BREXIT - more good than bad or more bad than good?

[Jonathan Scott]

At least some of the money ought to go to Welsh farmers who voted leave and are now concerned they will lose their EU subsidies!

I saw an interview with some and it was priceless. They said they'd vote leave again tomorrow, but wanted assurances the UK governmebt would pay them equivalent EU subsidies.

The UK government has recently agreed to provide £3 billion in subsidies to match the lost EU subsidies at least for the next couple of years. This presumably creates a slight complication for free trade, in that technically the UK needs to get approval from the EU to subsidise any commercial enterprise, although the fact that it was previously subsidised by the EU makes it likely to be acceptable!

 

[Vanadium 50]

The amount was not the issue.

The whole idea of being able to just redirect our whole EU contribution to the NHS is so far from reality

The bus doesn't say that. I'm not even sure it implies that. It said "We send the EU 350 GBP a week; let's fund our NHS instead. Vote leave. Let's take back control." To me, this doesn't say every penny saved goes to the NHS. It is a statement of relative priorities, and about who should set them.

In the 80's there was this poster:

Is this intended to be literally true? Or is it again statement about relative priorities?

Finally, in 2016 the NHS budget was about 2600 GBP per week. In 2023, it is forecast to be 3300 per week. That's more than 350M GBP. One can make many arguments about this - it needs to consider inflation, it's likely going to service debt instead of patient care, it might have happened anyway - but an argument for more nuance is a different thing than the argument to overturn a referendum.

 

[Orodruin]

argument to overturn a referendum.

This is a red herring. There is no referendum that a priori would have needed to be overturned as it was not a binding vote. Had it been a binding vote it would likely have had to be redone due to several irregularities such as overspending on the part of the winning side.

Also, almost nobody was talking about right out cancelling article 50 apart from the Lib Dems (if they got their own majority, which was never going to happen). What was being talked about was a confirmatory binding vote, which I do not think very strange as "Leave" was not a very well defined option as evidenced by all the different forms of leaving that have been discussed since the referendum. If you give people an option of "changing something" or "keeping the status quo", this gives a lot of leeway for the change option in terms of defining what should be changed and how and this can be done differently when pitching the idea to different people - all tailored to make them more likely to vote for the change without actually knowing what is going to change.

 

[Vanadium 50]

This is a red herring. There is no referendum that a priori would have needed to be overturned as it was not a binding vote

That's a fair point. But if that's your position, the red bus is as much or more of a red herring. If the referendum is non-binding, who cartes whether or not the "too stupid to vote" types were fooled or not.

I think there is also a fundamental problem with a non-binding referendum and I don't think Cameron et al. really thought this through. Suppose Outcome A is "Well, the people voted Remain, so we will remain. Will of the people and all. Sorry Leavers, but that's democracy" and Outcome B is "The people voted Leave, but after all, we said non-binding, and we the experts think Leaving is a bad idea, so sorry Leavers." So while Outcome B is a logical possibility, it's not a political possibility, at least not without saying to my hypothetical Lincolnshire greengrocer that her opinion never really mattered in the first place and that decisions would be made by experts in London (or Brussels) and democratic input was only a thin veneer over what is ultimately a technocracy.

This problem is compounded by the question being "who makes the decisions" rather than "how many snowplows do we buy"?

If you want to argue that the referendum was bungled from the start, I'd agree with you. I see it as a cynical attempt on the part of the Tories to skim off some UKIP voters by promising them a referendum that they would then lose. And that plan blew up in their faces. If you want to argue that Brexit is on whole a net negative for the UK, I'd agree with you there too. But once the plan for a referendum was launched, rejecting the outcome would be viewed as extraordinarily anti-democratic.

 

[Orodruin]

So while Outcome B is a logical possibility, it's not a political possibility, at least not without saying to my hypothetical Lincolnshire greengrocer that her opinion never really mattered in the first place and that decisions would be made by experts in London (or Brussels) and democratic input was only a thin veneer over what is ultimately a technocracy.

This actually happened several times in Sweden. For example, we had a referendum in 1955 on whether or not to start driving on the right. No won with a vote share of about 83%, but now we drive on the right. Participation in the referendum was very low however, just about 53%.

But once the plan for a referendum was launched, rejecting the outcome would be viewed as extraordinarily anti-democratic.

Rejecting it outright, I would agree. However, I do not think a confirmatory vote would have been unthinkable from a democratic perspective. It is a bit like talking to someone about parachuting, telling them in vague terms how nice it is and convincing them to come along the next time. At the moment of the jump, when it is clearer what it actually means, it would not be a bad thing to make sure they still want to jump rather than just throwing them out of the plane.