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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

True, but I think the British (my brothers to the east and north) need to remember that Brexit was ultimately a popular movement. Parliamentary shenanigans played a role, and have been making a mockery of themselves since but...

Brexit was a popular vote, with neither party actually supporting it. The interest in Brexit also grew against the wishes of major parties, industries and most centres of power. A reason parliament can't manage it decently is because parliament was and is mostly against it, including May.

This is not like ip laws, where interested lobbies co-opt the parliamentary systems with as little popular involvement (or knowledge) as possible. This was/is an actual division of opinions among the people. It wasn't imposed from above.

I hope you guys stay in, or at least close but I think it needs to be done in a way that respects the other side too.

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I think it's important to recognise that about 3 million UK long-term settled residents were not allowed to vote, and they were the people most strongly affected by it. And some UK citizens abroad were also not allowed to vote. Perversely given the nature of the issue, non-EU citizens with exactly the same type of migration were allowed to vote.

There were about 3.4 million non-UK EU citizens, many of them settled adults of voting age. They would have voted if they had migrated to the UK and become citizens. But they were told all their lives, that EU citizens don't need to become UK citizens, they have equivalent full rights in almost every respect without doing so, so they lived here in a fully settled way akin to citizenship. Sometimes for decades, with children and grandchildren in the UK. Some of them had respected positions in government.

Any of them, of voting age, could have registered to vote in the referendum if they had known sufficiently far in advance. That is, they could have applied for UK citizenship to do it - though not in the timescale in which the referendum actually occurred.

But EU citizens were discouraged from adopting UK citizenship because there was no need. This led to the perverse situation where non-EU immigrants had the vote, and EU immigrants did not, through no fault of their own.

The UK citizens, of voting age, who were not allowed to vote were all abroad. I expect most of them in the EU.

I'm pretty sure both groups would be pro-EU, and that 3 million number is more than enough to change the result.

So I would not say the Brexit referendum result of 2016 was even the popular result, for any reasonable definition of democracy in my mind.

Popular movement sponsored by a weird coalition of lying press, controversy-driven TV, illegal use of personal data, and (seemingly) foreign intelligence services?

The inability to force a clear Leave manifesto is the root of the disaster. What "should" have happened is either a Leave PM, or the 2017 election should have been run on a clear Leave manifesto specifying a realistic deal to be sought against a Remain opposition.

Nothing in politics is ever clean, and all those things are problems. But, we have a tendency to notice these things more when we don't like the outcome. Treating Brexit as illegitimate is not a recipe for a good way forward, IMO. Democracy works better with respect

Ok here's an angle. I can completely understand you if you are concerned about wanting free trade, free migration; but abstracted representation? Foreign authoritative bureaucracies?

I don't mean to say you're wrong. I'm just saying there appears to be obvious, legitimate concerns here, and your suggesting otherwise seems possibly disingenuous.

> abstracted representation

Yes, the EU representation is quite distant. The UK has an unelected upper house.

> Foreign authoritative bureaucracies?

This isn't great, but at least the EU one is elected. The alternative in all the other trade deals is unelected. Hence all the opposition to things like TTIP, and earlier complaints about GATT etc.

Fundamentally, voting against the EU doesn't make it go away. Some sort of framework always needs to exist to make agreements with other European countries. If the EU didn't exist, it would probably be necessary to invent it.

Hence the Norway/Switzerland situation: not in the EU, has to follow EU rules without having a vote on them.

> legitimate concerns

Here's the thing: hardly anyone talks about those anymore. Brexit has been absolutely dominated by antipathy towards immigrants, both EU and non-EU (despite this not being anything to do with the EU). There's no way to "unwind" EU immigration without ripping families apart.

(I was a Euroskeptic about the treatment of Greece, for example. But ultimately Greece realised that however bad a situation it was in, crashing out would be worse. The same applies to the UK, with "Tory Syriza" running it)

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