[sobellian]

It's a form of institutional hysteresis. If a major change can get implemented by a simple majority, it has zero noise margin. If it requires (say) two thirds, then it has a noise margin of 33 percentage points.

I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

[tzs]

I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible. The question asked was:

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

There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

[tim333]

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill

People were pretty ill informed and voted leave for reasons like they were pissed off with the present situation, or they didn't like foreigners.

Which they were entitled to do but have ended up with a worse situation and worse foreigners.

[mike_hearn]

> There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.

> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).

[jowea]

I think the ideal solution in an ideal world would be to do ranked choice voting between the main choices that could be reasonably negotiated and remain. So voters could pick between EEA, Canada-like, remain, etc all at the same time.

Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.

[mike_hearn]

If you want to split the Leave vote that way you would have also needed to split the Remain vote by asking people what Remain means: something usually presented as obvious by Remainers but it's by no means so. For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.

[realityking]

> For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.

[mike_hearn]

The EU institutions have done many things they weren't allowed to do under the treaties, so that argument just wouldn't have landed. An example of that was human rights law, which was originally never intended to be law and wasn't written tightly enough to be so. The UK and Poland obtained a supposedly water-tight opt out written in plain language, which the ECJ then simply voided. There are other such cases.

[phatfish]

It was deliberately so, Dave wanted to be PM at lot and gave the Eurosceptics of the Tory party everything they wanted.

A simple question for a massively complex problem.

An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).

Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.

Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.

[lmm]

> I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible.

Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.

[1832]

Voting for this once in a lifetime opportunity was smart; maybe the smartest ever. The smartest people in the UK voted for brexit. You will totally see in a few years when they made Britain great again!

[vixen99]

I can see no reason at all to suppose that this might be the case. Quite the reverse given current events and the determination of the current administration.

[toyg]

I think the parent comment was a parody of trumpite rhetoric.

[petre]

Good luck with that. Last I checked most more countries went to the BRICS summit rather than the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/brics-and-the-commonweal...

[skissane]

> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

In Australia, a constitutional referendum requires a double majority to pass: both a majority nationally, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states (so at least 4 out of 6).

Unlike Australia, the UK has no written constitution, and is a unitary state with devolution instead of a federation. Still, Brexit was undeniably a constitutional-level issue, and taking the constituent countries as the analog to states, they could have adopted the same "double majority" rule in the UK for the Brexit referendum. And if they had, the referendum would have failed: it got a majority nationwide, but in only two out of four constituent countries (England and Wales but not Scotland and Northern Ireland).

A big problem the UK has – which Brexit has arguably only worsened – is its extreme lopsidedness – one of the constituent countries (England) is over 80% of the population, so a big enough English majority on any issue can override the will of the other three constituent countries. And yet there are essentially no constitutional provisions to protect against this. Adopting a "double majority" for the Brexit referendum would have been a small step in the direction of doing so, at least by establishing a precedent.

[0] The fact that it was legally non-binding is not an issue: the legislation could have simply specified the conditions under which the referendum would be "deemed to pass", and require some appropriate government official to make a formal declaration as to whether those conditions had been met or not.

[blibble]

no double majority was required to join (no referendum at all...)

requiring a double majority to leave would the definition of stacking the deck in your favour

[skissane]

Yes, but the UK has evolved a lot since 1973.

In 1973, the UK was much closer to a pure unitary state – there was no Scottish Parliament, no Welsh Parliament; the existing devolution in Northern Ireland (the Parliament of Northern Ireland) had just been abolished the previous year and the attempts to reinstate it in 1974 and 1982 proved to be short-lived failures. By 2016 there was a devolved Scottish Parliament, a devolved Welsh Assembly (designated a Parliament in 2020), and a devolved Northern Ireland assembly.

I think the evolution of devolution (pardon the pun) is a recognition that the UK needed stronger protections for Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish rights against the English supermajority, and a "double majority" for constitutional-level national referendums would be a step further in that direction.

[zo1]

Wow I never thought about the "joining" stage of this whole brexit topic. If that's the case then that adds a whole new level of dysfunction to "democracy" as a concept.

It seems like democracy really is an experiment representative of our hope of human cooperation, and yet I'm constantly reminded that the way we actually implement and enact is very far from that ideal.

[switch007]

It wasn't the EU that we joined in 1973.

The UK joined the EEC, a very different institution

[lmm]

In fairness entering was done without a referendum, and could not have won one. (The government can and should make policy decisions without punting them to a referendum, of course).

[mppm]

Yes, there really needs to be some margin for really big and costly changes. One of the main reasons for Brexit being such a clusterfuck was that, once the going got tough, majority support evaporated and the exit was pushed through by what was effectively a minority government at that point, with parliament trying to make their lives as difficult as possible. It could have been less painful overall if there had been more robust agreement to go ahead with it, and therefore some degree of cooperation. Maybe 2/3 majority is overkill, but a 60-40 split should be a requirement for serious changes to the future of a country.

[n4r9]

> once the going got tough, majority support evaporated

It's likely that majority support would have evaporated as soon as any leave deal was reached. No deal would have satisfied all the different reasons people voted leave.

[ben_w]

Indeed; no deal (including the "no deal" option of leaving with no deal, and also the option of having another referendum) was acceptable to Westminster, which was why May was forced to leave office.

Only Johnson was able to cut that Gordion Knot, albeit by lying to people to their face.

[n4r9]

Clever :p

To be fair, Parliament forced a delay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020, to ensure that there was some sort of agreement in place. And then it passed because there was a one-year transitionary period until Jan 2021 during which the UK stayed in the single market.

And now we've voted in a PM who promises building closer ties with the EU. And eventually the generation that rabidly voted to leave will disappear. Progress marches on slowly.

[ben_w]

I live in hope that I will see the UK, or its constituent countries, return to the EU; but events may overtake such dreams, and it would be sensible for the EU to require a supermajority of the candidate nations to be in favour of joining, just to reduce the chances of things like Brexit from happening in the future.

[chgs]

When I close my browser, I get asked “are you sure”, seems crazy not to have that protection with brexit once the details had been worked out.

In the end we had an opportunity to reverse it, in 2017 and 2019, but said “no”

[n4r9]

Yeah. I'm astonished that people aren't looking at the EU and AV referendums and thinking that we need to drastically overhaul how we conduct them in future. Guidelines have been published with some pretty obvious improvements, like the sitting government not campaigning for one side.

[chippiewill]

> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

The problem with not proceeding following a "50% + epsilon" is you're then suddenly ignoring the majority of the electorate which has its own political backlash.

The trick is to not have a referendum unless the outcome likely to be definitive. This is actually codified in the Good Friday agreement as a condition for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to call an Irish unification referendum.

[danielfoster]

This is a great explanation. I wasn't previously familiar with these concepts and this is exactly the point I wanted to make. If only a 50.1% consensus is needed at one point in time (either by political will or referendum) to join the EU, the EU could end up with a group of members half-committed to membership. It is then much harder for such a body to make difficult or controversial decisions if members are constantly on the cusp of leaving, and easier for members with lower EU approval rates (such as Hungary) to extract concessions far in excess of their relative power.

[mike_hearn]

That is an artificial problem created by the EU's structure and ideology though. There's no reason collaboration between nations must be funneled through an organization that sees itself as an alternate government, and which likes to present everything as all-or-nothing. There could easily be independent agreements on independent topics which would avoid such issues, but this would not meet the ideological goals of the EU to replace the existing nation states and governments, so they don't do it.

[District5524]

Maybe surprising, but based on the latest Eurobarometer, the citizens of the following countries trust the EU less than Hungarians (even if Hungary is just below EU average): Germany, Czechia, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, France (in this order ...) While the stance of Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus and Greece is not much relevant in relation to the future of the EU, regarding Germany and France, that's a bit more alarming... Nevertheless, the loud HU government propaganda unfortunately has its clear effect on the Hungarian public opinion - Hungarian people trust the EU less every year, and also, everything else, including democracy in general. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3215

[emmp]

The Brexit referendum was not binding and the decision with what to do with the results, if anything, was still entirely left to parliament.

[tim333]

The whole thing was a bit of a mess. A good analogy I heard was you have a bunch of people in a room with one TV and have a vote whether to change the channel and 50% vote yes because they are fed up with the current one. But no one has specified which channel to change it to. After the vote they check out all the channels and find they are even worse than the first but can't change back because that would be "betraying the will of the people" or whatever nonsense.

The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?