Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Sep 13, 2019, 06:28AM

An American Talks Sense About Brexit

Listen up over there.

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Brexit won England with 53.4 percent of the vote. When elected president, Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the vote, the highest any presidential candidate has won since 1988. Even so, Brexit’s English total edges him. Remain came in a point better than John McCain, the sorry blighter who had Obama’s landslide (so reporters described it) land atop his bald head. But that point brings Remain to just 46.6 percent. In England, I mean. Remain ran up victories through the rest of the United Kingdom, so Leave’s figure for the nation as a whole is just 51.9 percent—not a fat total. But 53.4 percent is getting plump. That margin indicates a decision.

Now Brexit draws near. Experts say the country’s going to suffer if it leaves the European Union, and especially if there’s no agreement with the Union to keep trade from being snarled. But the deadline for leaving is weeks away and Parliament has voted down all the agreements given it. Britain skids toward its fate like a car skids toward a wall, or such is a widespread attitude. “Operation Yellowhammer documents predict public disorder, rising prices and disruptions to food and medicines,” The Guardian tells us, with Operation Yellowhammer being the government’s hitherto secret sizing up of what a no-deal exit would mean. The article’s headline boldly speaks of “chaos” (“Fears of No-Deal Chaos as Ministers Forced to Publish Secret Brexit Papers”). Boris Johnson, who’s prime minister and as desperately Leave as The Guardian is devoutly Remain, appears frantic to have a general election before Britain does any actual Leaving. Like the leaders of the opposition parties, he seems to think Brexit will be a very ugly duck if it’s born on the October 31 deadline.

Britain, delay! Kick that can down the road. Get an extension even if Johnson must be trudged off to jail. Don’t risk jumping from the window with no mattress below. But don’t cancel Brexit until the nation has given you leave. The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s perennial third-place party, are going bold with a new promise to drop the whole thing and tell the EU never mind. Perhaps the other Remainers will drift toward this position if the can-kicking extends over enough years. Let’s hope not. Imagine if the results from the presidential election of 2008 were set aside. Imagine the same for the results from England’s vote on Europe. People will have seen a clear ballot majority made into a joke. Democracy will have been slapped in the face and shuffled aside by the powers that be, and democracy can’t afford more of that treatment in these rough days. Certainly not in Britain, where it’s supposed to be safe. But if Britain’s leaders can’t show the battered dear some respect, much of the English population may see no point to her either.

Fracture your economy, fracture your democracy, or muddle your way through six or seven additional years of EU negotiations and referendum hell (trophy goes to whichever side wins two). These aren’t good choices, but now they’re yours. Let this American wish you luck, and please, don’t do anything we would do.

—Follow C.T. May on Twitter: @CTMay3

Discussion
  • So what happens if they have another referendum and get the opposite result? Bear in mind that court decisions have reinforced that as a matter of British law, “a referendum on any topic can only be advisory for the lawmakers in Parliament” unless the Act establishing the referendum included language to the contrary. There wasn't any of that language in the Act that set up the Brexit referendum. Which is part of the reason why the cheating by the Leave side hasn't led courts to nullify the result — there is, legally speaking, nothing to annul.

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  • Read this: "trophy goes to whichever side wins two." Best two out of three, you dig? Hence the reference to "referendum hell," since a while would be needed for the further two referendums to be held.

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  • As to the non-bindingness of the referendum. Yes, you go ahead and tell the English electorate that their will was not actually being consulted, that it was all a charade and that anyway the side you don't like cheated. That will do a lot for faith in democracy among Leave supporters, who make up a good deal of the English population.

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  • I mean, yes, but a) these things are advisory only, and b) in the hypothetical event of a second referendum with 'remain' winning — doesn't that just supersede the first one, since it's more recent and the electorate's now different? (If only because there's been three years of people exiting and entering the voter pool.) (Of course in Quebec we think about referendums a lot, so.)

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  • a) The sound of fine print being read to the sucker. I don't think it will wash. b) Different collection of people, same nation voting. After all the point of the 2016 vote wasn't to establish whether the people who went to the polls on that particular day would be in or out of the EU. It was to establish whether Britain would be. The electorate this year or next is still Britain, even if you don't have the same exact list of names as in 2016. I don't think a string of votes is needed for a national decision to stick, but in this case having one looks like a good idea -- much better than telling everyone the original vote was a just-suppose exercise.

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  • The fine-print argument is definitely the argument the Leave side holds. I'm not sure it's an argument a lot of Remainers agree with. As you can probably tell, I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that Parliament''s the instrument of democratic rule, and there's no parallel legitimacy for a referendum unless they specify it. The thing about a second referendum … we had a second referendum in Quebec in 1995, in which certain people were trying to overturn the verdict of the 1980 referendum. Absolutely nobody argued that it should be best two out of three. (I'd also say that what has become clear is that it's one thing to say 'Britain should leave the EU,' another thing to say under what terms. Probably there should've been three options on the referendum; stay, leave with a deal, leave with no deal. Which to me is why another referendum would be a good idea generally. But eh, thieir country.)

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  • Yes, Remainers don't like being reminded of the weaknesses in their position. But there the weaknesses are. If the Remainers think they can weasel out of this hole, they'll find out that they're wrong when faith in democracy suffers. And yes, Parliament is Britain's organ of democracy, but this time Parliament created a certain problem for itself. It booted a key question over to demos proper, and demos counts for something too. Better to have kept them out, but such is the procedure with EU membership, I suppose. At any rate, now the results have to be lived with, not wished away. Finally, if a second referendum is enough to satisfy the Leavers that they've been heard and respected, then fine. I'm betting it wouldn't be.

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  • Yeah, but I doubt there's any amount of referenda, elections, or other devices that'd convince Leavers the tide's against them. But look. What I'm saying is that Parliament *didn't* boot the question over to the people, not clearly. There are certain things they would've had to have said in the bill, and they didn't. Put it this way: after revelations about the Leave side cheating came to light, some people went to court arguing the referendum should be overturned because Leave broke the law. The reaction of the court was that there's nothing to overturn because the referendum was purely advisory. Well, if it's advisory, then it can be ignored or superseded. If it's not advisory, that court case has to be revisited, no?

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  • A lot of the English electorate *doesn't* think their will has been consulted. Referendum are notoriously bad at gauging the popular will, especially on complicated issues like Brexit. People who voted certainly didn't think they were going to provoke a brutal recession, or start violence up again in Ireland. It's a huge mess, but a referendum isn't a suicide pact. People have a lot more info on Brexit than they did before; it's reasonable to reassess before blowing up the country. That's not a thumb in the eye of democracy; it's trusting institutions to continue to represent the peopel, rather than insisting that one vote one time means you're bound to it forevermore. By that logic the US could never have abolished slavery.

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  • Its the same ignorant group that " didn’t think they were going to provoke a brutal recession" that you want to vote again. This is the sheep leading the Shepard. The English are just like everyone else, people are uncomfortable with change and tend to resist it, despite often claiming that change is precisely what they want. Having a do over, only encourages further ignorance from the public, since there are potentially no consequences to their initial ignorant votes.

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  • I don't want another vote. I think Parliament should just kill it.// People aren't sheep; they just don't pay attention to politics much, which is completely reasonable, but leads to bad results when you ask them to make complicated decisions about fuzzy political actions.

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