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It was virtually 50/50 and should not have proceeded. The bar to leave was set too low. 2/3rd better, and larger turnout should have been mandated. 16 year olds

• bingbong4748 27d ago
  “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it." - Nigel Farage, May 2016
• TulliusCicero 27d ago
  I dunno about 2/3rds, but there should definitely be some kind of supermajority required for things like joining or leaving the EU. Even a 55% requirement would be a lot better than a simple majority imo.
  • FartyMcFarter 27d ago
    Then we'd have to hear the Brexiteers whining on and on about democracy. This way we get to see their project fail. I don't know which one is worse.
    • danaris 27d ago
      Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few with reduced quality of products, increased prices, worse access to other countries, and a host of other problems... ...or we have to listen to some people whine?
      • FartyMcFarter 27d ago
        That's a good point, but sometimes it's a good thing for people to see the consequences of their (and others') choices. Perhaps it could have some good medium / long-term effects.
      • whateverboat 27d ago
        > Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few Few? 51% is a few? I mean, I also think Brexit was a monumentally stupid decision, but 51% of people wanted it, no? Even assuming that everyone who didn't vote would have voted for remain, given the voter turnout of 71% (which is already very high for any election, typical turnout is around 57%), 35% of people said yes. That's not a few, that a big chunk.
        • HPsquared 27d ago
          What if 51% weakly want something and 49% strongly want the opposite?
          • ipaddr 27d ago
            If 51% of the population weakly wanted something they would lose the vote because most wouldn't bother voting. Didn't happen here.
          • 1718627440 27d ago
            Strongly enough to vote for it.
        • danaris 27d ago
          The "few" I'm talking about are the politicians who pushed for the referendum, and the politicians and media execs that cheerfully portrayed it as if Brexit was going to cause Europe to give the UK everything it wanted with zero drawbacks or tradeoffs, as if they were still the Mighty And Unchallengeable British Empire. And in any case, the point of my post was the "suffering", not the "few".
        • multjoy 27d ago
          The biggest issue is that at the time of the vote, nobody had any idea of what Brexit actually meant. The leave campaign could literally promise anything and a) they wouldn’t have to deliver it and b) everyone who voted for Brexit can reasonably suggest that they voted for something other than what was actually delivered. The best you can say about the Brexit vote is that 51% wanted something other than the status quo.
      • tonyedgecombe 27d ago
        The winners are still whining anyway.
        • teamonkey 27d ago
          More like “we won, don’t mention it” It was recently the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote. Not a single firework.
    • UpsideDownRide 26d ago
      There is nothing inherent to democracy that says that everything needs a simple majority for a decision.
    • TulliusCicero 26d ago
      Democracies require supermajorities for stuff all the time, it's pretty typical, especially for constitutional changes. And in this case, it would also mean that Britain would've joined the EU with a 55%+ majority as well.
  • IndySun 27d ago
    55%, maybe. But that still leaves a divided country for decades afterwards. It was handled badly from start to finish. Many 'remainers' didn't take the threat serious enough. Never under estimate your opponent.
    • TheOtherHobbes 27d ago
      Cameron put a Eurosceptic in charge of the Remain campaign, and Nick Clegg - supposedly an arch Remainer - went to work for Meta after Cambridge Analytica and its contribution to Brexit became public knowledge. The public were conned. The oligarch-adjacent ruling faction of the ruling class knew exactly what they were doing, the lack of specificity for any Leave plan was deliberate, the lies and propaganda were cynical and calculated, and they were delighted with the result. Then they gave us Boris as the first of a succession of clown car comedy Prime Ministers, and started hyping Farage. It's all a stage set. The public in the UK have zero influence on any of these developments.
      • hawk_ 27d ago
        I blame Corbyn as much as Cameron if not more. Corbyn was supposed to represent the working class but because Remain could have benefited some Tories he backstabbed the working class and at least a whole generation if not 2 and for what?
        • SmashDan 27d ago
          Corbyn is an old school leftist and has been anti-EU for a long long time. It's completely unsurprising he was no use here.
        • TulliusCicero 26d ago
          Corbyn was an unusually terrible leader even by Labour standards. Amazing that some people still support him.
      • 1718627440 27d ago
        If the vote outcome is directly influenceable by campaigns, you can just let the campaign owners perform the decision. Campaigns only distribute information, voters still need to make a choice.
  • roenxi 27d ago
    Did they even have a referendum on joining the EU? Just skimming through, it looks like [0] they only had a referendum on EEC membership which sounds like it would predate the EU. It is a bit of an unfair ratchet where people can sidle in to the EU but require strong consensuses to leave. It should be symmetrical. Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage various aspects of life. It looks like they might be trying to rebuild the US federal government. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...
    • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 27d ago
      This brings to mind the government set up in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: it takes 2/3rds to pass a law, but only 1/3rd to repeal it. The thinking being if a law isn't good/useful enough to garner 2/3rd support, it shouldn't be law. And if a law is so bad that it can't even get more than 1/3rd the people to support it, it should no longer be a law. Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's too easy to import the votes you need, and people are too lazy to understand a law beyond the headline or what the news tells them about it.
      • TulliusCicero 26d ago
        > And if a law is so bad that it can't even get more than 1/3rd the people to support it What? That's not what you wrote. If it only takes 1/3rd to repeal a law, then you need to keep up 2/3rds support indefinitely, not 1/3rd.
      • nobody9999 26d ago
        >Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's too easy to import the votes you need, and people are too lazy to understand a law beyond the headline or what the news tells them about it. And who and from where might folks "import" such votes? I don't understand what that means. Please do elucidate.
• DrBazza 27d ago
  You could flip that argument. The bar set to remain was too low. As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21. > Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing Both sides lied, both sides exaggerated. The referendum to simply leave or remain would never have happened if UK Parliament went to the public more often with referendums about various treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Rome. Giving people the illusion of choice would have been enough. The UK seems to be an outlier for an arrogant Parliament that thinks it knows best, in spite of public sentiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...
  • ktallett 27d ago
    I would say if the age of voting increased then there should also be an upper limit as over a certain age, it's not your future. Prisoners should be allowed the vote for everything also
    • 1718627440 27d ago
      Voting right is not determined whether you are affected, otherwise toddlers should vote too. It's dependent on average brain development. Also two years of growing into the political system is not very long compared to the decades of being able to vote.
  • basisword 27d ago
    >> As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21. Why? Brexit will impact 16 year olds for decades. A large number of the old farts who voted for it are dead now and won't have to suffer the consequences. If you're going to adjust voting ages but don't want to lower it, it makes sense that those over 75 don't get a say in something like Brexit. And if your thought is that 16 year olds don't have the education yet to understand the implications of something so big, I'd say they're much better informed than most people over 60 who are consuming Facebook AI slop and believing it wholesale.
    • 27d ago
• RobotToaster 27d ago
  > The campaign to stay too weak. I can definitely support that. It seemed to basically boil down to "you dirty proles aren't going to stop poor Tarquin going on Erasmus are you? :'("
• _puk 27d ago
  The failing was the one and done nature of it all. The vote should have been, should we entertain this idea? If yes, a second referendum on what Leave actually means when it comes to the final decision point. Y'know the same way that any remotely functioning democracy would approach something this large and nebulous. Iceland being just the most recent example. Instead the vote was "life carries on as is" vs "something changes", with no clarity of what that change is. Given the state of the UK post austerity there is no surprise the vote for "I don't want more of this" was so high. That's the incredible failing of the UK democratic process here, Cameron foremost.
  • lazide 27d ago
    Eh, the ‘beauty’ of democracy is it is allowed to screw itself as hard as it wants.
    • tim333 27d ago
      But usually change it's mind later. One vote for life is more 1933 Germany.
      • arjie 27d ago
        Britons may choose to change their minds but this is not a single party decision. The EU will likely not readmit them on the same terms and the UK is not nearly as powerful or relevant to European interests as it once was. As a safe far away island, the UK has much more use in a captive alliance to defend a threatened continent than it is as a participant in Europe that gets special exemptions. And Europe already has them for that.
  • 1718627440 27d ago
    The real power lies in the people deciding what to vote on, not the vote itself. That's why you elect these people too.
  • RobotToaster 27d ago
    My understanding is they considered a vote on the type of brexit, but were pretty convinced the public would vote for a hard brexit that no one in the regime wanted.
• ajsnigrutin 27d ago
  But that's the point of democracy, whoever was interested in the isue, went out to vote, kids are too young to vote, and more than half of people interested enough to go out, voted to leave. You personally might have wanted to remain and wanted to raise the bar, but that's undemocratic, you can't just change the rules when you don't get the outcome you wanted. I'm not from Britain, honestly I don't care what you guys do, but a majority of voters decided in a way they did, and you have to respect that.
  • IndySun 27d ago
    >kids are too young to vote I said 16 yo should've had a Brexit vote/say because, especially in this case, it's the kids that reap the choices made. More Generally 16 year olds are old enough to take part in democracy vote-wise, and maybe in all votes too. The point being - look at the short term, actually make that 'not long term', policies being made now by us olds, they don't favor young people, on the whole - or their children.
    • ajsnigrutin 27d ago
      I mean, so do the 14 years olds and 10 year olds, and newborns, and the ideas still separated, because future mommy and daddy didn't have sex yet. But as a society, we've decided that 16 year olds are too young to do many proper things, be it buy alcohol in most countries, drive a car in many, open a bank account, or legally jerk off to porn. They don't watch the news, they have no recollection of previous governments and the promises that were made, never kept and are being made again, they have basically zero sense of taxes and also mostly don't pay any and have little experience with anything related to politics. Neither do most 18 year olds, but if we let them buy booze and drive, we also let them vote. Usually the push for younger voters comes, when someone prefers a push to a generally more "left" side of spectrum, but even this is turning around, since in my country (slovenia) more and more younger voters are turning right (eg. in the last election), especially young men, since they feel left out by the "left" parties.
      • IndySun 27d ago
• teamonkey 27d ago
  Turnout was about 72%, so really it was (approx) Leave 37%, Remain 35%, Don’t Know/Care 28%. Also worth pointing out that the hard Brexit we got, where we left Schengen and abandoned much of our cross-European programmes, was almost unthinkable, and not seriously considered by the media. Whenever it was brought up, it was decried as “project fear” by those who pushed for it.
  • hurfdurf 27d ago
    UK was never part of the Schengen area, there was only cooperation in the form of information exchange and similar.
  • arjie 27d ago
    I don’t think the UK was ever in Schengen (at least as far as my visa was concerned). That is one bright spot here. Traveling to the UK is much easier than travel to Europe for much of the world. The UK allows for paying for QoS so you can pay a large fee and get a visa soon or a much smaller fee and get one in two weeks. By comparison, Schengen visas from all participants are granted equitably by fee and the wait time is months.
    • teamonkey 26d ago
      Yes you’re right, of course, I was conflating the ability to move freely within the EU member states with the Schengen Agreement which was not correct. Border control was always necessary between Britain and the Schengen area, it was just streamlined.
• 1718627440 27d ago
  > The campaign to stay too weak. That's not an argument, that is not liking the result.
• dudul 27d ago
  Were these conditions implemented in a referendum to join the EU?
• arrowsmith 27d ago
  "We lost, let's change the rules"