"the will of 52% of the people" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I'm not claiming that I don't understand the concept of referendum by simple majority - merely that there's a certain duplicity in the sanctimonious language being used to describe the result.
(If I did the maths right)
Though of course there isn't really a single will of the people, just a lot of people with differing opinions.
Not just bothered to vote, but allowed to vote.
Citizens of other EU member states, living in Britain, were not eligible to vote (with a few exceptions), and nor were British citizens who had been living in other EU member states for "too long". Moreover, 16 and 17 year olds were disenfranchised too, despite that age group being allowed to vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
I don't see why not.
I have lived in UK for 8 years, and pay my taxes here. I'm a productive member of the society, I consider Theresa May as much my prime minister as any British person would. The result of the referendum affects me hugely, and yet I couldn't vote because my passport does not say "Great Britain" on it.
And like the other commenter has said - there was plenty of non-British citizens who were allowed to vote.
The UK has a long history of letting non UK commonwealth citizens vote in things like... The Brexit referendum!
The effects of such a change can last for generations and be hard to reverse, and potentially affect younger people for longer than older people. For those reasons, I think it is better to err on the side of greater franchise than less.
For reference here's some prediction from back then:
>The Treasury's "cautious" economic forecasts of the two years following a vote to leave - which assumes a bilateral trade agreement with the EU would have been negotiated - predicts Gross Domestic Product would grow by 3.6% less than currently predicted.
>In such a scenario, it suggests sterling would fall by 12%, unemployment would rise by 520,000, average wages would fall by 2.8% and house prices would be hit by 10%.
Which was pessimistic. Sterling certainly fell, about 20%, but unemployment's doing fine so far.
It bothers me immensely how quickly the truth gets discarded the moment it conflicts with EU ideology. The UK has shown excellent economics relative to the rest of Europe since the vote despite its people being told "uncertainty" would trigger a massive recession and employment bloodbath. Yet here you are, saying it's turning into the sick man of Europe!
Important big money already migrated to Ireland (mostly), but it takes some time (years, multiple) to take an effect if any.
Treasury (as well as other organisations) predicted that the vote itself would immediately trigger a deep and severe recession.
One has to admit that there is something of a conflict of interest when it comes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer producing a document to analyse the negative consequences of a scenario which his own prime minister was campaigning against.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/18/imf-says-br...
The entire global establishment of "experts" united together and made a series of predictions that weren't just wrong by a percentage, they were wrong in the wrong direction. There are NO organisations that I remember who predicted the outcome correctly. There were though, quite a lot of vox pops with the man on the street who said words to the effect of, "it'll be fine, we'll manage".
The brutal reality is that people who put their faith in the notion of expert understanding of politics or economics have been made to look very foolish, and worse, many of them don't seem to have accepted the uselessness or bias levels of the people the media present as experts. They are still being upheld not only as important, but actually as people who should be given vast new powers to run government! It's quite concerning.
The article starts "Leaving the EU would hit British living standards" and only talks about recession (occurring in 2017) in the context of the "adverse scenario" they modelled.
As explained here:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/imf-christi...
"[The adverse scenario] was predicated on the UK’s EU negotiations collapsing and the UK eventually crashing out of the bloc without a trade deal."
which hasn't happened (yet).
So I think the lessons to be learnt are that journalists can be guilty of over-simplifying economic analyses (presenting conditional scenarios as certain outcomes) and that government analyses can be self-serving (if they are published before a vote in which the government is campaigning for one side).
Of course for people who still believe, economics is unfalsifiable because these predictions are often of the form "x.y% less than it would have been" but there's no way to tell what any given stat "would have been" unless you accept the premise that these people can predict the economy ... which they clearly can't.
I would like to move there.
the head of the Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, on the 2005 French referendum on the Lisbon Treaty:
"If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'."
the result being that the French rejected it, but it was adopted regardless
1. The French didn't hold a referendum on Lisbon
2. The treaty was ratified in 2008
Presumably you are either confusing the referendum on the EU constitution with the Lisbon treaty, or trying to suggest that they are one and the same? They are not of course, the Lisbon treaty was drafted specifically to address the concerns with the EU constitution. "The electorate rejected version 1, so we redrafted until it was acceptable" sounds like a pretty good policy to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification_of_the_Treaty_of_...
the Treaty was a device created to pass the constitution while bypassing the need for referendums
> "The electorate rejected version 1, so we redrafted until it was acceptable" sounds like a pretty good policy to me
well yes, that sounds reasonable, except the electorate were not given the option to reject it a second time, because they might actually do that
I am not aware of any such thing, in fact I reject your statement completely.
> the electorate were not given the option to reject it a second time Isn't that a matter for France to address, rather than the EU
Needless to say, this has now been repeated, again, and again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...
And of course, one might say that the EU treated the election results in Greece, Italy, France and Germany with utter contempt. Greece most of all, of course, but the others aren't far behind.
The question asked was « Do we accept this constitution ? »
As you can imagine, barely anyone read it, so on the end most of voters choosed their response on this question : « Do I like my actual government ? »
But my point is, for the Brexit the question was simple, and could have been summarized as « Leave or stay ? » which is very easy to have an opinion on (even if the consequences were not that clear and, as many have stated in other comments here, an elaborated exit treaty should have been thought before asking).
So one one side, a complex question (due to the complexity of the text), and on the other a simple one.
And in the end, most of voters voted emotionally.
Maybe not that different after all.
From being an outsider (I have never even visited UK yet), it seems to me from talking to people and reading the news it was more a vote about "do you like how the things are now and where they are headed, or would you like ... something else"? Something else could have been not necessarily Brexit, as long as it was drastic enough change from the status quo.
And I think a good number of people are just dissatisfied and thought this gamble for a drastic change would perhaps improve things.
I think most people voting in the 2016 referendum were, in their minds, answering the question "do you want to give th establishment a good kicking?".
Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems analogous to getting fed up with shady mechanics, so the next time your car breaks down you drive it over a cliff in the hopes that the wreckage will be more reliable. But I guess people do strange things when they feel like they have no control.
Exactly. Desperate people who don't see anything in the future for them or see thing getting worse, don't usually act rationally. Poverty does that to people as well, for example, and that's visible daily. They resort to payday loans, food they buy might not be healthy for them in the long term and so on.
On the other side there are usually powerful forces willing to take advantage of that irrationality and desperation.
Now that they did, it's reasonable to have another referendum on those specific terms. To not do so would be undemocratic, in fact.
So even if there had been a pre exit agreement to be vote for in the Brexit one, it might ended the same. Leave or stay. And I’m not sure UK people would have read it (but I may be completely wrong by projecting how we did in France)
Opponents (on the left side of French politics) to the European Constitution argued that rejecting it would allow France to open negotiations for a more social leaning EU that didn't try to be only a giant free trade zone, but would also care about the well-being of its citizens (social net, minimum wage, etc.). We've seen where that went: there never was a Constitution B. No-one ever agreed to even try to write one. In short: just like for the Brexit, there never was any concrete plan behind the "no".
Ironically UK managed to duck out of most of the Lisbon treaty obligations (like the Charter of Fundamental Rights, judicial harmonisation and co-operation, etc.), while it would have been much harder -if not impossible- to do with the European Constitution... Had we (the French) voted "yes", we may have ended up with a Brexit 10 years before Brexit!
I think your conclusion is right. Having an agreement worked out first probably wouldn’t have changed much.