before the deadline. It's also a relatively permanent option--the legal opinion seems to be that a country can revoke Article 50, but they can't just keep invoking and revoking Article 50 over and over again in bad faith, which would seem to preclude any sort of "let's revoke Article 50 and we can just re-invoke it later once we realize what we actually want out of this".

Option 1--No Deal Brexit--is just what is going to automatically happen absent some sort of uncertain intervention. You can't get a second referendum or even a new deal done in time for the Article 50 deadline, you can't revoke Article 50 unless you're actually committing to remaining in the EU, and the existing deal is dead in the water. And, in a certain sense, Option 1 is really just a manifestation of the idea that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

They can invoke and revoke at will. The other side can just refuse to do any further negotiations because of bad faith, leaving staying in or hard exit as the only options.

That's not quite correct. The EU has stated they would consider granting an extension "for the right reasons" (meaning of course, a second referendum).

It's definitely possible to stop the clock.

It shouldn't be so hard to argue that steps of this magnitude should not be taken based on a single poll won with a 2% margin (which means that if only 1/100 of the voters had changed sides the result would have been opposite). It might take a bit of courage to declare it but it's a travesty that politicians are so afraid of their electorate as not daring to utter such an obvious truth.

'Leave' actually received 1,269,501 more votes than 'Remain', which is quite a huge number out of a UK population of about 66m. Pretty sure that means FOUR out of every hundred votes would've needed to swap sides to just get us to a 50/50 split. That's really not the close contest it's made out to be.

Sorry. I think we're both wrong. The referendum was won by leave with 51.9% of the votes. That means that if 2/100 had switched sides to remain (not 1/100 as I said before, but not 4/100 either) the result would have been in favour of remain (0.1% in favour). Agree?

Why would #3 and #4 be suicide? Maybe for PM May, but doubtful the Remain MPs and those who "found out how bad Leave was" would actually claim a political boost?

On the Conservative side - many of the remain MPs come from leave constituencies. Also, as a party, the Conservatives have a strong leave bias. If the leave does not happen, it is hard to see the Tories making it back to power for a considerable time.

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