One wonders if remain had one if the leave campaign would have accepted "The vote was clear, put up with it and shut up".

I completely understand why EU governments would be absolutely fed up with the UK government though.

Sadly my generation (40 and younger) are going to have to live the consequences of something we didn't vote for (49 and younger voted remain getting more strongly remain as you go younger) - it's absolutely frustrating.

"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3630668...

But equally, politically, and democratically, it is not tenable to call a referendum (which is something quite rare in the UK) and then to ignore the result. So the reality is that the government and Parliament had to abide by the result even if the referendum was legally not binding.

Now people are of course free to campaign for the UK to join the EU.

Or to campaign to leave the UK - which I suspect is a more achievable and sensible option. I'd doubt if the EU would want the UK back anyway.

But it feels like the UK needs to do some domestic cleanup before that has a chance of happening. Seems like the UK media and political landscape has gone completely off the rails.

Bit like buying a house - you want it? Ok, well do a survey... it has a bit of dry rot - you still want it or shall we look at other options?

This would smooth out the issue of sampling the decision at one exact point.

Add onto this the fact that the government wheeled out every 'expert' it could find to constantly cry about how bad brexit would be - most of them were lying (Mark Carney, George Osbourne in particular told lies of the most astounding nature - for example that brexit would cause more damage to the economy than WW2? Think about that for a minute.).

If anything the establishment was stacked against brexit.

But on your WW2 point, I did think about it for a minute.

Britain fought WW2 for 6 years, 1939 – 1945. Brexit has no known endpoint. Imagine that even 10% of the trade impacts we've seen since the end of the transition period on 1 January persist. Then you can quite easily calculate how many years it will take to damage the economy more than WW2. Off the top of my head, I don't know if that's 6 years, or 60 years, or 600 years. But there's certainly some finite number that will do it.

It was clearly reckless to hold a vote on something without a plan on how it was actually to be implemented or even what it might look like; and there were calls for the government to do some investigation here and publish a report or some such document - the decision not to do so was in order to sow that uncertainty.

I think it would have been democratically unconscionable to not have had "No Brexit" as an option on a second referendum, but that would have required a relatively complicated ranked voting system, and arguably it would have made more sense for the first referendum to have been set up that way instead.

I suppose the alternative would have been for Remainers to boycott the hypothetical second referendum, and hope that the number of votes for the different Brexit options summed to substantially less than the number of votes for Brexit in the initial referendum.

[0] https://www.markpack.org.uk/150719/dominic-cummings-second-r...

[1] https://metro.co.uk/video/jacob-rees-mogg-suggests-holding-s...

So no plan. Genius.

There was no single, set-in-stone outcome on either side.

I voted to stay in, but the remain campaign was far from honest.

It's also apparent to me that the remain camp did keep fighting Brexit tooth & nail much like Farage might have, so I guess we have symmetry.

(I say this with tongue firmly in cheek, but I do think there is some truth to the idea that people broadly get more conservative as they get older)

Yeah, but unfortunately only 64% of the under 35 year olds bothered to turn up, while in the older age groups the turnout was much higher (80% for 35-64, 89% for over 65). That was probably a result of many (including the polls) thinking that the "Leave" side didn't have a chance of winning, same as many US Democrat supporters (also supported by the polls) didn't think Trump could win. The US voters got to correct their mistake four years later, no such luck for the UK voters unfortunately...

So the students (18-24) that could vote had to be:

A) living with parents during studies, or registered to vote at parents place while not living there full time (illegal) — or! Live full time on their own, which is rarely

and

B) to not go to Glastonbury, one of the largest festivals in the UK for young adults.

Hindsight being what it is tells us this was foolish, it that’s how it was.

https://www.gov.uk/electoral-register

> It’s sometimes possible to register at 2 addresses (though you can only vote once in any election).

> For example, if you’re a student with different home and term-time addresses, you may be able to register at both.

The EU isn't perfect, but you'll struggle to argue that it hasn't expanded peace, prosperity and human rights across the continent. This is motherhood-and-apple-pie stuff.

Arguments in favour of Brexit thus tend to boil down to immigration and 'sovereignty'.

There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off. That makes it hard not to ascribe a strong desire to cut immigration to a powerful desire for ethnic homogeneity and/or a powerful dislike of foreigners. Those things are very close to racism.

Meanwhile, the 'sovereignty' Brexit delivers is almost wholly illusory. In practice, we'll get to choose which of the big players to take the rules from. That's going to be either the US (which hardly anybody actually wants — most Brits value our health service, non-toxic food and drinking water, holiday pay, and so on — and also isn't very helpful, because the US is far away) or the EU (whose decisions we used to play an outsized role in, but no longer have any influence over).

It would be hilarious — if it weren't tragic and a little terrifying — that the ones in charge of 'taking back control' are also the ones stifling parliament, suppressing voting, and attacking academics, judges and the rule of law. As far as I can see, the only ones taking back control are the rulers, and the only ones they're taking back control from are the other citizens of the UK.

Is it necessary for the UK to stay in for this peace to continue? Would you like to talk to some of the southern states about the expansion of prosperity that has come along with monetary union?

> There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off.

In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage, and who have to compete for those minimum wage jobs with a huge pool of people.

We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.

Was leaving the EU the right way to go about fixing this? Probably not, but to sweep these issues under the rug or worse, call people racist because of them, was counterproductive.

>> In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage

There are two arguments here:

1. If an aggregate gain isn't being redistributed so we're all better off, that's a failure of the tax and benefits systems that politicians could (and I believe should) address.

2. But aside from that, there's good evidence that immigration simply doesn't hurt those earning least. See Esther Duflo, for example: studies "all come to the conclusion that the effect of low-skilled migration on low-skilled wages is zero". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pZfFY132Q

"Empirical research on the labour market effects of immigration in the UK suggests that immigration has relatively small effects on average wages, with negative effects on low-paid workers and positive effects on high-paid workers."

I'm going to presume that page is well sourced as it's associated with Oxford University.

I don't disagree that many of the reasons people voted for Brexit were things that could have been addressed by the UK government in various ways. But they weren't, and Brussels Buck-passing was practically a parliamentary sport. Perhaps that can end now.

I haven't watched the video yet. But does she address the BoE paper? https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-impac...

Maybe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#Brexit

The solution is to create more jobs, not shrink the population. The idea that you get free labor and don't take advantage of it so backwards. It's only working because it's a psychological trick. In aggregate you are worse off.

Literally every country suffering from an underutilized workforce should just utilize it, even if artificially. Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages and thus your own labor surplus no longer becomes a liability. It works but it's so slow that if you were the politician of a waiting nation you should rightfully be criticized for doing nothing.

>We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.

This is where things get absurd. You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs with impossibly low pay but at the same time you never cared a single bit about those jobs and would never do them yourself?

Is this not just the broken window fallacy?

> Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages

I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make here?

Are you trying to say that in order to compete on the world stage you need a surplus of low/underpaid labour? Why is that good for the people that find themselves in that surplus?

> You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs

I'm doing no such thing. Please re-read my post after discarding some of your preconceptions.

I'm saying the pay and conditions attached to those jobs are wholly unreasonable. That they should not be run like that in the first place, immigrants or no.

Those companies were only viable because people could be flown in from places where there were lower expectations on working conditions and enough of a wage disparity that it made it worthwhile for those workers to be paid the minimum. They were often made to live in cramped conditions in temporary accomodation on-site, in a way that's totally incompatible with (for instance) a family life. That's not a good thing. That sector needs reform.

(Yes, immigration law was hiding this and contributing to wage suppression. I am in no way accusing any class of people, immigrant or otherwise of "stealing jobs".)

That is indeed a problem, but it is your problem. If 48% of people support anything, there must be some reasons for it.

You're right about the consensus among economists. At the same time, 10 years ago there was a consensus about the virtues of free trade. Then Autor et al. wrote "The China Shock" and other similar papers, and, well, now there's not a consensus any more. Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?

Is desire for ethnic homogeneity close to racism? It seems to be very widely shared - including among impeccable liberals. See the evidence on white flight in Kaufmann's Whiteshift. Homophily is close to a human universal, so it's not obvious that it is wrong, or stupid, to prefer others like ourselves.

If we trade we have to accept rules. But now we get to choose which, right? As you say, if we don't like US rules on chicken, we can trade that off against the costs. The value of tying ourselves to the EU depends on how you view its future. There's a fair case that it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies. I don't say that's the only perspective that you can make.

Lastly, the UK is a democracy. The EU, hardly (see Perry Anderson's recent essays in the LRB for a fairly comprehensive account). Democracy sure has its flaws, but doesn't the threat of the boot encourage politicians to get things done? In this context, the contrast between the UK's vaccination program and the EU's is telling.

Physical reality: Factories are in China we don't have to work in the EU to get manufactured stuff! The Chinese are working their butts off for us and we are making them rich in the process!

Anti free trade idea: Chinese people working their butts off for us should be illegal. We would rather work ourselves and prefer expensive domestically produced products (if you did, why make the "inferior" competition illegal?). We don't need high skill jobs, low skill work is just as important!

One particular reason: while trade increases welfare, it also has distributional effects. As trade barriers go to zero, the marginal effect on welfare of a further reduction becomes small, compared to the marginal effect on distribution.

Another reason: globalization allows capital to avoid restrictions (e.g. on environmental externalities, child labour, slavery) that are seen in the West as part of the social contract.

Here's the Autor paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18054/w180...

Dani Rodrik's recent work on populism: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23559/w235...

And his classic "Has globalization gone too far" is worth reading too.

Sure, and I think the most palatable conclusion is that a very large number of people are not well informed. If you look at UK news outlets — what they choose to report, how they choose to report it, and the interests of the people who own them — this doesn't stretch credibility very much.

> Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?

Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".

> it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies

The big tech companies are too large and too powerful to be safe for democracy (or indeed for healthy forms of capitalism involving genuine competition). I would like to see more action taken against them everywhere. The EU is large enough to stand up to large corporations of this sort. The UK outside the EU is not.

>Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".

Heh.... I'm an economist. Trust me on this one.

Why not? Australia is smaller and just stood up to them.

1/ You're right, UK is big an rich enough to make them cave a little, and is also speaking english and have a good diplomatic reputation, that will help.

2/ Australia is a weird country and have weird politicians, i don't think any western country could've done the same on their own.

Do you really want them to have an influence across the whole of the EU? By leaving, our dysfunctional politicians lose influence which will help with the peace and human rights that you mentioned earlier.

Peace takes two sides, so it's hard to argue that having your dysfunctional politicians run unchecked isn't going to lead to worse outcomes across the board.

Edit: maybe you were joking? Ha ha.

If we had remained then, what would the EU have prevented them from doing so far? Would they have stopped the corruption with regards to the Covid contracts? I guess we would have to keep GDPR, but then GDPR might have been stronger in the first place without the UKs influence.

> the UK used to be a major world advocate for human rights

Yes, but we aren't any more and our press freedom index is quite low by EU standards.

>Yes, but we aren't any more

Have you got a source for this?

The ECSC then EEC did that, and of course NATO, ECHR, Schengen and various other institutions and agreements. The EU came into existence much later and claimed credit for things that were set in motion decades before. Noone would have voted to leave the EEC, the EEC was great.

Actually I think after seeing the vaccine rollout by the EU, many more Brits would vote to leave.

It's interesting how events have turned out.

Right now we have a global pandemic so all countries world wide are affected. And unless the whole world is vaccinated we won't get past it since the chance that mutations occur that all possible immune against our vaccines increases the more people get infected.

Currently there are 4 Producing Vaccine "producing" countries/groups

USA, UK, EU, Russia and China.

From these 5 groups only the EU and China are exporting vaccines. I am unsure about russia. And the Chinese vaccine is also not that widespread outside China. But I know that the EU even supplies Canada and Mexico with vaccines, while the USA and the UK have export bans. That is one of the reasons why vaccinations are slow in the EU in addition to being slow last year with ordering.

So while they have great numbers at home concerning the amount of people vaccinated. It is morally debatable whether or not that is the correct approach for a global problem.

You can easily find this information online. The following picture is pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_V_COVID-19_vaccine#/me...

Also Russia is quite open about licensing the vaccine production technology to other countries, e.g. one of the countries which will soon start manufacturing it domestically is Italy.

My theory is simply that, at this point in time, the EU countries are insufficiently well linked and coordinated to face a crisis on this scale with the efficiency of something like the US, due in part to the variety of cultures, languages and political philosophies within the bloc.

> It's interesting how events have turned out.

it's more or less the same as every other crisis the EU has had to deal with: it ends up being handling extremely poorly

the EU is more or less good at one thing: trade negotiations

everything else it ends up involved with has pretty much been a disaster (sovereign debt crisis, migrant crisis, last days of yugoslavia, vaccine procurement, Russia, etc)

It’s the other continental armies (China, America, Russia) that worry me more.

The UK is actually the exception to the growing hate and nationalism in Europe!

The benefit of UK in Europe was that it helped curtail the exscesses of the continent. I worry for the EU now as it seems more toxic after Brexit than before.

The main representation of the UK in the EU parliament was from UKIP, a nationalistic political party that formed a grouping with other nationalists.

By leaving, the UK has reduced the size of that nationalistic group.

Are you in the UK? I find this a rather peculiar view.

LOL

Your own example is a single datapoint and according to the vote statistics you are a de facto minority in your age cohort.[0]

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/graphics-how-the-uk-voted-eu...

I haven't done the math, so I won't make assumptions, but I would bet the percentages from the polls roughly match up with the actual results from the referendum

> Also did they vote remain because it's cool or did they actually have some other reason?

That's an entirely different point, you're just moving the goalposts now. The question isn't whether young people were justified in voting remain, the question is did they vote remain.

What were your reasons behind your decision? What economic class are your parents in?

From my perspective, it's more like "it was inevitable". The people pushing for Brexit would never give up. So the choice was either leave now, or keep talking for the following years/decades/centuries about how the evil EU oppresses the UK, and how everything in UK would be perfect if only...

In some way, it reminds me of dissolution of Czechoslovakia. I was not happy about that either, but realistically, the choice was either do it now, or keep forever listening to voices on both sides about how all problems are caused by the other half and everything would be perfect (though probably disastrous for the other half) if only...

Once you have a major fraction of your population -- and it doesn't make a difference whether it's 48% or 52% -- believing they are being oppressed, it becomes unfalsifiable. Every time something bad happens, you have an explanation ready, and it doesn't matter whether it makes sense or not, believing that it is all someone else's fault is always popular.

If the lesson from Czechoslovakia applies here, at the end none of the prophecies of heaven or hell came true, both sides continue living their boring lives. The only change is that now when something bad happens, this one excuse is no longer available.

So, my guess is that after Brexit, the life in EU will more or less remain the same, and the life in UK will more or less remain the same, with the exception that "everything would be perfect if only EU stopped interfering with our perfect country" will disappear from political speech.

That doesn't seem to be disappearing. My guess is we will be hearing a lot more about the EU for the foreseeable future.

Soon after dissolution of Czechoslovakia, people in Slovakia blamed Czechs for all kinds of things. (We had an agreement that neither side will use the old federal flag; they kept it. We had an agreement that the national treasure will be split proportionally; they decided to keep it all. Plus a few more things. I am sure the other side also had their complaints.) A decade later, after most politicians from that era retired, no one mentioned this anymore. People who were not yet adult during the federation simply don't care; it's ancient history for them, like complaining that your garden does not have nice flowers because dinosaurs once stomped on it. Yeah, but what did you do about it since then; you had enough time to do something, right?

I feel like an old person just for mentioning the old issues. Similarly, ten or twenty years later, Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa no one cares about. It may be hard to imagine, but it will happen.

>Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa

Fortunately that has already happened.

Yes, but a far larger chunk has. Every country gets the leaders it deserves and the UK is no exception.

All things considered it was relatively close so not exactly a far larger chunk.

I don't have any spite towards the British people but I do hope that the EU will act in EU interest which means facilitating the return of financial services that shifted towards London since they joined and not letting the UK and whatever the borderdeal ends up as serve as a loop to ignore single market regulations.

"there are some demographic trends that will influence opinion in future. These changes will tend to pull British public opinion in a pro-European direction, and should be sufficient to produce a majority of 52%-48% for ‘Remain’ in 2021"

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends...

also add the EU's disastrous vaccine procurement scheme, combined with its attempt to obscure its total incompetence with petulant nationalistic flailing