Do you personally think that the UK will actually end up leaving the EU in 10 days? If yes, what are the chances of that happening?
My guess is an overwhelming (but utterly non-binding) rejection of 'no deal' by Parliament tomorrow, followed by a large majority on Thursday asking for a short-term extension of Article 50 to try to sort something out, followed by the EU saying "a year or nothing", followed by public disagreements, followed by an agreement for an extension of between two months and a year. Nobody actually wants a chaotic exit except a few financiers, and we're doing enough damage to ourselves that I doubt the EU wants to enforce a punishment beating at a cost to their own member states' economies.
As for the final outcome, I'd guess:
* No deal (10%)
* May's deal (10%)
* New (softer) deal (40%)
* Second referendum (40%), with any option possible after that from no Brexit at all to the public saying 'sod you all' and demanding a no deal exit.
But anything's possible at this point; we're off the map and predictions on the process I was much more confident on have already been wrong.
I also wonder how the EU's legislative arrangements compare to other post-war vassal states. Did Germany and Japan have a legislative mess they needed to clean up when the Allied occupation ended?
I think if there were a 2nd referendum, it would be remain, if only because all the old people that voted leave have died off. I don't think it would be by a satisfying large margin though.
That's if we get a referendum though. The Overton window has shifted so for over, MPs might just unite on a soft Brexit.
Any leave option has the Irish border question to sort (unless we remain in the customs union I suppose), which is pretty intractable, and already causing low-level violence to start up again in Ireland from what I hear.
And surely we won't choose to stay without a referendum.
And not leaving after all won't happen either, British pride and dreams of Empire can't handle that humiliation.
My money is on the no deal exit, even though that implies the hard border to Ireland.
It does solve one problem: that otherwise we crash out with no deal by default.
> And not leaving after all won't happen either, British pride and dreams of Empire can't handle that humiliation.
That's not the only force in Britain though. Plenty of people, especially young people, see themselves as European as much as British. And plenty of people are ashamed of the empire too.
> My money is on the no deal exit, even though that implies the hard border to Ireland.
It could happen, but I don't think anybody is keen to see a resurgence in Irish terrorism, which is not unlikely in a No Deal scenario. And this is even ignoring the significant downsides this would have for the British economy.
What happens at the end of that period is entirely unclear at this point. Leaving without a deal is still a distinct possibility, but probably not the most likely one. I'd give about even odds to some kind of deal being wrangled, and there being another referendum.
Of course, even another referendum doesn't necessarily resolve things. The vote is likely to be close again.
On a topic this controversial, MPs love being allowed to vote "no" to everything, but hate being forced to commit to anything constructive - anything they say will be unpopular with some of their constituency, and likely lose them votes. It will be very interesting to see what happens as their ability to criticise without offering alternatives gets closer to being taken away.
This is particularly true of Brexit, as significant numbers of both major parties voted for and against it, so neither party can avoid angering lots of people who would normally vote for them no matter what they do.
That depends very much what the question is. The vast majority of those pushing for a 2nd ref want it to be a choice between May's WA and Remain. In which case the majority of Leave voters boycott (because there'd be no Leave option as most people understand it) and Remain wins by a landslide. National support for the WA is down in the noise.
Personally, I think that if you're going to do that you may as well just skip the referendum entirely, declare that the whole thing's cancelled and save everyone a lot of bother.
I think it's significantly more democratic to have another vote. Most people thought remain would win the first one, but they didn't. If leave won again, we'd definitely definitely have to leave.
> there'd be no Leave option as most people understand it
I question that there is such a shared understanding of what leave means. Leavers seem pretty split between hard and soft options.
That obviously doesn't mean that all leavers agree, but enough of them do that a WA-vs-Remain re-ref would be a foregone conclusion.
It would only be undemocratic if there was coercion to vote a certain way in the second referendum. But I don't see that happening.
Leave already won twice. In the first referendum, and then in the general election called by May in which the Lib Dems ran on a "cancel Brexit" platform and lost most of their votes as a consequence.
What we now see is that many of the politicians who claimed they supported leaving the EU and would work towards implementing Brexit have turned around after winning re-election and announced they had lied, they would work to stop the UK leaving. MPs who said "a second vote would be undemocratic" are now saying "we must have a second vote".
The brutal reality is that there is no difference at this point between Remain as a position, and supporting the formal end of democracy in the UK. If a certain argument wins a referendum and then a general election in which both main parties claimed to support it and then Parliament simply tears up all the manifestos, public statements, conventions and speeches, people will conclude there is no democratic way to ever exit the EU and thus the country has been conquered by a political class that is apparently impossible to remove - because if they are willing to lie about their intentions to win election, how can you be sure you're voting for a "real" Brexit supporter?
If even 1% of the people who are watching their winning votes get torn up stop believing democracy works, and turn to extremism or violence, there could be massive problems for the UK. But the EU as an ideology has a sufficiently powerful grip on most MPs that they are apparently willing to take any risks, do anything at all to ensure its victory.
Polls that I've seen show a narrow remain majority. I don't think any specific leave option would win against it. The last vote unified all Brexit voters, so it's hard to see how a specific Brexit would command more support.
That's pretty low!