LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Messages
- 21,162
Yeah, the hysteria and "hell in a handcart" stuff around Brexit is pretty much all hyperbole.
I am very confident that the UK would, on the whole, have been better off remaining within the EU. The benefits would have significantly outweighed any negative factors. But, importantly, that's not to say that the UK is completely screwed now that it's opted for Brexit - it merely means that the UK will (IMO) be simply comparatively worse off than if it had stayed in the EU.
In a way, this reminds me of the last Scottish Independence Referendum. No serious commentator was suggesting that an independent Scotland would find itself in huge (and potentially fatal) economic/political trouble - it was just that an independent Scotland would be comparatively worse off economically/politically than a Scotland which remained in the UK.
I'm astounded by the result, and very saddened by it. And while I absolutely subscribe to liberal democracy, one has to ponder whether decisions with complex permutations and dramatically important outcomes should be put to referendum. I happen to believe, in the case of this particular referendum, that large swathes of the voting population were either poorly/insufficiently informed or incapable of performing the necessary intellectual analysis to come to a reasonable (and reasoned) decision.
I realise this could sound incredibly arrogant, condescending and "sour loser"-ish. But - just as in, say, the OJ Simpson murder trial, where the jurors subsequently indicated in interviews etc that they simply hadn't grasped the evidence of the trial properly - I think there's already growing evidence that a significant proportion of "Leave" voters did not properly understand what it was they were voting for (and against).
To extend the jury analogy, in England and Wales, there's an ongoing debate about whether complex technical trials (typically those involving complicated alleged financial criminality) should be tried by "ordinary" juries selected from the entire general public. A number of such trials have descended into a form of black farce where the jurors simply haven't been able to understand what's going on, and have thus had pretty much no option but to acquit regardless of the genuine strength of the prosecution. Perhaps (after a long pause for sober reflection) it's time to debate maturely and sensibly whether questions of such huge complexity and finality as whether the UK should leave the EU or remain within it should be entrusted to the public in referendums.
(And I would address a rebuttal in the form of "well it was incumbent upon politicians, journalists and business/employee leaders to provide voters with all the necessary information to allow them to make a reasoned and informed decision, so it's the fault of those groups if people really did make improperly-informed decisions" with two contentions: 1) no matter how long and hard anyone tried to push out information, it was still in clear danger of "going in one ear and out the other" with large swathes of the UK population - and there's already evidence to suggest this was the case; and 2) even for those who did properly assimilate the information, a significant proportion of them probably still lacked the wider contextual understanding and reasoning abilities to enable them to make a properly-reasoned decision.)
Oh, and of course I was stunningly wrong with my prediction of the outcome. I suppose I just had more faith in the abilities of the UK population (as a whole) to make properly-informed and properly-reasoned decisions. Oh well......
