Labour were decimated in the last election. I don't suspect they'll be in power with a mandate to rejoin the EU.

Btw, things aren't as split down party lines as they may seem. Half the Tory party are Europhiles, and I know many of my Labour friends are anti-EU in a libertarian small government sense.

Indeed, trade deals and international relationships are bipartisan issues, labour’s last leader was anti EU for decades. The party lines in the UK are drawn along class and aspirational values, not policy decisions- although when a referendum is called 2 sides always step out to divide up the electorate in their favour

Agree. I'd always argue that this was broadly an anti austerity / inequality vote: people just basically pissed off with having a rubbish life voting against some notion of "authority" or "centralisation".

The sad fact is that it's exactly these people (in the Midlands, NE, those on lower wages, in rural communities, etc) who (generalising a bit, not much) voted out - these are the communities who will be hit hardest.

I think this analysis has been shown to be false. This does not apply to significant majority of leavers.

It explains a minor boost on the left, not main leaver sentiment.

Agree. I personally think Labour blew it, big time. But: the lies that got us out of the EU were pretty unstoppable. Selling an out message on the back of sensationalist, shock messages was an easy PR hit.

We'll see. Personally, I'll always feel and be European. I reckon we'll be back.

It's perfectly consistent to feel European and also feel that EU membership is not a net positive for the UK. Being pro-Brexit does not make one less of a European.

Um. Finding it hard to parse this..?

The European identity is not tied to the European union but to a shared culture and history. Or are Swiss and Norse people also not European?

The EU vote in Norway almost 30 years ago was very, very different from the British Brexit affair. Luckily for us Norwegians, we didn't suffer from anyone like Mark Francois, for example.

Of course you could say that Brexit has nothing to do with British culture.

The point is that European culture is not linked to the European Union.

I'd say they're linked insofar as the European Union was created by and continues to evolve through European culture.

> The EU vote in Norway almost 30 years ago was very, very different from the British Brexit affair

It was driven by the same core concerns about national sovereignty.

Yes, but expressed in culturally different way. As I wrote, no Mark Francois for us. He's an important politician due to the peculiar British current political culture.

EDIT: I meant "peculiarly British", but I haven't the heart to edit that typo.

Yeah sure, as long as you get your paperwork ready and book your visas ahead of time

Well Labour will just waste another decade campaigning to rejoin the EU which has so far has been nothing but a complete failure given the last 3 consecutive election defeats since the referendum vote.

Here's to another decade of Labour being out of government. (Again).

It may be an easier sell once the consequences of Brexit are less theoretical and more practical for a few years.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

IIRC the forecast economic damage is lost opportunity for growth rather than immediate losses, and any actual immediate losses could be easily dismissed (especially by this lot) as “COVID losses, not Brexit”.

It's unclear whether the collapse of the European banking system will have the effect of boosting support for rejoining the EU, but it's not impossible.

- Tory f's are out

Is that language really necessary? Such divisive language doesn't help the debate at all. As mentioned below, it's also totally incorrect. Labour heartlands voted massively for leave. Labour and Tories went into the election saying they would honour the referendum vote. Tories cleaned up an 80 seat majority in December 2019 winning many Labour seats campaigning on the goal to get Brexit done.

Brexit has happened. I voted remain but I've moved on. Harbouring such negativity and pessimism isn't healthy.

"Cleaned up"? They got just 43% of the popular vote!

It's even more ridiculous than America. The whole thing's rigged, 60% of the country didn't want the Tories handling this and somehow they have an 80 seat majority!

> Here's hoping our kids manage to vote us back in

New old people are created every day. So I wouldn't necessarily count on it.

I hope you're right though.

It's almost entropic really - there was a genuinely depressing YouGov graph from a few years ago which plotted the number of people who actually think the EU is an important issue vs. time: The number is almost nil (even the wonks didn't care) until the year/s directly leading up to the referendum.

Europe is a tricky problem, but the way Brexit specifically has happened (Lie, Damned Lies, and fake statistics - at best) means the only real lesson from this is that referenda are truly disastrous for complex policy decisions.

I'm not a fan of the "people can't be trusted with international law" thing. I mean, I also hate Brexit, but I hate policy laundering too. And international agreements are really good at just that, because they aren't democratically accessible. Ironically, the EU tried to solve this problem: it had a parliament with democratic elections that actually made decisions about the kinds of international treaties EU member states would adopt. However, most international law doesn't work that way. Instead, all of the sides negotiate in private and some negotiated agreement comes out the other end that local legislative bodies only get a final yay-or-nay vote on.

Fun fact: this is actually how we got the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This is commonly derided as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, but the actual legislative history is that the EU had already negotiated and passed identical term lengths five years prior. They also added a reciprocality clause, granting the same term lengths in the EU to any country that also extended terms in their own jurisdiction. This is a ratchet: there's no mechanism for an American or European to object to longer terms, aside from unilateral withdrawl that will disadvantage the first-moving party. In practice, the US agreed to longer terms, because what else are they going to do? Let France or Germany have more protection for their films than the US has?

(DMCA Section 1201 happened in a similar manner, but replace the EU with the WTO. The US wouldn't pass anti-circumvention laws first, so they snuck it into TRIPS, and then used that to force the DMCA into being. The beauty of international law is that you always can find another institution to launder policy through. If there was no TRIPS, then maybe they could have bundled it into NAFTA.)

People don't like it when they object to something, and their elected representatives try and shut down their concerns. That makes them feel disenfranchised. Brexit was the inevitable result of politicians doing unpopular things and using the EU as an excuse for it. Eventually, someone was going to say "why don't we just not have international agreements"? Bonus points if you are actually one of those politicians looking to get out of, say, an upcoming tax agreement. Cause the problem (anti-democratic ratcheting), sell the solution (economic isolationism)!

> Ironically, the EU tried to solve this problem: it had a parliament with democratic elections that actually made decisions about the kinds of international treaties EU member states would adopt.

the EU parliament can't do any of these things

it can't even propose legislation

at best it's a rubber stamp for the Council and the Commission

The keyword here is "tried". Pretty much every other multilateral trade agreement is entirely undemocratic. Parties to the agreement negotiate on a condition of unanimity. This isn't just minority rule (Council/Commission), it's minority-of-the-minority rule.

The solution to the EU being "undemocratic" is to make it democratic: move decision-making power to the European Parliament and away from member states. You can have democracy or soverignity but not both.

Certainly a referendum this vague. People were asked to vote for either status quo or... something very ill defined. Witness the ‘yes’ voters suddenly surprised they’re losing their jobs because the deal doesn’t cover selling live eels or sausages or banking services or whatever to Europe.

It’s easy to say “they condemned themselves” and they _were_ naive to buy into the cake-type Brexit narrative, but if the choice had been between status quo and “we’ll try to negotiate this sort of attainable deal”, people would have had some idea on what they were voting for. As it was, it could have been anything from Norway+ to autarky.

> the only real lesson from this is that referenda are truly disastrous for complex policy decisions.

Yeah, I think that's definitely the big lesson.

I feel it's exacerbated by decades of tabloid propaganda.

Decades of uk politicians letting the EU take the fall in the tabloids and little of the credit.

Those new old people will have a bit less nostalgia for the world wars and the empire.

I believe Mark Francois is to be used to train an AI to have CaaS - there's hope yet!

I think there's still a fairly dangerous element of colonialism which will get phased out as that whole era drops from memory. Here's hoping, anyway.

> Here's hoping our kids manage to vote us back in as soon as those Tory f's are out.

I think there is a decent chance that sometime in the next few years there will be another Scottish independence referendum, that this time "Yes" will win, and then an independent Scotland will apply to rejoin the EU.

I think Scottish independence, combined with demographic changes in Northern Ireland – Catholics are likely to outnumber Protestants, possibly as early as this year's census, but if not in 2021, then almost certainly in 2031 – have a decent chance of leading to Irish reunification in the next couple of decades.

If Scotland and a united Ireland are in the EU, will the United Kingdom of England and Wales still want to stay out? (And will they still keep the "United" in their name?)

(Even Welsh independence might happen eventually, but I think that is a fair way further off than Scottish independence or Irish reunification.)

The SNP's majority and the remain vote in Scotland certainly give credence to that idea. Given how close the last referendum was the Brexit issue could easily be enough to tip the scales, granted it's always difficult to predict what other factors might be in play.

I must admit that part of me likes the irony of the UK "forging it's own path" resulting Westminster losing power and it's states gaining independence.

As a side note, I think it's better to refer to the northern Irish as republicans and unionists. The division is due to the partition of Ireland and not religious beliefs. The division lines might be the same but religious labels add irrelevant impactions. You don't have to be Catholic to be in favour of reunionification and vice versa.

> As a side note, I think it's better to refer to the northern Irish as republicans and unionists

The reason I spoke of Catholics and Protestants is because there is a religious background question ("what religion you were raised in") on the Northern Ireland Census, and it is widely expected to flip in this year's census, and if not this year, then almost surely by the next census in 2031.

By contrast, the Northern Ireland Census doesn't directly ask about whether one identifies as "republican/nationalist" or "unionist". The closest thing it comes to that is the question of whether one identifies as British, Irish, Northern Irish, or some combination of those three. But it isn't clear how exactly the answers to that question map to the community divide.

Religious background doesn't exactly map to community affiliation, but it mostly does. One thing to keep in mind is the distinction between small-u unionism (pragmatic support for the continuation of the status quo) and Big-U Unionism (support for traditional Unionist symbols such as the Orange Order parades, 12th of July celebrations, etc) – a decent percentage of Catholics support the former, very few (if any) Catholics support the later. Likewise, there are some Protestants who would vote for Irish reunification but very many of those would not want to associate with traditional nationalist community symbols.

> The division lines might be the same but religious labels add irrelevant impactions.

I think, historically, the religious division did play a major role in the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s. Many unionists saw Unionism and Protestantism as going hand-in-hand. The Republican/Nationalist side placed less emphasis on religion – although the vast majority of Republicans/Nationalists were Catholics, there was a small Protestant minority among them. Now, as the decades have passed, with continuing secularisation, religion is less an issue than it used to be, but it still lurks in the background. The DUP was originally strongly linked to the Free Presbyterian Church, although the DUP has de-emphasised the religious linkage as time goes by. Their traditionalist moral stances (anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights, etc) have even won them the support of the ultra-conservative end of Northern Irish Catholicism, but that's only about 2% of the electorate. Still more than the number of Protestants voting for Sinn Fein or SDLP.

In the context of the census that certainly makes sense and there are obviously strong links between religious backgrounds and political beliefs.

The reason I mention it is because I've encountered too many people in continental Europe who assume the Troubles were purely due differences in religious beliefs which seems absurd given how similar those two branches of catholicism are. I realize it's entirely based on my personal experience but I've seen it too often to ignore!

> The reason I mention it is because I've encountered too many people in continental Europe who assume the Troubles were purely due differences in religious beliefs

I agree that it is a complex situation, and that while religion is a major factor, it is not the only factor, and painting it as purely about religion is an oversimplification. On the other hand, I worry that many people oversimplify it in the other direction, and try to present it as if it has nothing to do with religion, which is false.

> which seems absurd given how similar those two branches of catholicism are

I think you mean Christianity, not Catholicism here.

Britain and Ireland have a long history of religious conflict and sectarianism. In recent decades, the intensity of that conflict has dropped down dramatically, in large part due to secularisation. But decades ago, it was much more intense.

That conflict was never primarily about religious doctrine, although religious doctrine still had a big role to play in it. A lot of it was about the fear that Catholicism was a means for foreign Catholic political powers – Spain, France, etc – to take over. It was also about who was the rightful king – Catholic King James VII and II was removed in a coup in 1688 and replaced with his Protestant daughter Mary and son-in-law William of Orange. James had an authoritarian ruling style, which caused a lot of conflicts with Parliament; but he was also an advocate of religious toleration, which was deeply unpopular with the majority of Protestants; those two factors combined led to his removal. James sought to regain the throne, and many Irish Catholics supported him, along with France. His supporters (the Jacobites) fought a war (with French help) to gain control of Ireland (the Williamite War of 1689 to 1691), but lost. (His supporters included some Protestants, especially conservatives who viewed the removal of the king in a coup as a threat to the legitimacy of the monarchy.) Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland still celebrate their side's victories in that war to this day, particularly on the 12th of July.

At least your representatives are not about to have a vote on if your democracy should pay attention to the results of its own elections.

But look at all the no evidence!

Personal opinion.

Tribalism prevails, humans have no fix. Perhaps in another reality or dimension it is conceivable for people to come together and form a truly resourceful world government.

Wait till you see how the lack of world coordination keeps this virus thriving in half of the planet. While we plot beautiful statistics to show which tribe has less cases in a non-uniform response.

Hail the great UK for awakening the UKIP with their fantastic referendum promise to reduce pest immigrants to hundreds. The UK had it long coming, the country lives in the 19th century, never moved towards becoming a modern republic. And now, people are shocked we voted out of the EU. Bad news is old news.

It is the UK's tradition to be a lone fighter in favour of customary nationalistic tribalism and island mentality. Worse of it is that it ended up waking up the dormant retarded far right around the world. Hell yea! great way to start 2021 UK!.

This was not tribalism. The vote was on a knife’s edge, and only after many years of anti-European sentiment stirred up by conservative and other Euro-skeptic sections of the media. We can squarely blame Rupert Murdoch for this, even if he did not directly pull the strings. People routinely vote against their best interests because they are convinced to do so by a pervasive, aggressive, psychologically damaging mass media, which is now exacerbated by social media.

By that logic we would expect the German states to vote them self out of the German federation, Scotland and Wales to vote them self out of the UK, Nigeria to break apart, etc. And not only that we should expect it to happen with hostility towards the old nation, e.g. no trade unions after independence (unlike e.g. Catalonia not only voting them self out of Spain, but also out of the EU).

However that seems not be happening, nor does there seem to be any will towards it.

It seems people actually quite like each other, and they like to be able to visit each other, and trade with each other, even though they speak different language or have different religion. In fact in the world today, tribalism seems to becoming more and more on fringe.

I don’t believe for a second that people voted for Brexit because of tribalism. Some might have, but they were definitely a tiny minority.

> However that seems not be happening, nor does there seem to be any will towards it.

I don't know about your other examples, but there is definitely some will toward Scotland voting themselves out of the UK. There was already a referendum about it a few years ago, and there has been more talk again recently since Scottish voters didn't want Brexit and many would love for Scotland to be able to break from the UK and rejoin the EU.

Yeah I did think of that as I was writing this response, but there is a difference though. As I note in the Catalonia example the sentiment is not tribalism as people generally want to retain relations with the foreign neighbors post independence (e.g. I bet most Scots want to rejoin EU post independence).

I bet even most people voting for Brexit didn’t want this hard “we are on our own, and we don’t care for nobody” type Brexit as you would expect if tribalism prevailed (as evident that most people even in favor of hard no deal Brexit still favor CANZUK).

Nothing like diversionary foreign policy :/

The EU has really been quite a convenient scapegoat, not just in the UK. I wonder if politicians on all sides will/can continue to blame the EU now that the UK has "full control". I have a feeling that, yes, they will.

As much as I consider myself a pan-European, the European institutions, governance and government unfortunately make for a (mostly deservedly) great political target.