oh god politics · 2:04am Dec 18th, 2018
TLDR: politics confuses me
So like many Brits I've been following the Brexit dealings quite closely for the past month or so, since it's all heating up now. Two years ago in the UK, the public were given a choice: remain in the EU, or leave the EU?
I voted Remain, purely out of long-held Europhile tendencies and a desire not to rock the boat that we already had. Aaaaand... the Remain vote lost. Leave won 52% of the vote which makes them the winner.
I was disappointed at the time, but after a while I accepted that it may not necessarily be a bad thing that we're leaving. After all, a vague sense of liking European languages and cheese isn't a solid foundation for an economy. What if the EU fell apart and crashed and burned? Would I still want to be a part of it then? Or would I enjoy having had an early out and being in a country that is now self-sufficient and happily trading on its own terms? It seems to me that you can make a good case for remaining or leaving and that it just depends on what you make of it.
But now, watching the furore in the UK Parliament, I'm just left really confused. Our Prime Minister, Theresa May, has been clear from day one that she means to deliver Brexit. She keeps saying it. She's determined to deliver what the people voted for. The people, she says, just want the Government to get with on it. To do otherwise would be a failure of democracy and a betrayal of the people.
And my question is this: why doesn't anyone pull her up on the fact that actually, only a little over half of the "people" voted for Brexit? She's excluding like 48% of the country whenever she says that. Isn't anyone going to correct her on this point? She's kinda lying when she says that it's what everyone wanted. Isn't like half the country getting really mad at that? I haven't heard that they are and that really puzzles me since people usually love getting mad about politics.
And on that note, why was this referendum result even accepted at all? Why not wait for a bigger majority, like, say, 65% to 35%? Isn't that how some votes work? I can understand that the Government doesn't want to back out now because they're in too deep at this point... but why didn't they just say before the referendum, "Okay, we'll do it, but only if a good majority of people want to"? I mean, who could argue with that?
Sure, you could argue that the place where you draw the line for a majority is arbitrary, but the Government makes arbitrary decisions all the time anyway, and the whole point is that it's a safeguard so we don't make a poor decision based on misinformation or fearmongering, which surely is something that both sides should be in favor of right? But that didn't happen and we instead launched into this decision based on a First Past The Post system, because... well, I don't know. I'm really puzzled. Sure, Leave won, but that doesn't mean it's a good decision. It's 2% away from being completely undecidable. Is it still the unassailable will of the people if 52% vote Remain instead?
I mean, as I understand it, the referendum isn't even a vote anyway, but a tool that gives Parliament the taste of what the country thinks about a thing. So why would you take a result that's almost 50-50 as being indicative of the will of the people? Theresa May is charging ahead based on this not-entirely-convincing result because she says it's what the people want. Even though she's one of the people who said she didn't want it.
Politics is weird.
Last I heard she was a hardcore remainer who tried to hold a second vote because she wasn't happy the first one didn't turn out her way. Also heard she's trying to make the worst leave possible in order to make remaining look more desirable.