This Brexit thing - it's almost as if the British people didn't know anything at all when they voted for it. So many of them are genuinely surprised at what is happening.
What happened?
What happened?
Conservative backbenchers have wanted out of the EU for a while. To keep the peace within his own party, David Cameron (the former PM) promised them a referendum figuring it was a straight-forward (and safe!) lay-up that put the matter to bed, and that would then be the end of it. Essentially, "Remain" would easily win by a landslide and the matter would be settled for good.
The plan didn't pan out.
Because it was essentially intended as a rhetorical question when it was devised, no great amount of time was spent figuring out what a Leave vote would mean in practice as it was not expected to happen. Unfortunately, the upper echelons of both political parties spent so little time and effort explaining the implications that it left that role wide open for media outlets to fill in the many blanks - meaning that people on the Left were told it would be the end of days and those on the Right that it was a free ticket to the promised land with no downsides. The Right vote carried.
A lady I know who thinks the law is terrible was complaining the other day that her daughter had to get off her insurance at 26. I had to bite my tongue so hard to not be like, ya know, without Obamacare she'd have been booted 8 years ago.
Why not politely inform her that the extension is a provision of the ACA?
In a normal democracy with a referendum system, the people vote on a text in place of having the politicians do it. The question is always “to you approve the text such and such.” The first problem is that the UK constitution doesn’t have this system I think, the second problem is what to vote on. They could either negotiate a treaty first and then ask people to approve it, or they could ask people to vote on the mission of the negotiators (but it’s tricky since the outcome is not known)
Within 4 years they passed another referendum cutting the taxes they voted in to pay for the trains without repealing the referendum requiring the transit authority to build the trains. Doh!
It would be easier to give said family $10,000 and exile them from the state, but then you'd have to face a very frank realization, California is not a good state for most working class people.
That's besides the point, let me know when this train gets built. More cities need public transit
this isn't true, the UK doesn't have them very often but we had had two country-wide referendums prior to the EU referendum
and at the council/district level they are frequent, even being required by law for certain proposed changes
Referendums should be preceded by fact-checked pros and cons of each decision, side by side. But no, let politician sh*t-talk on TV and buses with nonsense instead.
Democracy works when the voters are informed. With disinformation, the loudest voice wins. That’s not democracy.
We have a representative democracy. Generally, you would assume if you're being asked to vote in a referendum, that either outcome would be implementable. Turns out that the referendum was really just David Cameron's plan to unify the conservatives, and he expected remain would win by a landslide, so didn't have a plan for if leave won.
Of course, we did vote for those representatives in the first place, so it's indirectly our fault either way.
That being said, given the enormity of this change, it was always going to be a challenge for the first year or two after it went into effect. In principle, EU scepticism is a perfectly reasonable view to have, our politicians just let us down.
So many?
https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/in-highsight-do-you-th... tracks the UK's evolving view on whether Brexit was the correct decision.