Admittedly, I don’t know much about Brexit, but from what I have been exposed to, it seems like a decisively economical and political impairment that made travel and business with the rest of Europe more difficult and costly. Since it is so highly criticized as a terrible move, why doesn’t the UK just rejoin the EU?
Try to remember that almost half of us did not vote to leave in the first place and knew it was a mistake. The Brexit vote was won on the tiniest of margins mainly due to a criminal misinformation campaign.
There was no mandate in that vote for the UK leaving the single market - something that those liars campaigning for Brexit said that we would never do. I firmly believe that all of the Brexit campaigners should be rotting in prison for the incalculable damage they did to our nation. Many people were tricked into voting against their best interests because they were told that leaving the EU would mean more money for the NHS, or it would protect their daughters from all the Turkish rapists joining the EU next week, or all the other total fucking nonsense the criminal liars told them through Facebook.
That’s exactly the problem : you need to fix your country before you can join again. That’s how democracy works.
The brexit is a tragedy, and I feel for those who didn’t want to leave the EU. But it’s done. Maybe your kids will be able to see the return of the GB into the EU.
The thing is your electorate let itself be manipulated like that and as you said the perpetrators are still very much at large. It follows they will manipulate the electorate again and there’s no reason to believe the same demographic won’t easily fall for new lies. (Unless they died off.)
This sucks for the Brits who knew better but it also means the EU would let an unreliable partner back in if nothing changed. It seems the pro Brexit crowd will need to learn the hard way that no really you were lied to and you still have to bear the consequences of your own actions (vote).
Being lied to isn’t an excuse to accept racist fearmongering and plainly suicidal economic reasoning. Nor is it an excuse for the project fear slander that happened at the time. They were lied to and were also told the truth. And you who voted to stay also need to learn that your vote doesn’t abdicate Britain either. You’re in this together.
Oh, I totally agree with how it happened, the point is, it happened, and a good deal of the people who made it happen , are still in power. The problem is no onw will do anything about it. As you say, almost half didn’t vote for it, but over half did, and there-in lies the problem. “they were lied to” Yeah, but they voted based on those lies.
You only needed a slim 50% to split? Not like a 2/3rds majority?
Yup. And the rerendum wasn’t even legally binding.
The whole thing still boggles my mind, it was something like 52/48 on a non-binding vote, and everyone is just like, “Ok, I guess we’ve got to do it then,” even though it seemed to be the most obviously stupid decision in the world. There’s alot I like about Britain’s system of government, but that such a major decision hinged on the barest of margins is just weird, at least in the US we’ve got huge hurdles before we can change our Constitution (though that too can cause problems trying to get some things fixed).
The 2000s have just been filled with so many epic, unforced face-plants across countries and companies, it’s like we’re living in the Age of Idiocy. Either that or Russia had its tendrils everywhere and somehow convinced a great number of people to make the stupidest decisions ever, to which they took advantage of that… by doing their own epic face-plant.
I think humans tended to do such epic face plants for a lot longer. But these days every idiot and their dog has a smartphone to record everything and an internet connection to share it to the world. You look a lot more silly with your epic face plant if it’s captured in 4K and broadcast to the world.
Random side note: if you want to hear about a rather epic historical face plant there’s a good video on the Erfurt latrine disaster on YouTube.