I doubt Brexit would've been much different. The constituency nature of UK general elections means that a substantial majority of MPs knew they had to support it even though it was only a 48-52 split in a supposedly advisory referendum.
But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.
OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…
People keep bringing up the "advisory" nature of the referendum, but that's because referendums are not legally binding in the UK.
There was a vote. The public made their decision. Having carried out the vote it would have been political suicide to have ignored the result.
I think the result was wrong, and I think there should have been a defined threshold of 60% or similar, but those things aside the results were always going to be followed and honoured so long as the 50% threshold was exceeded.
The only way that the result could have been ignored would have been if the reply had been "we'll spend five years coming up with a plan, and let you vote on that" then hoping people forgot.
The whole vote was pointless, the possibilities of leaving so large and a single binary question captured none of the available options. Then the Tories locked in the most brutal exit they could and we were screwed.
But "advisory" was not even the top 50 things in the list of everything that went wrong.
ben_w|2 months ago
But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.
OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…
On that kind of theme, there's a psych study, Robbers Cave, worth reading about. Also note some summaries fail to mention that both groups resented being manipulated by the researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...
stevekemp|2 months ago
There was a vote. The public made their decision. Having carried out the vote it would have been political suicide to have ignored the result.
I think the result was wrong, and I think there should have been a defined threshold of 60% or similar, but those things aside the results were always going to be followed and honoured so long as the 50% threshold was exceeded.
The only way that the result could have been ignored would have been if the reply had been "we'll spend five years coming up with a plan, and let you vote on that" then hoping people forgot.
The whole vote was pointless, the possibilities of leaving so large and a single binary question captured none of the available options. Then the Tories locked in the most brutal exit they could and we were screwed.
But "advisory" was not even the top 50 things in the list of everything that went wrong.
spicyusername|2 months ago