Put It To The People March London Tomorrow · 4:59pm Mar 22nd, 2019
If British politics were an Equestria Girls film, we would now be at the scene where the Prime Minister has transformed into a megalomaniac winged demon, and is now hovering above the Palace of Westminster, sending out shots of dark magic while cackling with laughter, yet frustrated with people’s efforts to thwart her evil plans.
What should happen at this point is a group of true friends should come together and join hands on Parliament Square and zap her with rainbows and lasers and turn her back into a harmless school girl, whose greatest misdeed was trampling through wheat fields.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we are going to get the ending we want. It seems the script writers are still just setting the scene for a line of dark sequels, which could drag on so long that the series may get canceled before we reach the epic finale where the magic of friendship would triumph over the forces of darkness.
But we are not defeated yet, so, fellow British citizens and residents, please come along to the march tomorrow. Let’s show how much we care about international friendship. While the PM won’t listen, there is a chance we can influence the mass of collectively incompetent MPs who are making the decisions, and let’s send a message to our European friends that Theresa May does not speak for us and we are not leaving them willingly.
This will be big. I will be going and plan to join friends in Hyde Park before. If anyone else will be there and would like to try to meet, DM me.
And if you haven’t signed this petition yet, please do so: Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU (now at 3.4 million and rising).
I'll be there.
No publisher or producer would ever touch a script this surreal, incoherent and downright idiotic. With the main protagonist flatter than cardboard but still evil because reasons. Also no unicorns despite being promised by the authors.
The very best of luck from Denmark.
I think you should be happy about this and just let Brexit happen and accustom to the changes. The UK survived before joining the EU and it will survive after leaving it.
And with the horrible direction the EU is going with each new and questionable decision it makes, leave while you still can is the better option.
If the Brexit happens, you'll be thankful it did, one day.
5031499
What are some of the questionable decisions the EU has made?
5031499
We also survived before we had computers and mobile telephones, but I don't want to go back to the days before that. I would rather keep my rights as a European citizen and have a say in the decision making. There will be far more questionable decisions made by the post-brexit administration and in the chaos it will be even harder to challenge them. Brexit is a project of the far right, driven by those with a desire to restrict freedom of movement and cut protection for workers and the environment. It goes against so many things I value, and I cannot see any realistic scenario where we will be thankful for it.
Best of luck from Norway.
Oh, right, Brexit. Sorry, most of the room in my brain for nightmarishly terrible European politics has been monopolized by Article 13. Best of luck in getting through to Sunset's teenage zombie army.
5031499
The leave campaign promised all the benefits without the restrictions and a golden age for Britain (Boris Johnsons 'Cake and eat it' quote comes to mind). No one spoke of 'surviving'. The UK was the 'sick man of Europe' before it joined, why would you want to go back there? The UK has the best deal of all member states and, like all members, has a veto in all decisions. It has been one of the most influential nations in the EU, not some kind of prisoner.
5031518
One of the consequences of Brexit is that it is distracting attention from so many other important issues. I did mean to engage with the Article 13 debate and write to my MEPs, but I've been so busy with other stuff, like fighting brexit, that I never did. And I soon won't have any representative in the European Parliament to write to. I will probably end up doing what you are doing and pleading with my European friends to intervene about something which affects me, but which I will have no say over, because Brexit.
Brexit is the natural result of size of beurecracy excedding a critical limit.
What evreyone is comlaining about has nothing to do with Brexit itself, but the thugs using force to prevent relief supplies reaching the needy.
Or for the average human.
Brexit is a classic case of Domestic Abuse. You still tell the person to go back and put up with it?
5031527
Brexit is a form of revolt against the imposition of neoliberalism. It is doomed, however, for two reasons. First, domestic British politics has been the exclusive preserve of neoliberal parties since the 80s, and that has not changed - not even with the rehabilitation of the social-democratic wing of the Labour Party. Second, and this is intertwined with the first point, every party in power today must implement neoliberal policy, because the real power lies not in any country's domestic politics but in international capital markets, which can punish and reward governments more quickly, efficiently, and brutally than voters can.
The EU is, to be sure, a tool for the imposition of neoliberal policy, but it is far from the only one and not even the most powerful. Its special role is to secure a privileged place in Europe for German capital - the British strategy in joining the EU in the first place was to disrupt that and secure for the City a place in the sun. So Brexit is also counterproductive from the point of view of the national interest in the present constellation of power - but the national interest is articulated by neoliberal parties with which people are sick.
The whole thing is also, as Pineta mentioned, the perfect vehicle for neo-Nazis to build support for their politics, as Brexit is doomed to both fail and to continue discrediting the parties that implement it.
Really just a shit show all 'round.
5031527
The road to Brexit summed up by Jonathan Pie. Brutal and on point.
I'll stop now, all of this is too depressing and I fear for my friends in the UK who are going to have their rights taken away and who in some cases may very well lose their livelihoods because of this madness.
Brexit is bad for pretty much everyone, even if we're not in Europe. D: Catastrophically less so over here in the US, but still. If there's anything that can be done to stop it, I wish you the best in doing so.
5031507
Ridiculous regulations about how well-shaped vegetables that end up in supermarkets "have to be" (resulting in a ton of food that gets thrown away because cucumbers aren't perfectly shaped according to EU politicians), Article 13 and another ridiculous regulation about the exact degrees fries "have to be" fried and how brown they are allowed to be when they get sold to costumers (sorry to those who like their fries in restaurants or from food stalls very brown and crunchy from the EU politicians who say you aren't supposed to eat your fries like that).
Oh, and the EU tried to ban Doner Kebab through a backdoor by using the popular "It's not healthy for you" argument.
Just to name a few. I'm sure there has been more, but I didn't go digging and don't have time for that right now. Just the stuff I personally heard about. Article 13 should be obvious (the EU denounced protesters as "bots", effectively declaring all protests as invalid, just to make it a little bit more obvious) and the food examples sound eerily like Orwell.
If that direction keeps up, I hope Austria leaves next.
5031511
See my examples below. The EU restricts more freedom than the UK ever attempted or will likely attempt in the future.
The EU itself already said that UK and european citizens will keep a lot of those rights, including the right to work and live in EU countries and to keep living and working in the UK.
It's the UK that takes the risk of a hard brexit, but the EU is, surprisingly, pretty reasonable and aware of the consequences that a hard brexit would bring and aims to make things as easy as possible for UK citizens.
Normally, I'm the first one who doesn't trust politicians (or anyone in a certain position of power, really), but in that case, I think it's worth listening to them for once and to let the UK government do it. As past examples have shown, the powers at work in Brussels are far more nefarious than the UK government.
Some changes will come for the UK, without a doubt, but the country will adapt to the changes after a while and in the end, I think it will turn out to be the better decision. Maybe it doesn't look like that right now, but I'm sure the benefits of that decision will become apparent soon enough.
5031559
Except none of those is actually true. They're just lies that have been printed in British newspapers in the hope of selling more copies.
Obviously the EU isn't perfect, but given Britain's physical proximity to Europe - it shares a land border - we'll inevitably be subject to whatever rules Europe passes. Isn't it better to be part of that process than merely subject to it?
5031517 I am reminded of "Have fun storming the castle." :)
5031560 "Brexit is a project of the far right..." By the logical inverse then, the EU is a project of the statist left in an attempt to impose *their* version of order upon the countries within. Just putting it out there, because I don't know too much about Brexit except...
Generally, in an argument among countries such as this, their words are meaningless, and their actions are what really counts. The British people voted to leave (by fairly narrow margin). The EU bureaucracy is fighting fairly hard to keep them in (by a wide margin). This leaves a general idea of the cost/benefit of each party to the agreement, much as if you were trying to leave your apartment lease, and the landlord is fighting tooth and nail to keep you there might indicate he's having a hard time leasing the flat. (i.e. the EU gets more out of Britain being a member than not.)
Legal Insurrection (an excellent blog run by lawyers) has been keeping a fair track of the ongoing discussion in a fairly neutral and non-frantic way.
5031563
Again that argument. Let me ask you, for what purpose would british newspapers do this? Spreading lies about the EU to rile up the british people against it and to motivate a vote to leave the EU that way? That sounds like it's the plot of some political thriller but not like something that actually happens.
For one, the Brexit plans are still pretty recent. It wasn't too long ago that the british government developed the desire to leave the EU. Until that happened, there weren't many voices that suggested to leave the EU, if there were any at all.
Second, what you shrug off as lies wasn't just printed in british newspapers, it was printed in austrian newspapers, as well. And likely in the newspapers of all the other EU countries. Are all of these newspapers liars, too?
I read the articles about the regulations for fries and the attempted, backdoor doner kebab ban myself in austrian newspapers. And Austria is a happy EU member state, the vast majority of people here want to stay in the EU, so no newspapers have any reason to ignite anything, cause there's nothing to ignite here in Austria.
And the same goes for Article 13. Are you really suggesting that this article doesn't exist and that british newspapers made it up? That's completely stupid, the EU itself talks about Article 13 and openly defends it, so that's even more of a real thing than the rest is.
All examples that I listed here are true. These regulations by the EU happened, they are facts. There is no conspiracy against the EU by newspapers.
5031572
That the EU gets a lot out of the UK is obvious. And with a majority vote to leave the EU, I see even less of a problem. Sounds like the british government and the people are in agreement over this then, so I'm left wondering where those strong protests against the leave suddenly come from.
5031572
Maybe don't just blindly apply logical inverses, then? The European project going back all the way to the beginning was never a project of the Left - Adenauer was a Christian Democrat and DeGaulle was, well, a Gaullist. The Brandt and Mitterand governments acquiesced to it more than anything else, and it did them in in the end. The Schroeder and Hollande governments were far more enthusiastic, and they hollowed out their parties implementing neoliberal policy. The British Tories joined the EEC in a cynical maneuver most of their voters didn't support, and Labour was almost entirely opposed at the time. New Labour embraced Europeanism wholeheartedly, however, the residue of which can be seen in the People's Vote campaign (largely a Lib-Lab outfit, and on the Labour side largely grassroots and student- and professional-driven with at most grudging support from the hard-left leadership and virtually none from the working-class towns).
5031661
Well, let's find out; it should be easy enough to check! After all, this "internet" thing that we use to talk horsefiction with also has things called "search engines" that let you quickly research and evaluate suspect claims. So, let's start with "the EU is banning brown fries." Here's the first link that comes up when I google "EU french fries ban:" https://www.beuc.eu/blog/tag/eu-ban-french-fries/
To save you some time, here's the relevant portion:
So, your fry claim is a lie. Let's try the "cucumbers must be perfectly shaped or they get thrown out" one next! When I google "EU cucumber shape," the very first result is the Wikipedia article "Euromyth" ("The term euromyth is used to refer to exaggerated or invented stories about the European Union and the activities of its institutions, such as purportedly nonsensical EU legislation"). Wikipedia's not a valid source by itself, sure, but it conveniently links to the European Commission's own analysis of the law at https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/straight-cucumbers/
Here's the relevant bit:
So, that's also a lie! Last one you mentioned is something called a Doner Kebab. Being a simple American, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to go waaay out on a limb and guess that, if your first two claims are straight-up lies, there's probably not a lot of truth to the "EU tried to use shady backdoor lawmaking to ban it."
If you don't like the EU, that's fine. You're entitled to that opinion. Myself, I don't know nearly enough about European politics to have an informed opinion on what's best for Britain at this juncture, nor do I pretend to. But if you're going to pretend to, it'd be nice if you at least didn't spout simplistic, easily-disprovable (literally seconds on Google over here!) lies as "justification."
5031682
You probably know doner kebab as shwarma. It's reasonably common in America, under both names.
Honest question: Would you be supporting a second referendum, if the original results were reversed?
Perhaps the saddest part of Brexit is how the younger people voted overwhelmingly to Remain, while the older people were the primary force behind Leave. On both sides of the pond, the 50+ age group have largely voted to screw over their children and grandchildren, and I suspect that the Boomers will be derisively referred to as the Worst Generation when those of us still living in 30 years have to deal with their messes.
5031761
The thing is that the referendum did not truly pass:
For reversible things, a simple majority (50% plus 1 vote) is fine, but for irreversible things, one should require ⅔ plus 1 vote to make certain that one does not jump over a cliff from people in the mushy middle saying "Meh, I guess that I shall vote yes, although I am just as inclined to vote no."
On another note, the people calling for the vote had no plan for leaving the EU. That is like deciding to jump out of a plane in midflight and then, while falling, trying to decide what to do:
Jumper A:
"I guess that we should have taken parachutes with us."
Jumper B:
"Hind sight is 2020. ¿How could we have anticipated that jumping out of a plane at over a myriad (a myriad is 10,000) meters high would be a bad idea?"
Since BrExit passed by far less than ⅔ plus 1 vote, you should throw it out. If the supporters of BrExit want to try again, tell to them that, if they have a complete detailed plan for BrExit, and they present the plan to the general public, they can have another vote, but they will need to get ⅔ plus 1 vote to pass.
I hope that your protest gets the attention of the politicians, but I doubt that it will:
The politicians seem to have heads made mostly of skulls, fat, and cerebral fluid, with hardly any brain at all. You can throw out the bums at the next election, but is will be too late for BrExit.
5031825
If we want to talk procedure, referenda are basically a bad idea, and it is both unfortunate and wrong that they have become conflated with democracy. The plebiscite is a tool of tyranny going back to Napoleon, used to rubber-stamp and legitimize settled government policy. The Brexit referendum was no different in intent - the Tories (and Labour, which saw fit to spend most of the campaign trying to commit suicide rather than campaign) just happened to screw things up so badly that they didn't get their preferred result.
5031682
And what, do you think, this "strive to bring acrylamide levels down" and the methods listed will lead to? To fries that aren't brown anymore.
Whether food makers are being told "You have to remove brown fries from your menu" or "You only need to try removing brown fries from your menu" isn't making any kind of difference when random surprise controls happen. If they are seen selling brown fries, every control organ can guess that they likely didn't try enough. Which is probably getting countered by the food makers with the argument that they did try and the control organ might believe them, but eventually, more controls will happen and if they sell brown fries every time, then it's obvious that they don't try. Eventually, they will cave and do it, which will ultimately lead to it that brown fries aren't a thing anymore one day.
In addition to this, you can't predict how food makers will react to this exactly. Some might wait it out and hope that they aren't getting caught and will therefore only apply the regulations to their fries much later. Others might be nervous and deny you immediately when you ask for brown and crunchy fries, pointing to the law. That creates a situation where you, at best, can hope that your local food stall is daring enough to act against the law, least for a while.
The wording in this article makes it sound like it isn't all that bad and that brown fries aren't banned at all. But if you think about this logically all the way to the end, the result is the same: Food makers have to take steps to avoid making brown fries and will eventually succeed with that when those steps work, whether that happens of their own volition or is "encouraged" by control organs and the law.
So, in short, this came to be because industry representatives wanted that buyers can purchase cucumbers in the exact same quality and quantity in each EU country. Which was achieved by introducing grading rules that assess whether a cucumber has that quality and quantity. And cucumbers naturally come in different shapes, lengths, sizes and weights, so the only way how grading rules can assess that quality and quantity is by establishing guidelines on how shaped, long, big and heavy a cucumber is allowed to be before it reaches the customer.
If it meets the criteria set by these guidelines, then the cucumber gets sold. If it doesn't, it gets thrown away.
Also, I never said that cucumbers have to be "straight" by these guidelines. Only hat regulations are put on cucumbers that determine how they should look. What these grading rules specify exactly doesn't change that they specify something and that they require cucumbers on the market to meet certain criteria before they get sold.
That's another clever wording here. Whether the word "banned" is used or not, doesn't matter. With these regulations, the end result is the same: Cucumbers of a certain shape/size/length/weight don't get sold anyway and thrown away instead.
No matter if we talk about the fries or the cucumbers here; there are actual regulations in place, regulations made by the EU, that control how our fries are made and how our cucumbers on the market look like.
And I am left entirely clueless about and speechless over that you defend the EU so ferociously in these matters when it has taken clear steps that lead to it that food gets wasted and that EU citizens get dictated what they can eat.
You sound like you don't enjoy freedom. Or like the truth is so horrible to you that you reject it. Whatever it is, it's a type of thinking the EU is definitely happy about.
Also, here's where you can read up about the doner kebab ban:
https://www.businessinsider.de/doner-kebabs-could-be-banned-across-europe-due-to-links-with-heart-disease-2017-12?r=US&IR=T
And before you say "But the EU never wanted to ban doner kebabs, just the phosphate used in them": Said phosphate is 100% necessary to make doner kebab, without it, the meat would dry up too quickly and it would fall apart on the skewer, making sales of doner kebab impossible.
The EU can't simply go and say it will ban doner kebab, the public outcry and scandal over banning a certain type of food would be too big. But if it would just ban the usage of a key ingredient in doner kebabs, then no one can claim that the EU is banning a certain dish.
And this key ingredient is used in various other food as well, such as cheese and hamburgers, but the ban of phosphate only spoke about banning it when it's used for doner kebabs, not in anything else. A strategy to ban doner kebabs through a backdoor.
5031848
I partially agree and disagree with you:
Referenda can be a valuable tool, but with lots of asterices. The trouble is that the general public is not comprised of lawyers and does not have time to research the issues thoroughly. I shall give myself as an example:
I am not a lawyer and I work 72 hour a week (12 hours a day and 6 days a week). I do not understand the legalees and I do not have the scores of hours it would take to research each issue.
That said, referenda are great for taking the temperature on an issue, but the legislature should not just abdicate its responsibility to legislate.
Best of luck! I kind of expect the UK to crash out and burn, because your political leaders seem to be a bunch of fundamentally useless pig-headed idiots, but I hope to be wrong, for your sake as well as the rest of us.
5031977
If the point of a referendum is to take the pulse of the public, we have better ways to do that. We have street demonstrations, we have opinion polls, we have big data aggregating every opinion we feel compelled to express. A referendum is unnecessary.
But I would argue - and have argued - that the point of a referendum is not to give the government information. It is a tool to legitimize settled government policy. It is supposed to demonstrate how popular the government is, and how popular its particular decisions are. It is backwards-looking.
It is also easy to manipulate. A referendum is an up-or-down vote on a particular issue, typically boiled down to its basic premise, with all the technical details left to figure out. The process of gelatinizing the issue, of reducing it to its most abstract, leaves a lot of room for clever people to play. In what direction do you want to abstract? To what social values do you want to appeal? What attitudes do you want to gin up?
Opinion polls are manipulative in most of the same ways. They are phrased about as carefully, and are about as designed to elicit a desired response, as referendum questions. So they are perhaps not so great tools for taking the pulse of the public after all. But no one apart from perhaps literally Bill Clinton and Tony Blair defers to opinion polls the way the British government and in particular the Tory Party seems to defer to referenda. Certainly there are a number of American state legislatures that seem happy to ignore or repeal ballot initiatives, which aren't the same thing as referenda but are better because, legal training or not, when you're voting on a ballot measure you can read the thing or at least an executive summary more involved than a sentence-long up-or-down statement.
(Since you brought it up, I am a lawyer, and I firmly believe that it requires neither special skill nor training beyond literacy, that conversely lawyers are susceptible to the same manipulations as ordinary folk, and that the whole industry is mostly a racket.)
So what's going on here? Britain has had several high-profile, high-stakes referenda over the past few years, all called by the Tories. Two of these, the first two, on alternative vote and Scottish independence, went the way the party leadership preferred - both against. The third, Brexit, did not. The difference is somewhat telling. AV was a sop to the Liberals whom the Tories needed to please to get them to stay in coalition, but who could not themselves gain the necessary support to actually win a referendum. By offering one, and then campaigning halfheartedly if at all for their own government's referendum, the Tories lost nothing and gained five years in government. The Scottish independence referendum was more fraught. It wasn't the government that wanted it, but a non-government party (that was simultaneously the Scottish government), and the government thought it was calling that party's bluff. They gambled, self-consciously (the SNP had a big majority in the Scottish parliament in 2014), and they won. They thought they could pull the same trick with Brexit. The only party calling for that, seemingly, was UKIP. UKIP was a strange beastie. It had captured 205% of the vote or so in the 2015 election, and was a credible threat to the Tory Party on its right flank. Largely this was due to being able to capture Tory voters with a promise of exit from the EU. This was popular for many reasons. I've posited above that it is promptly an anti-neoliberal reaction, and I'll stick by that, but there are many facets to neoliberalism and many reactions to it. There is an anti-austerity strain in Brexit, and it finds its political home in the current leadership of the Labour Party. But that's not what appealed to Tory-turned-UKIP voters. These people are incensed about freedom of movement first and foremost. It's where you find provincial Little Englandism (about which I will not go into further because I'm given to understand it's a folk concept and despite being able to analyze British politics with what I hope is some degree of facility, I am an American), anti-Slavic prejudice and even great replacement conspiracy theorists.
So the promise of a Brexit referendum was supposed to be a means of stopping that flow of votes, and so secure for the Tories another term in government. It did that successfully. Then the idiots, instead of sitting pretty in government for five years and placating their voters some other way, actually went ahead and did it. And they were caught entirely off guard by how popular it turned out to be, and how unpopular the neoliberal principles of modern British government were. It turned out that just enough people were able to project enough into a national vision for Britain (not necessarily all the same national vision, but a national vision - politics makes strange bedfellows especially in up-or-down referenda!), that Leave won. Having sold two referenda as expression of the democratic will of the people that the government must follow, having gambled thrice, the Tories finally lost.
Funny, when I headed into downtown today to finally buy the newest MLP: FiM comic, I ran into a demonstration against Article 11 and Article 13 that I didn't know was happening.
It took about five minutes until all the demonstrators, who walked very slowly, were past me, so participation in that was very high.
Austria is often pretty lame about a lot of things, but I'm glad that everyone stands up for a free Internet, at least.
5032014
I am aware of the campaigns for Scottish Independence and IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting). Scottish Independents seems as ilconceived to me as BrExit. I have more to say about IRV:
I am into electoral mathematics. I shall quote myself:
Come to think about it, a few years ago, The United Kingdom dodged a bullet when it rejected IRV (Instant RunOff Voting), Orwellianly called Ranked-Choice Voting (thus poisoning the well for all ranked-choice voting systems).
I need to go back a millenium:
When a white christian male landowner went to vote, a clerk would record a voice-vote. The voter would declare a single vote.
When we switched to paper-ballots, we idiotically kept the 1-Vote-Per-Office Rule. This lead to Duverger's Law. :
In the early twentieth century, the people of Australia wanted to vote for 3rd Parties and Independents. The ruling parties (the National/Liberal Coalition and The Labor Party) did not want competition, so created IRV as a false reform. This is how IRV works:
Voters rank candidates. The candidate with the least number of # 1 Votes, is eliminated and the # 2 votes of this candidate are redistributed. This continues until a candidate gets over 50%.
In practice it works thus:
Those on the right give to their favorite candidate # 1. They give the Liberal/National Coalition #2 just in case their candidate fails.
People on the left give to their favorite candidate a # 1. They give Labor # 2 just in case.
All votes transfer to National/Liberal Coalition and the Labor Party. Only the Liberal/National Coalition or the Labor Party can win.
The simplest real reform is to get rid of the Overvote Rule:
Mary and Edward run for a seat. The results are thus:
Mary:
"60%"
Edward:
"40%"
Elizabeth, a candidate very similar to Mary joins the race:
Mary:
"30%"
Edward:
"40%"
Elizabeth:
"30%"
We eliminate the overvote rule:
Mary:
"60%"
Edward:
"40%"
Elizabeth:
"59%"
¡Mary wins!
This is called Approval voting. One can Approve Multiple Candidates. It is not subject to Duverger's Law and allows 3rd Parties and Independents to win.
If England wants to reform its voting system, rather than listening to hucksters selling snakeoil, read the mathematical works of Lewis Carroll about voting systems. Despite being dead for a century, modern Electoral Mathematicians still cite his work in their papers.
Approval voting works great for single-winner, bt ¿what about proportional representation?:
If England wants a new House of Proportional Representation, it should use Asset-Voting:
Lewis Carroll invented asset voting for proportional representation. Unfortunately the inferior system Single Transferable Vote already existed. This is how Asset-Voting works:
Each vote is an asset, which is conserved but transferable. Mary gets 1 asset-votes. The size of the legislature is set to the cube-root of the population. She gives her vote to her favorite candidate. Her Prefered candidate does not have enough votes to make the legislature. her candidate and other similar candidates negotiate. they pool their asset-votes. They have enough asset-votes for sending 2 of their members to the legislature. The decide to give the asset-votes to Tom and Susan. Tom and Susan join the legislature. Because asset-votes are conserved, this is proportional.
In the 2016 Presidential Election, Trump won by a plurality in 6 states and 1 district of Nebraska. If the 3rd parties and independents could transfer their votes instead of just acting as spoilers —— ¡never vote 3rd party or independent under plurality! —— Clinton would have won with 335 Electoral Votes.
Lewis Carroll created for proportional representation.
5031761
No. Having seen how destructive a Leave vote has been before we have even got to the point of leaving, if I were to somehow walk through a portal into a universe where the votes were reversed and someone were to suggest repeating it to give leavers another chance, I would shake my head and say, no, trust me, you really don’t want to go there.
I believe this is one reason why the idea of repeating the Scottish Independence referendum is so unpopular with people in Scotland.
That is, of course, said with the benefit of knowledge. Now what would I say the votes were reversed and I had no knowledge of how things have played out here? In such a case I would still be opposed to Brexit, and oppose a vote, but I would think, as I thought after the first vote, that it won’t be a total disaster as there will surely be agreement to let the UK stay in the Single Market, and maybe things won’t change that much.
I suppose, in this hypothetical scenario, if a million people were to march on the streets of London calling for a second vote as they really really want to leave the EU, and five million were to sign a petition, then I would have to admit there would be a very strong case to do so. But seriously, that would not have happened.
Your question does, sort of, imply there is a symmetry between the two outcomes, but the realities of the two outcomes could hardly be more different.
5032796
Just to make myself clear, I consider that referendums are a notoriously bad idea in democracies, a way of imposing mob rule by way of the vote and ignoring actual, established democratic mechanisms. For a notoriously disastrous example, just look at Venezuela's constitutional referendum back in 1999, which is at the root of their current issues.
So, while the first referendum was a bad idea, this second one seems even more like a political hail-Mary in order to revert the original decision, and a way of silencing the people who voted for Brexit back then. There is just no good outcome out of it, it will reinforce the division inside the country, and make certain groups feel even more disenfranchised, whatever the result. Not that there is enough time for it to happen at this point anyway.
Just for some context, I don't live in the UK, but I was against Brexit back then. And I also believe that the EU has taken many overtly authoritarian steps these last few years, betraying the original intent of the project, and that the faster the UK gets away from that mess, the better. In that parallel universe, I could honestly see a wave of public support for a new Brexit referendum around this time, considering stuff like GDPR, Articles 13 and 17, and the recent movement towards the creation of an European Army coming from Makron and Merkel.