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Merged Now What?

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crescent said:
The petition is at 2.7 million signatures in a bit less than three days.

I suppose they are unlikely to get 16 million, but they are certainly making progress. At this point, a good many parliamentarians are probably looking at no downside to debating this.

As you said, it was close. If the events of the last two days have been enough to change the minds of 2% of the electorate, then any hypothetical second referendum held tomorrow would be in favor or "remain".

So here is the question: if the referendum was very close (as it was), and polling data starts to show that the majority of the population no longer supports it, what should the government do? After all, the referendum was hailed as being non-binding. Should the government continue to implement policy based on a non-binding referendum if they have data indicating that public opinion has already swung away from the results of the referendum?

This is not a far fetched scenario. This was a very close vote. Anyone assuming that this is inevitable seems to act as if there were some sort of super-majority victory. There was not, a second poll held today could easily have different results.


ETA: If anything, the public seems to have been misled as to whether or not this actually was "non-binding". In practice, all parties involved seem to be treating the results as set in stone. It seems to now treated as entirely binding.
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Doesn't matter what you do. The experiment will fall apart eventually.
 
Brexit: Gibraltar in talks with Scotland to stay in EU

One possibility under discussion is for Gibraltar and Scotland, which both voted to remain in the EU, to maintain the UK's membership of the bloc.

Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that talks are under way with Gibraltar.

Northern Ireland could also potentially be included in the discussions.

"I can imagine a situation where some parts of what is today the member state United Kingdom are stripped out and others remain," Mr Picardo told Newsnight.
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crescent said:
For big, largely irreversible decisions, I agree. I've often thought that a "Supermajority or Best-of-Three" strategy would work.

1. Have an election. If either option gets a supermajority, then that's the only election. If no Supermajority, have a second election a year or two later.

2. If the second election chooses the same option as the first, then go with it, even if both elections were close. If it gets different results, have a third election a year or two later.

3. Assuming it has gone on this long, the winner of the third election gets selected.

The idea is to make sure that the decision made reflects the settled opinion of the electorate, not the short term emotional response to a single election campaign.
This would be different than selecting for political office. After all, electing candidate "a" does not mean that candidate "b" would need to jump through a decade's worth of bureaucracy just to run for office again. However, leaving the EU would certainly commit the UK to a long re-application process should the UK ever decide that leaving was the wrong thing to do.
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Archie Gemmill Goal said:
<snip>


The real irony is I'm willing to bet there's more than a few signing that petition now who didn't even bother voting on Thursday.
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Precisely why they should be given a chance to vote in a second referendum. That's what the petition is asking for. My suggestion that the petition is a "second referendum" was intending to point out that if more people signed the petition than voted Leave, then that would be undeniable weight that the first referendum was not the choice of "the people", and a second referendum would reflect more closely the actual will of the populace after the implications of either not voting or voting Leave has sunk in, as crescent posted above (which idea makes a lot of sense, even for general elections, if we can't have proportional representation, that is).

Only a second referendum can be said to be a truly democratic handling of the current situation.
 
Are you sober?

ETA..........please see post #708
 
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Anyway, forget all this for the next two hours: I'm rooting for England to not exit Europe right now! Playing Iceland in the knockout stage!

(Association football tournament going on, for any philistines living outside Europe. Association football, or "soccer", which apparently is not an Americanism, but an old term used in Britain decades ago, from shortening association to soccer, differentiating it from Rugby football). (Note the correct placing of the punctuation in these two sentences).
 
asydhouse said:
MikeG said:
Are you sober?
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Yes. I don't like alcohol. If you are referring to me. If you are, I see no justification whatsoever for your absurd response.
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I think MikeG was responding to Jules Galen's post; it looks like the thread in which the two posts were originally has been merged into this one.
 
asydhouse said:
Yes. I don't like alcohol. If you are referring to me. If you are, I see no justification whatsoever for your absurd response.
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Apologies, but that was not my fault. I was replying to a weird new thread by Jules Galen, which appears to have been merged with this one. I posted in direct response to his (posted here at 6.35), but in a separate thread. I guess it's just a quirk of the system that posts go in time-order when they're merged.
 
Jules Galen said:
The UK knows that without the EU they are nothing but an inconsequential island - a has-been empire chocked full of Delusions of Grandeur. For this reason, the UK will never leave the EU.

I'm getting so tired of the leaving talk...this Brexit. Well, I say Screw 'em and tell then to booger off. The EU would be just fine without the UK: in fact, it would be even better off.

Hey Brits...ARTICLE 50 Awaits....DO IT! Or STFU and quit your Whining!!!
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Hardly inconsequential - the UK is the fifth sixth largest world economy. And as a net contributor to the EU budget, the EU will in fact be worse off once we leave.

Nobody is forcing you to read threads about Brexit, feel free to read elsewhere if you find it tedious.
 
Agatha said:
Hardly inconsequential - the UK is the fifth sixth largest world economy. And as a net contributor to the EU budget, the EU will in fact be worse off once we leave.

Nobody is forcing you to read threads about Brexit, feel free to read elsewhere if you find it tedious.
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Not much. Thanks to departure of GB, surviving "Eurosceptics" just lost major force.

And we might get hit a bit, GB economy won't be in good shape at all. And if GB gets associate Norway-style status then you'll be paying similar amount of money, but not receiving anything back.

Sorry, you are not as important economy as you think.
 
Agatha said:
And as a net contributor to the EU budget, the EU will in fact be worse off once we leave.
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It all depends on the deal struck if and when UK leaves. Any deal to remain within the common economic area and retain the bank passport - vital, if the UK is to remain in the top 10 world economies - will likely mean UK will have to keep the contributions to the UK budget, sign up to the rules you won't have a part in making, while recieving no money from EU budget.

That's Norwegian model, literarilly. Don't expect a better deal, there is no reason to offer you one. If you don't like it, Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin will happily take the banking business away from London. Try explaining that to your voters. Germany will be able to point to increased business elsewhere, but it will be a loss after loss for the UK. With the Brexit leadersip firmly doing the proverbial deer in the headlights routine it is clear they didn't even plan for a success. It took Germany less than a day to present a proposal for the future relationship in the UK. It's now been four days since the referendum and all that came from the Brexit hyenas has been backpeddaling on their promises, with zero proposals, explanations, timetables or anything else that isn't packaged and canned London fog.

I sincierly doubt the Brexit will go through at all as a result. There is simply no reason for EU to offer a better deal, and plentiful reasons not to (to prevent similar referendums from succeeding elsewhere if nothing else). You may get some concessions on further immigration and maybe a slightly reduced gross contribution at the price of a similar net contribution and a few other bones like that. You should probably forget about keeping Scotland in the UK, to avoid even more disappointment at a later date.

Great deal Brexiters! Great deal! I happen to hold a few bridges for sale, if you're interested ...

McHrozni
 
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Klimax said:
Not much. Thanks to departure of GB, surviving "Eurosceptics" just lost major force.

And we might get hit a bit, GB economy won't be in good shape at all. And if GB gets associate Norway-style status then you'll be paying similar amount of money, but not receiving anything back.

Sorry, you are not as important economy as you think.
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I didn't say we were important, I said we are sizeable. Slightly less sizeable since Thursday night!

I voted to remain and still believe that to leave the EU is bad for both our country and the EU. But it is what it is. We have to make the best of what's happened.
 
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Tariffs of 3% are within the range of normal currency (Sterling/ Euro) fluctuations, so wouldn't be a big deal. Paying those and not contributing billions to the Euro coffers might actually be a better bargain for the UK than remaining a member of the single market. Don't believe that the EU holds all the cards in this negotiation for a second.
 
I agree that the Brexiters had no real plan in place - Boris' white, worried face on Friday morning was like the kid who just burned his house down after playing with matches. But that's okay, as he went off to play cricket on Saturday instead of dealing with the storm for which he's partly responsible. Maybe the referendum questions should have been:

Do you want the UK to remain in the EU, even though it costs us net £161m a week? []

Do you want to take a leap into the unknown, which will probably plunge the country into a recession and cost us around the same to access the free market? []

Planet X? []

Or more simply:
In? []
Out? []
Shake it all about? []
 
MikeG, do you think the tariffs imposed to trade with the EU partners would be in the order of 3%? I fear that the EU will seek to impose punitive tariffs pour encourager les autres if nothing else; the EU needs reform but they won't want to do anything to give us an easy ride for fear of other countries leaving.
 
MikeG said:
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Tariffs of 3% are within the range of normal currency (Sterling/ Euro) fluctuations, so wouldn't be a big deal. Paying those and not contributing billions to the Euro coffers might actually be a better bargain for the UK than remaining a member of the single market. Don't believe that the EU holds all the cards in this negotiation for a second.
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How have you arrived at 3% and what is the link as you see it to currency fluctuations, which will of course still occur?

Also remember that while the tariff on imports might be x% the effect of tariffs on exports (or indeed other rules that could exclude UK imports to the EU) could be much much much more significant if they mean the product isn't bought.

Are there still EU quotas on things like car imports? I'm not up to date.
 
Agatha said:
MikeG, do you think the tariffs imposed to trade with the EU partners would be in the order of 3%? I fear that the EU will seek to impose punitive tariffs pour encourager les autres if nothing else; the EU needs reform but they won't want to do anything to give us an easy ride for fear of other countries leaving.
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So far I have yet to see a good argument what and why needs reform in EU. What I do know needs some fixing, is bloody ignorance of general population.
 
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