[tzs]

OT: Can I ask a question about something that has long puzzled me about Brexit?

Note: I'm not asking about whether or not Brexit was a good idea. No matter where you stand on that, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were terrific arguments for both staying in the EU and leaving.

My puzzlement concerns the specific question asked on the 2016 referendum, which was

> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

with the options being remain or leave.

If you wanted the UK to stay in the EU, then clearly "remain" was the right choice for you.

Remaining didn't require the UK to do anything, so if you voted "remain" you were voting for something with a highly predictable outcome.

Leaving, on the other hand, requires a lot of action over the next several years. There were many quite different ways a post-EU UK could turn out, and much disagreement among the people who wanted to leave as to which of those ways they wanted. There could be changes of government over the years it takes to implement so even if you were confident that the people now in power would work toward an implementation of the kind of Brexit you wanted, they might not be the ones in power when it comes to actually finishing the thing.

If you wanted to leave then it seems to me that the best choice would still be to vote "remain" because this particular referendum was terrible. Instead, work to elect politicians who would offer a better referendum. Something like this:

> Should the United Kingdom develop a concrete proposal to leave the EU and then hold a referendum on that, and if that referendum passes negotiate a final deal to leave the EU, and then hold a final referendum on whether to implement that final deal?

[KineticLensman]

Unfortunately that would have required a nuanced political discussion, something that traditionally has been lacking in the UK Brexit wars.

[StewardMcOy]

The missing piece here is that the referendum was designed by people who wanted and expected remain to win. David Cameron, the PM at the time, was facing a minor rebellion within his own party from a faction of MPs that were anti-EU. They weren't a majority of the party, but they were large enough to cause trouble.

A couple years prior, he had faced a similar problem from Scottish nationalists, so he approved a referendum on Scottish independence. He was against independence, but when Scotland voted to remain a part of the UK, it weakened the arguments of the Scottish nationalists, making his job easier. He figured he could do the same with Brexit. Nobody seriously expected leave to win.

Problem was, it turned out there was a lot of money in leaving the EU. It would make tax dodges easier for the ultra-rich, and it would allow disaster capitalists to make a killing by shorting the market. So money flowed into the leave campaign from wealthy donors hoping to make a killing. As a result, leave ran a much slicker campaign.

All this might not have been enough for leave to win, but people were also pissed off at the government for years of austerity policies and a flagging economy since the 2008 crash. Lots of people, saw the vote as a way to express their displeasure in the government. Some of those who voted leave never expected it to win.

SO yes, you're right. The referendum was poorly worded and poorly planned. This was evident in the immediate aftermath. The House of Commons could not agree at all on what to do. A large chunk still backed remaining, but not a majority. Lots of MPs decided that, even though they knew Brexit was a bad idea, their constituents had voted for it, so they needed to switch sides. They didn't all switch to the same side though. Some wanted a no-deal Brexit. Some wanted to remain in the customs union and single market. Others wanted different arrangements. There was no majority for any course of action, because the referendum didn't describe a course of action, and it paralyzed UK politics for years.

[soneil]

This exactly.

The goal of the brexit referendum was to catch the voters that were leaving the conservative party for the ukip party, and give them a reason to vote conservative again.

It wasn't expected to pass, it wasn't expected to be remotely close. It was expected to shore up the conservative party so they wouldn't be dragged into another coalition.

The wording of the referendum needs to be seen in that light. It was intended to give ukip voters what they wanted to hear. "should we think about talking about thinking about maybe doing something" wouldn't have achieved that goal.