[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.