[lifeisstillgood]

I was a remainer (ie anti-Brexit).

This article shows what seems to be becoming a general growing consensus that "some people (prominent campaigners and politicians) lied to us for their own benefit" - and there is a more subtle second consensus of "and then forced a hard brexit for their own career gains".

This is a nice consensus because it has evil people to blame, and removes the blame from 50% of the voting public

I am not sure that's a good idea.

We have more or less proof that 50 % of the country cannot work out basics of social democracy, of trade agreements and referendums. Even things like self interest or which of the bastards is lying to you.

It was a massive act of self harm and it was an act of democracy.

Brexit shows there are viable mental models of the world and there are mental models the equivalent of crayon drawings of the sun and ann apple tree.

How do we get sensible disagreement on the viable ones and laugh the crayon drawings out?

I am always reminded of the woman who told John McCain "I am scared of Obama, he is an Arab". McCains reply was inspiring but the look on his face seemed to me to say "how can I fix this one voter at a time? It will take forever".

[deepthunder]

A start would be ditching FPTP elections.

People vote with their emotions, regardless of education. But I will concede education helps. However, look at all the educated but gullible fools who still think the Democrat Party is "for the people" compared to the Republican Party. Both parties are for the Ruling Elite. Its just different Rhetoric but same actions and outcomes.

[flir]

IMO you do root cause analysis on pretty much any major problem the UK is facing and there, right at the bottom, is FPTP.

[_nalply]

I am thinking about alternative form of government too, however we should not forget the famous quote that democracy is the worst form of government.

Pieter Hintjens the ZeroMQ founder wrote the book "The Psychopath Code". I learnt that some bad people are enough to make a community capsize. I am not sure whether this applies to democracies as well. It is a completely different scale from Open Source projects. However I think, this book is very valuable in learning why democracies have enormous difficulties.

I am afraid, however, that the alternatives are even worse.

[PrimeMcFly]

> How do we get sensible disagreement on the viable ones and laugh the crayon drawings out?

This is the biggest problem. It's an even bigger problem in the US.

The issue is lack of education. There's a reason repub voters are generally not college educated.

The answer is also education, with the caveat you can't educate people who don't want to be educated because they are already too far down a rabbit hole.

[deepthunder]

Lets not forget what swayed the working class (former Labour stronholds) to vote Brexit in the first place: IMMIGRATION! [aka "free-movement"]

Tony Blair was the only leader to allow Immigration ["free-movement"] from Eastern Europe the from moment they joined the EU. Coupled with English being most peoples second language the UK was flooded with people that helped to keep the wages down (by design of course). And who benefited from that? Not the working class.

And Boris was savvy enough to know that if he campaigned on "get Brexit done" he could topple the "red wall" and score a huge victory.

Keir Starmer thinks Corbyn's "socialism" is what cost them the election (2019). No, it was Brexit and possibly Corbyn's "open borders" policy which killed Labour at the polls.

Next election, no-one will be voting FOR Labour, they will be voting AGAINST the Tories.

[flir]

> Tony Blair was the only leader to allow Immigration ["free-movement"] from Eastern Europe the from moment they joined the EU.

That's not true. Bulgaria and Romania were limited for the full seven year period.

> Next election, no-one will be voting FOR Labour, they will be voting AGAINST the Tories.

That's true of most elections where power changes hands. If the party in power is doing an average job, the electorate tends not to replace them with an unknown. They have to be doing badly to get kicked out.

[sph]

These days the only people against rejoining are hardcode Brexiters and those that start their comments with "I voted Remain but..."

They are everywhere, and Labour is sadly doing anything to court these self-flagellant types, so we'll keep ignoring this shadow over our heads for the next 30 years at least.

[lifeisstillgood]

Edit: to the above. I am being overly negative - like "half the population are fools !". It's not that. Democracy works well (ish) with political parties that are more or less well intentioned - they may have their favourite in groups and be more or less corrupt but as long as one party is not trying to sink the ship, then "the people" do not have to pay much close attention.

The difference in policies between most major parties in any country is small and the difference across counties is much smaller than you would think.

So if you vote on "traditional party lines" you more or less get forward progess.

But if one party actually wants to harm the democracy / state then you get Hitler elected (ok very special case he already had a 3 million person country wide organisational apparatus) but you get my point - if politicians are actually intent on sinking the boat they can slip through if we are not careful.

That seems to have been the 2016 case - europe, Brexit, Trump. Wolves appeared in sheep's clothing and people just picked between sheep.

it's not clear how to fix the problem other than to accept that sometimes we will self harm, and we will need to pay the price, not of electing someone who will promise to fix it for us, but to do the hard work as citizens and become educated, informed, engaged.

I think something like citizenship tests for not immigrants but natives might be an interesting start. USA has an odd head start in you learn to swear allegiance to a flag and a reply bloc every day as kids. That makes some kind of diffeeebce.

[seanp2k2]

“Half of the people are below average”