They resigned.
Boris Johnson the Foreign Secretary resigned. David Davis who was literally the "Brexit minister" resigned.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/theresa-mays-gov...
Here are more people who resigned.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-ministers-who-have-quit-over-...
My view is that these people lied to the public about how awesome Brexit would be. Once it got to the hard work of making it happen they realized how awful the deal would be and how the economy would be harmed. Because they didn't want their name attached to it they resigned.
Some of them are hoping that May will resign and they can become Prime Minister instead.
One could argue that they didn't expect the vote to pass at all, and did it to gain favor with their constituency - to be able to say they "tried to leave the EU but alas." They knew their promises were untenable, yet they made them anyway, but there's no way to fulfill them once the vote passes, hence resignation.
The leave voters will just complain, but it avoids all the chaos and cost associated with leaving, when there's no clear benefits.
I seriously think that UK should stop the process and start again. This is not undemocratic because people now know better (new circumstances justifying a re-evaluation). The process would be like this:
1. The parliament decides to cancel the process
2. A Spanish judge made a proposal how to halt the Brexit
3. An emergency committee tries to find a temporary deal with the EU
4. After a year or so, the popular vote is repeated
They aren't stupid. They knew all along it would be impossible. They didn't think the vote would go for brexit. They wanted to use it as political leverage and they underestimated the stupidity and malleability of the public and the powerful amplifying influence of social media.
It simply requires that the UK ensure that no hard (customs) border is required in Ireland. A key component of the Good Friday Agreement which ended 3 decades of bloodshed on the island of Ireland was that physical border checks between the two states whould be phased out.
All it requires is that the UK accepts that EU customs checks are performed between Britain and Ireland rather than at the Irish border. This option is supported by the Irish government and has popular and business support in Northern Ireland.
I have no idea why the extreme brexiteers find this idea so objectionable? It's a popular in Ireland, North and South; it satisfies the EU (a sponsor of the peace deal) and it allows brexiteers COMPLETE freedom to negotiate any type of future trading relationship they want.
There was a custom's border inside France from 1815[0] to 2008, with different treatment for imports/exports from Switzerland to the small part of France beyond that custom's border.
According to that article, you can still buy cars w/o EU import duties in that part of France...
[0]: Yes, as a result of Napoleon's defeat and as part of Geneva joining Switzerland.
Because it's a slippery slope that looks very much like ceding territory. It's not just border checks, but Northern Ireland would be effectively in the EU as far as customs rules and tariffs. Otherwise, you could circumvent the EU tariffs by importing in the UK, moving the goods "internally" to NE then loading them on a truck and unloading somewhere in the rest Ireland.
This differentiated regime would strengthen economic ties with Ireland and weaken those with Britain.
A hard border, combined with the overwhelming preference of North Irish to remain in the EU, increases the chance of a successful North Irish referendum for unification with Ireland. If the UK allows such a referendum and Ireland unifies, then the UK is ceding territory anyway. So there's really a no-win scenario assuming that the UK leaves the EU customs union.
If the UK wanted to commit a further violation of the Good Friday Agreement and act to prevent an Irish reunification referendum, or ignore the results of one, the Troubles would very likely start all over again, and the UK would be in no position to negotiate any kind of cease-fire because they would have demonstrated twice over that they can't be trusted in such things.
I don't think that the Good Friday Agreement does say this, I would like a reference if you can provide one.
The alternative isnfor the UK and ireland to simply refuse to enforcr a hard border and dare the EU to do it if they are so upset about customs.
What, is the EU going to station troops there, because of trade deals?
Neither Ireland or the UK are interested in enforcing any sort of hard border. It is instead the EU who would become unhappy about broken trade deals.
But that means Britain effectively has an open border with the EU (which Brexiters don't like, and probably some Remainers don't like in the context of Brexit though they are happy with it with UK a full member of the EU with a say in union policy), or has an internal border between NI and the rest of the UK (which pretty much no one in the UK likes.) The EU has a similar problem with Ireland where the UK has NI.
Which is why this issue is intractable; it internally has no good solution on either side, even before the difficulty of getting agreement between the sides. This is worse on the UK side, because of the interaction with the Good Friday Accords; it's not just abstract political displeasure, it's potentially undermining an internal peace agreement.
The UK and Ireland do not want a hard border. That is a fact. They aren't going to enforce it.
It is irelevant to point out the consequences, because both sides have stated that they will never ever ever enforce a hard border.
The UK and Ireland would both be perfectly fine with not having a hard border. They have stated as such.
You can call it dumb or say that it undermines the purpose of brexit, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. Both Ireland and the UK are willing to accept the consequences of not having a hard border no matter the consequences.
It's pretty relevant, because the UK government doesn't have Parliamentary support for either of the alternatives, given Brexit, to the the thing they say they won't do, and also seems (though surprises are possible) to be likely to prevent Brexit from being derailed even if they can't pass a Brexit deal. So it's quite likely that we’re heading to a Brexit with none of the choices regarding the Irish border being politically viable.
That political choice is "don't do anything about it, and leave it without a hard border". And this is the choice that both the UK and Ireland want to take.
That would be (from the UK side) the effective open border with the EU choice.
> And this is the choice that both the UK and Ireland want to take.
No, Brexit with the Irish border as an end-run around Britain’s new EU border is not a choice that has majority Parliamentary support in the UK.
For example, the US has, for years, refused to pass any kind of immigration reform, but until recently, also refused to comprehensively enforce the immigration laws already on the books because they were really awful and unfair in places. For another example, neither the People's Republic of China nor the Republic of China (effectively Taiwan) recognize each other, and yet Taiwanese businesses own tons of factories in mainland, PRC-controlled China.
I thought half the point of Brexit was so that the UK could secure it's borders.
And they are just going to leave their biggest land border wide open?
Hopefully yes. I don't want to eat some toxic food that nobody checked when it entered the EU.
IE, they would become the target of terrorist attacks. I doubt they would want this to happen to them.
Ireland would absolutely, under no circumstances, enforce a hard border. They would simply refused to do it.
If the vast majority of people in NI are happy to be part of the EU customs zone and allowing them their wish (in the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement) also allows brexiteers to turn the rest of the UK into a Singapore (Reece-Mogg) or a Venezuala (Corbyn) as they see fit without any encumberance from the EU, then what's the problem?
I just don't get it. A year ago, some of the leading voices of the Brexit movement were advocating special customs zones to be set up around the UK, once free for EU competition rules. There were news stories with brexiteers advocating a Tyneside Customs zone, for example. Why is it fine for Tyneside to be have a separate customs zone to the rest of the UK but not Northern Ireland?
> All it requires is that the UK accepts that EU customs checks are performed between Britain and Ireland ... I have no idea why the extreme brexiteers find this idea so objectionable?
Generally they don't. However the government is only in power with the support of the DUP[0] who see it as THE END OF THE WORLD, and it would be a complete anathema to Ulster loyalists[1], whose are (essentially) half of the Good Friday Agreement.
In short: if they accepted this, the British government would fall and armed conflict could well break out again in Northern Ireland.
Overall to Brexit supports in Britain it doesn’t really matter, it mainly matters politically for the current government. Without the DUP they would effectively be a minority government.
At least in a divorce you tend to split things (I'll keep the bed and you can have the dresser). In this case it's someone walking out the door but saying "hey, could you let me still come by for dinner?"
> May's deal permanently blocks the UK from ever fully leaving the EU without the EU's permission
That's the big joke of Brexit. Boris Johnson fantasizing about dozens of trade deals ready to be signed when the UK exits. How many are there now? Zero.
Because the UK isn't in a position as strong as Brexiteers fantasized. Ostensibly they are all for negotiating deals in the national interest, but when the other side has interests, too, that's somehow unfair and they should "go whistle".
Brexiteers are looking for handouts, not real negotiations.
My point was that you cannot invite real interest-driven negotiations and then complain about red lines the other side draws in the sand.
It's either a real negotiation or an agreement between friends.
The latter would have been preferable, but all the hatred towards the EU side made that an immediate non-starter.
Could you please leave stuff like this out of comments? On Hacker News you just make your point without gratuitous antagonism.
But it is possible for someone to inform you that if you do take a given action, they will take draconian, but completely legal, measures against you.
> May's deal permanently blocks the UK from ever fully leaving the EU without the EU's permission
The UK, as a sovereign nation, is party to international agreements which it has signed in the past which commit it to doing various things, many of them intended to be permanent and many unrelated to the EU. One of those is with the Republic of Ireland, over peaceful relations in the UK territory of Northern Ireland. The Irish government and many Northern Irish people regard this agreement, broadly construed, as implying that no new barriers will be set up on the Irish border. Another international agreement, WTO rules, which the EU is signed up to (and the UK also intends to trade under) implies that if the UK and EU adopt different customs regimes they will also be required to actively monitor customs borders between the UK trading bloc and the EU trading bloc. The Irish government (and by an extension EU negotiators representing their interests) regards feasible customs border check regimes as violating the spirit of the Good Friday agreement over security barriers. Therefore unless and until some border solution in line with WTO regulations and acceptable to the Irish government or an adjudicating party is found (or the Republic of Ireland also chooses to leave the EU, which is highly unlikely) Northern Ireland must not become part of a different customs area from the Republic of Ireland and therefore must remain subject to some relevant EU laws.
Being a sovereign country means the possibility of reneging upon prior commitments, but it doesn't mean these agreements don't exist or that parties won't insist you honour [their interpretation of] them when offering new agreements
The "backstop" stipulates that any future trading relationship does not violate terms of the Irish peace agreement known as the Good Friday Agreement - specifically that there would be no physical checks at the border in Ireland.
Currently the border is virtually invisible because the UK and Ireland are EU members and in the same customs zone.
If, in the future, the UK decides it would prefer to leave the Customs Union (you can be in the customs union but not in the EU), then this would require a special arrangement for Ireland - probably requiring customs checking to be done between Northern Ireland and Britain instead of between north and south in Ireland.
For some people (and I don't know why - see my comment above), this is absolutely objectionable even though this arrangement would enjoy popular support in both parts of Ireland. If you're not prepared to accept this arrangement, then the UK would be stuck in the EU's customs union.
Of course if you want to leave the customs union (otherwise what's the point of brexit), then you have to accept the special arrangement for Northern Ireland or basically renege on the terms of Irish peace agreement.
Sure, customs checks at ferry and airports to the UK mainland would entail considerably fewer practical delays, smuggling opportunities and security issues than customs checks between a village and its nearest supermarket on the Irish border, but unionists can legitimately argue an Irish Sea border violates their understanding of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. Though it'd also be perfectly fair to ask their politicians who all backed Brexit what did you expect to happen?
They can probably still leave as a sovereign entity, in the same way I can technically ignore my loans that I initially agreed to pay back. There will be consequences.
Essentially, they want to honor the will of the people. The will of the people, by democratic vote, was to leave the EU.
With that in mind, they have no options that are in any way good:
1) Push ahead and exit with no-deal (economically disastrous)
2) Push ahead and exit with the proposed deal (economically bad while also not really exiting)
3) Declare it a bad idea and just don't do it (political suicide for everyone involved & creates distrust in democratic process)
4) Hold another referendum where it's going to have to be a decision between staying in or exiting with no deal (also political suicide & creates distrust).
There's no way for anyone to win here. I think the best option is for the PM to "take one for the team" (i.e. the country) and take option 3/4, knowing that it will be the end of her and her party.
I've never really understood this reasoning given how Leave as completely nebulous with no real details. Is it really such a betrayal to go back and say "alright here's what Leave actually means is this what you actually want vs Remain"? That's been my issue with the whole vote from the beginning, leave was so nebulous there was no actual consensus behind what it should have actually meant.
Granted it was kind of impossible to have the details before the actual vote because the actual deal had to be negotiated but I don't see how the situation hasn't changed enough for another referendum to be appropriate.
Then then they're on the hook to do the actual replacement part and realize that there never was a replacement but they have this hard deadline to get it done.
The fact that the vote was held at all is total madness. They were trying to call a bluff and it blew up in their face. The whole "post fact era" thing only works up until you the point where you need to actually implement policy.
(US user)
Sure some of it was lies, but lies are a form of information. They had a bus and everything.
The anti-Brexit side was seemingly more vague, saying that it would be bad without really giving people anything to be excited about.
On top of that there's a whole spectrum of brexits people could have been voting for so even the government doesn't know what people actually want out of a leave vote!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/02/brexit...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brexit-food-shortages-stockp...
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/brexit-foo...
The EU would not blockade Britain, as many of these articles seem to imply (how else would you just run out of something simply because you have to import it from a 'foreign' country now?). Britain would have to pay any tariffs the EU imposes to others of course, but it would also be in their best interest to not set them so high that people in Britain stop buying their products at all. Any 'shortages' would be brought about by shear mismanagement.
I do think what you suggest would be fair and sensible. I do not believe the voters will see it so reasonably.
I'm from Ireland, where we had something similar happen. People still talk about how the govt will just hold multiple referendums till they get the answer they want on an issue. This is in reference to referendums that happened 10 and 20 years ago. It doesn't matter that these decisions have proven positive for the country - there's still resentment and bitterness, and this was an issue with far less emotional weight than brexit.
You must be new here :-)
Option 4 (second referendum) isn't necessarily on the table, because the UK cannot hold a referendum in the time they have left until the Article 50 deadline in March. They would have to ask the EU for an extension, and there's no guarantee that they'll get one.
Option 3 (pass an Act of Parliament to revoke the Article 50 invocation) is possible, but just like May's deal, I don't think the current Parliament has the votes, and there isn't time for a general election before the deadline. It's also a relatively permanent option--the legal opinion seems to be that a country can revoke Article 50, but they can't just keep invoking and revoking Article 50 over and over again in bad faith, which would seem to preclude any sort of "let's revoke Article 50 and we can just re-invoke it later once we realize what we actually want out of this".
Option 1--No Deal Brexit--is just what is going to automatically happen absent some sort of uncertain intervention. You can't get a second referendum or even a new deal done in time for the Article 50 deadline, you can't revoke Article 50 unless you're actually committing to remaining in the EU, and the existing deal is dead in the water. And, in a certain sense, Option 1 is really just a manifestation of the idea that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
It's definitely possible to stop the clock.
It's easy to find a consensus to the abstract question "should the UK leave the EU". It's much harder to find a consensus to the all of these questions when asked together. All the people who wanted Brexit are backing away from May's solution because she needs to answer all of those questions 100% correct for 51% of the population. Any disagreement and the deal is off.
Former PM David Cameron put Leave/Remain to a vote, but publicly said he voted Remain. Resigned after the vote results. Theresa May took his place after some debate; she was vociferously pro-Brexit, and looked like the best option if Britain was to act tough when negotiating with the EU. A number of people dropped out of the succession race, gambling that the Brexit hassle wouldn't be worth it.
May survived a no-confidence vote in late 2018, but a number of members of her party have resigned because the deal on the table didn't sync with what's important to their constituents.
There are a number of factors, but May's insistence that net migration would fall to 5 figures was something people expected her to deliver. It's not going to happen.
I don't think that is accurate. See https://www.euronews.com/2018/12/12/what-is-theresa-may-s-vi..., https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38653681, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_May#Brexit
Many had radically different aspirations for Brexit, no influence on the process and/or disliked May and her government on principle. Others were part of May's Cabinet, some even directly responsible for negotiations, but couldn't deliver anything which matched their initial promises, disliked the deal that was put on the table and decided eyecatching resignation was better than compromise. One or two, like Gove and Leadsom actually are still backing May, but fairly reluctantly. Everybody agrees the deal isn't fantastic, but few are prepared to admit their alternative aspirations were pure fantasy.
The flip side is that [nearly] all the Conservative MPs who voted down May's deal will vote confidence in her government very shortly because they value staying in power and loathe the opposition parties too. Which leads nicely on to the next point...
> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
The same forces that protect a President that has made Nixon's actions look like model of propriety and is quietly despised many of his own party's leading figures. A mixture of partisanship, terror of defying ones own voters and party members, fear of what political upheaval might happen next and doubts over whether they actually would manage to stop things if they tried.
Nothing except politics. The referendum is advisory and not legally binding. The Leave campaign has been found guilty of criminal offences. But actually, the referendum result is the closest thing May has to a mandate, her party won a minority in the parliamentary elections.
https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/sovereignty
The subtly here is that usually a government commands an overall majority of Parliament, but weak/minority governments have to worry about government rebels.
There is no such thing as a favorable brexit deal. Britain is already in the most favorable position possible with regards to EU relations: they have all of the benefits of EU membership, but with a special deal that means they're exempted from some of the membership dues, and they can have their own immigration policy and their own money. Britain has a more beneficial position in the EU than any other country in the world, in or out.
There is absolutely no way that the EU is going to let them leave and keep most of the benefits of membership. The hardliners want to get everything and give nothing, and surprise surprise, the EU wasn't going to let them have everything in exchange for nothing, so the hardliners hate it, and everybody else hates it because it was a stupid idea in the first place.
It would be similar to half the republicans and half the democrats agreeing on a key policy & fundamentally disagreeing with the other half of their respective parties.
(it's actually even worse than that because there are at least 3 main positions [hard exit, soft exit, no exit] which divide the two main parties, meaning nothing really has a clear majority).
The way the UK government works is: from the majority party a government of ministers is formed from their group of MPs. By convention individual MPs in this government (called front-benchers) have a cohesive support for the overall government policy (if they disagree with the policy or vote against it then by convention they have to resign). Anyone from the ruling party NOT on the front-bench can (and often will) vote against the government.
Brexit has been insanely divisive. Internally, the ruling Convservative party have at least 4 different positions, including the official government one. Many front-benchers have resigned.
Fundamentally the problem is this; people voted for Brexit. But only just. So really nearly half the population doesn't want it. It was simple to answer a simple yes/no question. But exiting is a hugely complex question whereby it is nearly impossible to negotiate a compromise that works for everyone.
Oh well, you live and learn.
Because "Prime Minister" is not the head of state, so there's little respect for the position. Her position is equivalent to Speaker of The House in the US, only in a system where The House is also the Executive.
I believe members of the UK armed forces would probably dispute that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_(United_Kin...
Dan Carlin has a series on his podcast discussing the background of the war in Asia in 1937-1945 (https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern...). One of his major points about the Japanese government at the time was that the military held allegiance to the emperor, who couldn't or didn't actually do anything, rather than the civilian government. As a result, the military could do essentially anything it wanted.
That didn't end well.
Unfortunately for her there are essentially three groups. (1) Brexit on WTO terms, (2) cancel Brexit and remain, and (3) those that largely support her deal. These groups are more certain what they don't want than what they do want. This means that 2/3 of the MPs oppose this deal. But 2/3 will oppose any option.
For Remainers(Anti-Brexit) the agreement was to start the process to leave the EU so of course those people didn't like the agreement either.
But their seats have already been agreed to be distributed to smaller countries who were underrepresented so far.
It would be a complete clusterfuck, including doubts whether any legislative action would survive court, if the UK isn't properly represented (either because they don't care anymore and don't hold elections, or they simply cannot organize elections on such short notice).
It basically saying the UK is leaving the EU, but not really as we still follow EU law. As such it is not acceptable to brexiters.
For remainers, well they don't want leave anyway.
Thus no one supports it.
a) The vote (referendum) was advisory, and non-binding. Basically an opinion poll held by the government.
b) It has been proven that there were many manipulations, irregularities and outright illegal activities which have influenced the result.
Normally, these two would be enough for a government to ignore the vote result. But these are not normal times.
Our gradient descent has ended in a local minimum, and noone can agree enough to climb the hill.
Immigration is a very powerful topic (fear and loathing?) in the mind of voters and much of the 'debate' is not based on reason on either side. It's probably worth noting since the referendum was announced it's unclear whether one person in a country of 60 million has changed their mind on what they preconceptually had locked in at the start.
Crucially the referendum isn’t binding which is where the problem occurs. The vote didn’t go the way people thought it would go. Maybe because of the fall out of banking crisis and rising inequality, maybe because the leave campaigns broke the law, maybe because of Russian involvement. So now you have a representative democracy that is broadly pro EU vs a popular vote which has voted “out” whatever that means. The referendum is non binding so should be advisory only to the elected officials.
Now the government is in a pickle. Because even though the vote was just advisory if they’re seen to ignore this, people will start wondering if their vote matters at all. It could be a path to chaos. This is complicated further by the split of the age of people voting leave. They tended to be older and these voters traditionally vote conservative (aka republican in US terms). So they’d be disenfranchising their base.
The government doesn’t even have a majority and is propped up by another tiny party of 10 members called the DUP. This is a little complicated but the outcome is a really weak government because it doesn’t have the numbers to push through legislation it would like.
On top of that the euro-sceptic extremists are bolstered by vote and lobbying hard for out by any means necessary. They’re effectively driving policy by threatening to terminate her fragile leadership.
All this would have been a doddle if a decent opposition was sat opposite in the commons. However in a perfect storm the opposition is absent. This is even more complicated to understand but the summary is that the hard left socialists have more in common with the hard right anti-EU lot than either of them would like to admit. It’s weird.
Mays deal satisfied no-one and it’s taken 2 years to get this far.
One interesting side effect is that more people now know what being in the EU means than ever before. It was virtually never discussed before.
I’m off to stockpile toilet roll and pain killers
Right now the PM (and the EU) gets to go back to the drawing board. And Parliament gets to try to force various things, such as a second referendum, or a delay to brexit (which the EU would have to acquiesce to). May can resist Parliament for a while, if she wants.
Obviously I won't try to predict the outcome of anything. I'm not in that business.
Nope. The EU has said there will be no more negotiations.
May promised a divorce which would be a "good deal brexit," or one that includes trade deals which benefited the UK, but without any of the "undesirable" EU requirements. Most people, regardless of political persuasion, divorce could happen, but knew that the Britain wasn't going to get a "good deal" brexit.
2. I am not sure how you can claim the majority of the populace is against leaving the EU. A national vote demonstrated the opposite. And it's not clear that another vote now wouldn't yield the same result (the recent polls are roughly where they were a few months before the first vote).
3. May is the prime minister. The head of state (the queen) being essentially an honorific title, she is in charge (she has control of the red button!). But parliament has more power in the UK than in the US and she answers to parliament.
4. The terms of trading between the EU and the UK, as agreed with the EU, requires the UK to abide to EU laws without having any say on them. Brexiters are against as they don't accept this loss of sovereignty (they typically would like a free trade deal with the EU but without loss of sovereignty). Remainers are against as they don't really want to leave the EU in the first place, and are trying to force a way out of Brexit.
I don't think you can call the result of referendum "stupid" and ignore it. That would seem very anti-democratic to me. I don't know how the whole thing will play out. Right now it seems that the potential outcomes are:
a. Brexit being postponed from March to June (unlikely to be later as this is when the new EU parliament starts after the spring elections, and unlikely to help in any way other than kicking the can down the road).
b. May being defeated at the vote on Wednesday, new general elections, whoever wins will have to deal with the same problem and likely with the same outcome (the EU is unlikely to concede much).
c. A new referendum (but May repeatedly ruled it out, and again nothing says it will yield another result)
d. The EU making significant enough concessions in the short term that could help PM agreeing to the deal. Germany hinted they would be open, while France ruled it out today.
e. Leaving the EU without a deal, resulting in short term trade disruptions and an adverse economic impact on the medium term.
f. Parliament cancelling Brexit. Many MPs would probably prefer that option, but this is ignoring the result of a referendum, which is a really worrying outcome for a democracy and would likely boost a populist vote down the line.
There aren't any obvious good solution, everything comes at a cost. Which is why the public opinion is terribly divided.
I'm not generally happy with the idea of assuming those people who didn't vote on the day would have voted in one direction or another; but given that EU citizens who've lived in the UK for many years were excluded from voting we can assume that a lot of those would have voted to remain had they been given the choice.
Unfortunately if we did have another vote the only outcome which would be decisive would be another leave result.
The leave campaign didn't define a vision of brexit beyond vacuous slogans. It left the door open to any dream of what brexit could mean. This is irrefutable in spite of their protests to the contrary.
In short, May has never taken a WTO ("no deal") exit seriously. Since she won't walk away she's had no leverage, so the EU predictably gave her the worst "deal" imaginable, to the extent that polls show Leave voters would prefer staying in the EU and Remain voters would prefer leaving with no deal. It's seriously awful.
> Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May?
If you're talking about the various Leave-supporting ex-ministers like Boris Johnson and David Davis, they quit when it became clear that they were only there as window-dressing for consumption by domestic Leave voters, and had no influence at all in negotiations or planning. When May came up with her "Chequers" plan, she showed it to Angela Merkel before her own Cabinet; this in a political system that supposedly follows a principle of collective responsibility.
> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
As an American, what prevented the election of Trump being declared stupid and that the US gov't was not going to accept him? Because I suspect it's pretty much the same answer: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." You can't hold a referendum for tactical reasons and then welsh when it doesn't go your way without thoroughly destroying faith in the legitimacy of your political system.
The Constitution. The referendum, on the other hand, was non-binding.
Also an American, but from the outside I don't see how a majority desire can be so accurately determined beyond a vote.
> Some portions of the UK [...] are strongly aganst this voting result.
This I definitely see from the loudest. So strongly that the vote has been tarnished every which way (which, let's be honest, you can do with any vote you want due to all the malfeasance you can find by campaigners). It's becoming a pattern. The votes that the loudest in democracy don't like or can't understand are being challenged on several grounds, most boiling down to assuming ignorance and gullibility of the other side. Accepting results is becoming harder and harder for some to the point where the larger-yet-silent groups feel no recourse but to use the polls and the louder feel no recourse but to invalidate votes and/or prevent them from happening and/or try again.
The key is that because the 'Leave' campaign weren't in government and weren't one single organised group and didn't actually hold power they could promise literally anything safe in the knowledge that they'd never have to actually deliver it. In fact after 'Leave' won the referendum the Prime Minister resigned and none of the key Leave campaigners actually mounted a serious campaign to replace him- someone who campaigned for remain was put in charge almost unchallenged.
So through all this murkiness you end up with one key fact: 48% of the country wanted to remain, 52% wanted some form of leaving but each of those options I listed above probably garner no more than 20% of the vote by themselves. So we're 52:48 in favour of leaving, and 80:20 against any specific way of leaving.
Democrasy doesn’t measure majority desire, it measures electioneering. Majority desire is definitely an aspect of elections, but it’s not the thing that gets measured.
There are better ways to accurately measure majority desire, and they are not one person/one vote systems.
What the system purports to give us is not accuracy, but fairness. It’s acknowledged that no matter what system you put in place, its ideals will be perverted. The best we hope for is that multiple parties all have access to those same perversions. So the difference between the U.S. and Russia is that both Bush and Gore had a right to sue the state of Florida. Of course the outcome doesn’t represent the will of the people in any meaningful way, but we take comfort in knowing that both candidates had the same games open to them.
In Russia, Putin is playing a wholly different legal game than everyone else. That’s anti-liberal, and anti-democratic.
Much hand wringing is happening in the U.S. today because the American President is mostly above the legal system, as its executor, with only the Senate holding him in check. And it’s not clear our current Senate is committed to the rule of law. We will see when Mueller’s report comes out. And perhaps some governors can also hold him to account.
Again, none of this bears any direct relation to the “will of the people” except that there is a method to the madness and any citizen can volunteer for any aspect of the game.
My personal opinion is "majority" wins isn't necessarily a proper majority. Given how our Congress votes party line on most things, and the ratio is more or less 50:50 Dm to Rep, a 66% majority seems minimal for passing any law unblemished with party bias.
With 72% of registered UK voter turnout, Brexit won with only 52%. That's not a mandate for anything except perhaps another vote after clarifying what it would actually mean and how it would actually happen.
Something as important as Brexit should require more than 50.1% to pass. But it was actually non-binding anyway so the government could just ignore it.
After the election, parties voted to enact Article 50.
After enacting Article 50, the parties that campaigned in the following general election on a promise to implement the decision to leave were overwhelmingly successful.
Ignoring the referendum would have been a poor decision.
I understand the following timeline:
1. A largely disseminated, nation-wide vote occurs, bolstered by nationalist sentiment, that the EU is bad for the UK. This vote results in a conclusion that UK should leave the EU.
2. This is controversial, due to the majority of the populace in general not desiring to leave the EU, but not voting as such individually. Some portions of the UK, itself a Union, are strongly aganst this voting result.
3. May, a woman of great importance in the UK government, chooses to try and make a deal with the EU for favorable leaving conditions for UK.
4. Nothing May is presenting is considered acceptable by anyone.
On its face, this makes no sense to me. Why is May being held responsible for this? Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May? What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent responses. I'm now under the impression this is like when a significant portion of a dev team with (actual, hypotehtical) equal or flat hierarchy believe that code needs to be refactored to a serious degree, but no majority of devs can decide on what the refactored code will look like. (Extremely simplified!). If this is largely incorrect please let me know.