Another elephant in the room

TheCatWoman said:

Brexit was won by a narrow majority and not only were the 48% who wanted to stay totally ignored, but leavers were never asked what they really wanted either?

Is that not like a group of people voting to have a light switched on or off, then those who lost the vote complaining that their opinions were not taken into consideration.

It was a binary choice with little nuance - be in the EU or out.

TheCatWoman said:

I think we need to be much more united as a continent

Have you lived in any other European countries (excluding Ireland)? They all have very strong ideas of their national identity and getting them to all agree on stuff - especially stuff that heavily impacts themselves - is a nightmare.

The EU works well on an everyday bureaucracy level but not so well for big decisions like this, plus Russia has a lot of influence in key areas through people who it controls who can veto key decisions or slow them down so much that they become unusable.

China are getting up there with their influence peddling as well although for different reasons, so getting any sort of united front as you suggest is going to be highly unlikely.

I think the best we could hope for is for individual countries (eg Poland) to react to an incursion by Russia and persuade a bunch of other neighbours to respond with force. Russia seems so ground down militarily by the Ukraine war that a sustained and focussed response could lead to the government being overthrown which is the best chance for peace.

Sorry if this seem bleak but I try to be realistic rather than idealistic about what can happen.

"Is that not like a group of people voting to have a light switched on or off, then those who lost the vote complaining that their opinions were not taken into consideration. It was a binary choice with little nuance - be in the EU or out."

Your analogy doesn't work at all and just highlights the main issue. It was presented as a binary choice but the reality is anything but binary. If it were, we'd have just left and all the arguing about the deal we would have with the EU afterwards that saw for Theresa May wouldn't have happened. It's the oversimplification of complicated issues that populists like Farage and Johnson (plus many others around the world) always push. A large part of the electorate don't want nuance, or uncertainty or benefits and drawbacks etc. They just want to be told that the thing they think is a problem can be solved very easily if we just do this one simple thing but the elite are lying to you about it.

The analogy also fails because turning a light off has very basic consequences that everyone can easily understand - it gets darker. If those people were told that by switching off the light, they'd have better healthcare and then that turned out to be false, there would be a case for suggesting that the vote was fraudulently influenced.

To run with your flawed analogy further - you could also consider that some people that campaigned for turning the light off had their own enormous torch that they could use instead,that would only benefit them and not everyone else i.e. rich people who are insulated from the negative effects by their wealth.

I could go on but to summarise, no, it isn't like that at all and the suggestion that it is demonstrates exactly why the leave campaign was a huge lie.

McFrost said:

It was presented as a binary choice but the reality is anything but binary.

I think we have to disagree here. The end result of the referendum was to be in the club (and hence bound by its rules and paying its fees) or to be free of them to do our own thing. 

We had no worthwhile power to negotiate once we announced we were leaving as all the other members of that club turned back to work with one another and left us to get on with our own thing without any help - pretty much what we were asked to vote for.

Where the deception came into it was the possible future gains for the country that would follow when we left. The politicians promising great things had not done their research and were touting figures that were far from real in order to get their objectives met.

I agree that the leave campaign was based on lies and ignorance but I still think it was a binary choice by nature. You can't be 40% a member of a club for example - it is 100% or 0%. There does exist a different membership level but this was never researched to see if it was an option (it turns out it wasn't).

Brexit was just another nail in the coffin of our national prosperity, one that has been long in the making and still continues today under the current government.

Were we ever to come crawling back to the EU asking for membership, we are likely to have to pay a very hefty premium to get back in and have terms that are much less attractive as we are now a much poorer nation and have demonstrated that we make a poor business partner.

McFrost said:

It was presented as a binary choice but the reality is anything but binary.

I think we have to disagree here. The end result of the referendum was to be in the club (and hence bound by its rules and paying its fees) or to be free of them to do our own thing. 

We had no worthwhile power to negotiate once we announced we were leaving as all the other members of that club turned back to work with one another and left us to get on with our own thing without any help - pretty much what we were asked to vote for.

Where the deception came into it was the possible future gains for the country that would follow when we left. The politicians promising great things had not done their research and were touting figures that were far from real in order to get their objectives met.

I agree that the leave campaign was based on lies and ignorance but I still think it was a binary choice by nature. You can't be 40% a member of a club for example - it is 100% or 0%. There does exist a different membership level but this was never researched to see if it was an option (it turns out it wasn't).

Brexit was just another nail in the coffin of our national prosperity, one that has been long in the making and still continues today under the current government.

Were we ever to come crawling back to the EU asking for membership, we are likely to have to pay a very hefty premium to get back in and have terms that are much less attractive as we are now a much poorer nation and have demonstrated that we make a poor business partner.

It was presented as binary but it never was. "In the club or out of the club" is a massive oversimplification. There are different levels of relationship with Europe and the idea of no relationship whatsoever has never been a realistic option. The leave campaign pretended we could leave and then negotiate a new relationship with Europe that would benefit us and only us, which was laughable. Nobody but the most swivel eyed of Euro sceptics believed we could have no relationship whatsoever but the binary choice put to us meant that we decided to leave with no idea of what that relationship was going to be and with serious damage to our reputation and negotiating power.