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Either the issue is too technical for the electorate, and you don't hold a referendum in the first place, or it's not, and you do, and then you live with the re

Either the issue is too technical for the electorate, and you don't hold a referendum in the first place, or it's not, and you do, and then you live with the results. What you don't do is try to cancel the referendum if you don't agree with the outcome. That's disingenuous. And yes, this is Hacker News, but no, I don't think politics can be reduced to technical issues. I'm not British and I don't have an axe to grind regarding Brexit. But it seems reasonable to frame the issue in terms of taking a cut in GDP in order to protect national sovereignty. Which goes to show that the issue goes well beyond economics.

notahacker 8y ago
When a government is clearly deadlocked and damaging the country rather than delivering on its promised better deal, people don't insist there is anything "disingenuous" about suggesting that the country might be better off calling another election rather than the living with their mistakes for the originally-proposed full five year term. Why would a referendum in which the EU status quo lost narrowly to a range of optimistic alternative visions of the future, most of which are now ruled out be any more irrevocable? It seems far more disingenuous to frame the issue in terms of taking a cut in GDP in order to protect national sovereignty when the Leave campaign's key argument was framing it as the precise opposite: their headline claim was about how much more money our government would have to spend on public services. Sure, some of the people that voted Leave would have accepted the "less EU jurisdiction for less GDP" tradeoff, but certainly not enough of them to have won the referendum if they believed that was the choice they were making.