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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible. The question asked was:

> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

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"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill

People were pretty ill informed and voted leave for reasons like they were pissed off with the present situation, or they didn't like foreigners.

Which they were entitled to do but have ended up with a worse situation and worse foreigners.

> There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.

> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).

I think the ideal solution in an ideal world would be to do ranked choice voting between the main choices that could be reasonably negotiated and remain. So voters could pick between EEA, Canada-like, remain, etc all at the same time.

Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.

If you want to split the Leave vote that way you would have also needed to split the Remain vote by asking people what Remain means: something usually presented as obvious by Remainers but it's by no means so. For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.

> For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.

The EU institutions have done many things they weren't allowed to do under the treaties, so that argument just wouldn't have landed. An example of that was human rights law, which was originally never intended to be law and wasn't written tightly enough to be so. The UK and Poland obtained a supposedly water-tight opt out written in plain language, which the ECJ then simply voided. There are other such cases.

It was deliberately so, Dave wanted to be PM at lot and gave the Eurosceptics of the Tory party everything they wanted.

A simple question for a massively complex problem.

An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).

Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.

Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.

> I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible.

Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.

Voting for this once in a lifetime opportunity was smart; maybe the smartest ever. The smartest people in the UK voted for brexit. You will totally see in a few years when they made Britain great again!

I can see no reason at all to suppose that this might be the case. Quite the reverse given current events and the determination of the current administration.

I think the parent comment was a parody of trumpite rhetoric.

Good luck with that. Last I checked most more countries went to the BRICS summit rather than the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/brics-and-the-commonweal...

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