Brexshit
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@Giles agreed, but the potential fall out could have been enormous.
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and also when scotland had there vote on independence they were persuaded to stay in the uk or they would be left out of the eu which they very much wanted to remain in.
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@Tago-Mago love the video
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@Tago-Mago From memory, Wales also was overall Leave (52.5%) and in line with the national vote. NI was marginally in favour of Remain (55.8%). Scotland was the outlier recording something like 62% in favour of Remain.
@gazza61 Well, 62% of them wanted to stay in. 38% wanted to leave. That's more "very much wanted" than the rest of the UK, I suppose, but not by 'very much'.
I've never understood the SNP's position on this... they want to leave the UK, in favour of a super-national organisation where the Scots would be even smaller fish in a much larger school (comparatively). Polling I've seen of SNP voters suggests that, in 2016, they were more inclined to vote Leave than non-SNP voters (funny that nationalists wouldn't be in favour of globalisation/super-national bodies...).
My, admittedly cynical, read on it is that Sturgeon and her Party jumped on the fact that, as a country, Scotland had the largest Remain majority (if you ignore Gibraltar) to bolster their argument for leaving the UK purely to attract Remain voters, while those that would want a fully independent Scotland realised that leaving the UK and joining the EU would be separate votes and arguments.
Ultimately I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say that this is something the Scots should have the right to decide for themselves, but I don't think you can just re-run referenda ad-infinitem until you get the result you want. For one thing you'd have no comeback to the person who comes along afterwards and says "best of three"?
(Also, as an aside and at the risk of going off topic, the SNP's rhetoric doesn't play well South of the wall either. Multiple of my English family members have asked "when do we get a vote on whether we want to kick out Scotland?" around the dinner table whenever Scottish Independence has been in the news cycle again. But I suppose that that suits the SNP's purposes just as well.)
Edit: realised I could just go and look up the actual voting proportions on Wikipedia, so I've put accurate voting data in the above.
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@EdH I'm aware that Brexit wasn't a case of "the English" dragging the rest of the UK out of the EU kicking and screaming against their will. I was merely pointing out, maybe not as articulately as is required for such a complicated and multi-faceted topic, that coverage of Brexit from my perspective focused heavily on England and failed to adequately address a number of issues that affected all other parts of the UK as well, or in some cases exclusively affected them, e.g. Northern Ireland as mentioned above. But that might be an indictment of the quality of reporting or my selective perception in the lead-up to the referendum
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@Tago-Mago Point taken. I do recall NI coming up at the margins ahead of the vote, but I think the argument went along the lines of Remain campaign saying "the Troubles could re-start" and the Leave campaign saying "don't be ridiculous". I don't recall any sort of in-depth analysis of the Good Friday Agreement or how that would interact with the EU treaties.
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@EdH Ultimately, the result of the referendum speaks for itself. In my opinion there's no point in repeating the referendum until there's a result that I like. That's democracy, like it or not.
The biggest issue in my opinion is the cavalier attitude with which Brexit was approached. As mentioned before, I don't think that the "Brexiteers" actually thought they were going to win, which is reflected in how things have gone since.
I also think that a more conciliatory tone on both sides would have helped. But the EU is the jilted lover in this scenario and the UK's players are blinded by their unexpected victory
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AND, the result of the vote was advisory not mandatory. 51:49 or whatever it was, Dave should have said that it was too close to be overwhelming. And quite frankly, we have an elected government to make decisions on our behalf, decisions that are too complex for mortals like me to understand properly....
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@Tago-Mago said in Brexshit:
the cavalier attitude with which Brexit was approached
In fairness, I don't think it could have been approached in any other way, for both political and legal reasons. The Leave campaign was not the Government of the day, so if they'd drawn up official plans then the Remain campaign would have been able to say "you're not in Government, none of that can be said to be a policy".
I think the problem here was that the Government had been foolish enough to take a position on the referendum. Once they did that, they couldn't allow the civil service to prepare contingency plans for a Leave result, as that would allow the Leave campaign to say "see, the Government has a plan, it'll look like this" when, for political reasons, the Government wanted to be able to present a vote to Leave as a jump into the unknown. In fact, the Government forbade the civil service from drawing up any plans for this very reason, as they would more-likely-than-not end up leaking to the press.
There is also the wrinkle that EU law as drafted actively forbids pre-Article 50 notice discussions with a Member State that is contemplating activating Article 50. (I can't recall if there was an ECJ decision on this point, I think there was, but it was certainly the Commission's position.) So any Government plans would have to be caveated with "we'd like to try and do [x], but the EU's position is unknown and they won't talk to us unless we actually do this".
If we could go back in time, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the Government should have stayed above the vote, saying "this is a choice you've got to make". This would allow the Gov to draw up plans - as far as they could given the EU's position and with the necessary caveats - which could have been published in advance. Meanwhile individual politicians would have been free to campaign for their preferred side.
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advisory not mandatory. 51:49 or whatever it was, Dave should have said that it was too close to be overwhelming
Technically true, the referendum was only advisory, but that's for arcane legal reasons to do with the UK's constitutional framework.
You'd have to weigh the political risks of invoking Article 50 and leaving the EU with the risks of going against the result of a referendum which, on a political level at least, you've promised people would be binding.
I'm not sure whether I'd like to see what would happen if Dave had decided to go back on that promise and refuse to Brexit after making such a promise.
*Edit: you've reminded me of fascinating legal-political arguments which were going on over at the UK Constitutional Law Association's blogs back in 2016-2019. The nerd in me now wants to go back and re-read them.
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Never take anything that I say as something I wholeheartedly believe in. I like taking a position and pushing it a little bit...
Don't worry. One side-effect of my first degree being PPE (with most of it being philosophy options) and being surrounded by much smarter people than me is that I have a tendency to think that way myself and assume that everyone is testing their points by making them publicly.
I have consequently developed a bad habit of prefacing most of my statements with "I think" when I talk. (My boss thinks I'm trying to be some combination of too-lawyerly, non-committal, and/or evasive all the time. I have to keep explaining that I'm always half-expecting a counter argument to every utterance I make, even if it's as obvious as "water is wet".)
