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Yes, well, I didn't say MPs were smart, just that they were more knowledgeable about the tactics used to manipulate voters.

I have been reading this thread with great interest. In Canada, there is a far right Premier of the province of Alberta pretending to just want 'the people to have their say', all the while complaining about Alberta being 'treated unfairly'. The Brexit fiasco is a warning to Albertans, I hope.

We have Labour for life now, it was the will of the people

Shld NEVER had been accpeted by Scotland...it's a MASSIVE democratic deficit to say the very least & SNP need to say that every damn day. Scot capital, voted 73% remain..massive majority & every constituency in Scotland voted to stay in EU, EngGov then told ScotGov to f off re any 'deal' talks!

Cant say we've not been patient and given them every chance

Tick tock....

No. Salmond was an MP at Westminster at the time and tried to have this rule passed as part of the referendum bill.

The proposal stipulated that the UK could only leave the European Union if each of its 4 constituent nations England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland voted in favor of leaving. In May 2015, she suggested that the SNP would attempt to amend the EU Referendum Bill to incorporate this requirement.

Brexit was a referendum on whether or not the western information ecosystem had been sufficiently corrupted to destabilize NATO. The UK has left the European Union. Referendum fulfilled.

The day AFTER the ref, Google recorded record numbers of questions about what the EU is and does.

To wit, see #GMB this morning with Susanna Reid being the spoon vigorously stirring the 'betrayal' pot, and whipping up Andrew Pierce into a frenzy

Or they should have agreed to a confirmatory referendum when a specific leave deal could have been voted on.

Populism doesn't work that way Just look at MAGA voters claiming the tariffs/ICE raids/cuts to federal services that Trump campaigned on were not the sort of Trumpism "vibes" they voted for Similarly it's all about the Brexit vibes with Leave voters

That's always been the problem. Brexit was a monochrome answer to a technicolour question.

Bozo asked if we wanted to 'Get Brexit Done', we did, Brexit got done

& the response to "why" was "Well, it's sovereignty, innit" but, when asked "what do you mean by 'sovereignty'?" they either (a) didn't reply (probable bots) or (b) were completely unable to frame a coherent, cohesive answer (didn't know) or (c) "make our own laws" (don't understand how EU works)

Brexit was born mediocre. Then it achieved more mediocrity. Even among events lacking all distinction, Brexit inevitably stood out as an event lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who think about Brexit, are always impressed by how unimpressive it was & is. [Apols to J Heller]

Farage Brexit Trade Death: Since the end of the EU transition period on 31 December 2020, growth in UK goods exports has fallen significantly behind the rest of the G7. In 2024, goods exports to the EU were 18% below their 2019 level in real terms. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

And the call the losers Remoaners! Remain told them they’d never get the gains Leave bullshitted them about. Tough cahungas

Exactly. It was a referendum for what we didn't want. Not what we wanted afterwards.

They "Got Brexit Done". End of story. It's past history, nobody said we should never have a good relationship with the EU ever again.

of course these people never define what a 'real' brexit really is and we know what it is, steroid beef on our shelves and monsters killing machines on our roads

Except it was full of mis-information the likes of Farage/liar Johnson laid the lies on with a trowel, we now know the truth, there was never a chance the nation would benefit from their Brexit, the only winners were going to be the liar tellers, it's time we has an honest referendum.

*lost

It was genius wasn’t it ? If only we Remainers had coined a snappy word 🙄

Remeber that even the "all things to all people" question only passed 52/48 I think before the referendum, most people didnt get the implications of leaving either the SM, CU or both. After May invoked Article 50, the reality of leaving those two sytems was all anyone talked about.

Agree. I think part of the problem is that the UK is generally unused to referendums. There is no problem putting a referendum with multiple yes/no questions on it. People get it. It would have been excellent to test "no-deal", but a slightly more complcated ballot paper or process

Disagree. Nearly half the electorate are not morons.

We would have a much better idea of the so-called "Will of the people" had it happened. Anyway, doesn't matter now. UK will not be in either for at least another 20 years, till the current crop of true believers (and for that matter false believers) take their fat payments and fade away.

It's the same argument 'Communists ' use. It failed because it was not enacted properly.

Pretty obvious the EU isn’t missing youse.

Farage went from advocating a "Norway Plus" option prior to the referendum to advocating "Let's go WTO" when leading the Brexit Party after. The fact he's high in the polls now says much about the political ignorance of UK citizens and our malignant right-wing media.

Just maybe , people have realised what a disaster it has been and have changed their minds.

Cameron: "the government will implement what you decide"

Sure but you were talking about the framing which is why I corrected you.

Exactly this. Instead they had their ridiculous "Indicative Votes" in Parliament.

It should’ve been a supermajority of some sort. Cameron thought he’d win easily.

Beautifully put. Thank you Dmitry

This is exactly why we needed a 2nd referendum. I made this point so many times. Whatever deal Johnson got he was never going to get any real support for it. The result is that his mess needs fixing and you have reform going on about it being done wrong. But none of them wanted to give us a choice

They should have just been honest about it and just said “No forriners!” Then we’d all have been clear what we were voting for

It seems that leavers want it to mean we never have any dealings with the EU in any form for the rest of time.

"We knew what we were voting for!" "This isn't the Brexit we voted for!" Schrödinger's Brexit

Of course there was no vision because none of the snake oil salesmen understood how it worked. Johnson for example didn’t understand CU. Farage hardly turned up when an MEP & I doubt he paid attention as its was all performative.

Wonder how many of Those voters are now the ones who have changed their mind and would now vote Remain?

I remember Farage sarcastically saying, "Oh wouldn't it be awful if we were like Norway."

Many brexiteers were adamant that we would retain the benefits of the single market. Cakeism sounded too good to be true so naturally dimwits voted for it. No downsides they thought and were told.

They carefully avoided saying that (apart from Hannan who slipped up once) - they came up with carefully worded ways of sounding like it ("retain access to the European market") that reassured that our trading relationship wouldn't change.

This notion of being logically consistent in public policy choices is new.

Nah, the precedent is set now; we have an in or out vote and any "in" vote is counted as a mandate to sign up to literally whatever the hell you want with no further consultation on the matter and anyone who objects to any of it being branded as a traitor to the country.

The joys of living in progressive evolving democracies They have every right to take any previous decisions and bin them & start from fresh Brexit is one of those things in 100 years will just be in the history books If we aren't erased from this planet by then

This is why eurosceptic nut jobs need to be ignored. Give them an inch and they take a mile.

So we never needed to leave!?

See the Venice Convention on Referendums, item III.8, to which convention the UK is/was a signatory, and which convention the Tories merrily ignored for short-term electoral gain at the cost of the economy and the UK’s relationships with its neighbours. www.venice.coe.int/webforms/doc...

Yes and no. Both parties pretended that they were obliged to respect the referendum; the referendum was challenged in court as illegally influenced; Eadie *conceded that it was*, but said that didn’t matter because the referendum was (still) not binding. That’s the double standard

It was Dominic Cummings who wrote in 2015 "A NO vote really means that a new government team must negotiate a new deal with the EU and they will have to give us a vote on it”.

Exactly. You either make the referendum binding, but then your creative financing will get it voided. Or you make it non-binding, and then... uhm... it cannot be voided, and everyone will treat hard Brexit as as the sacred, non-negotiable will of the people anyway. Crap, how does this work again?

cf John Howard: do you want to retain the monarchy or have *this specific* form of republic?

Or recognise that you made a mistake (as we have) and work to fix it (as we are not).

I still say it's one-all in referendums/referenda. Time for the decider. #Rejoin

This seriously annoys me. It was a leave/ remain referendum. How hard or soft it was, was dependent upon Dave Davis and co. Needless to say, owing to staggering incompetence, we took the hardest exit, with nothing at all. For anyone to whinge about it is just bollocks - we should never have left 🤦‍♂️

...#Brentry...?

The only good Brexit is a dead Brexit. brexitrage.com/the-only-goo...

The result wasn’t binding, it was an advisory referendum. Just a con from Cameron & Farage.

Bernard Jenkin bleating on Times radio just now.. Beat my head against the wall!

💯 this. Far more eruditely put, but I have been saying this for months!

That's not the point though. They just need something to rant about so they can manufacture some outrage among their easily manipulated sheeple, because it's precisely this anger about fake issues that keeps the whole rightwing grift train rolling along.

They wouldn't have got their result if they had, because any specific proposal could have been shown to be damaging to the UK. By sticking to themes of [never lost] sovereignty and [largely illusory] control they could avoid the compromise-laden business of real policymaking

Vote leave cheated and got fined - we should never have left the EU

It was advisory

Clearly it is not practical to have a very complex question forming the basis of a referendum. The question was fine. The simple truth is that Brexit supporting politicians should not have told lies. Sadly, they did...

Hannan is your ‘phone a friend’ if your playing a quiz where only wrong answers count

More about Carroll and clocks: bsky.app/profile/snar...

Oh no - you're re-writing history there! That was the brilliant intellectual, Mr Michael Gove. Credit where credit's due!

That’s a very easy job. It’s always the UK. Regardless of who is negotiating.

Yup. I’m all for that. Absence of fairness, accountability and truth is where we are because virtually all media outlets are owned by extremely r/wing billionaires. This almost certainly explains why Farage is platformed, daily as the Messiah and is not banished from politics.🙏 Always follow the💰

His job is to be wrong about everything, all the time. He is exceptionally good at it.

He's the kinda guy who would always knock around with a clipboard insisting he was "terribly important" and "extremely busy".

Oh, I know this one, it's these; only a winning hand if you're trying to prop up a table leg at the pub.

We *did* hold all the cards. Unfortunately the cards we held were Mr Bun the Baker, Pikachu, a Shadowmage, a fireball spell, and the Fool.

That's Michael Gove.

I've become a big fan of - what I think is Marie Le Conte's phrase - Headcanon Trump. The same goes for Brexit.