Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll
Only one in 10 feel leaving the EU has helped their finances, while just 9% say it has benefited the NHS, despite £350m a week pledge according to new poll
A clear majority of the British public now believes Brexit has been bad for the UK economy, has driven up prices in shops, and has hampered government attempts to control immigration, according to a poll by Opinium to mark the third anniversary of the UK leaving the EU single market and customs union.
The survey of more than 2,000 UK voters also finds strikingly low numbers of people who believe that Brexit has benefited them or the country.
Just one in 10 believe leaving the EU has helped their personal financial situation, against 35% who say it has been bad for their finances, while just 9% say it has been good for the NHS, against 47% who say it has had a negative effect.
No, the referendum was non-binding, it was passed by executive action.
David Cameron, who was against it, and therefore the will of the people, resigned because of this referendum.
It would not be good to pass a referendum and then have its result ignored by executives. What would have been a better outcome? Exercise democracy and then ignore the results??
I'll say it again. If the people of the UK want change they should do another referendum, see if it passes, and if it does: apply to join.
Yes, it would have been better to take the results of the non-binding referendum, create a study group that would have had sufficient time to prepare an actual exit plan with multiple options, forecasted results for each, and then make a decision whether to exit or not based on the study.
There’s nothing inherently good about putting up something for a vote and proceeding blindly on it, and to put something so fundamental and world changing up for a simple majority vote while swimming in disinformation and ignorance was beyond stupid.
I think that the key part is that the government tried to come up with a Brexit plan on their own but couldn’t. They even started negotiating with the EU before they knew what they wanted and could get passed Parliament.
They wasted the best part of a year coming up with a single plan only to get it shot down because it didn’t match what most MPs wanted. It couldn’t because there were ten or twelve different versions of Brexit ranging from leaving in name only to just not even doing a deal with the EU at all.
Had they created a study group to analyse the options and the consequences of each they could have come up with a coherent plan with Parliament so that they’d know what everyone wanted before starting negotiations with the EU.
yes, the people can't be trusted to make decisions. we must have experts make decisions, with study groups etc, for the people.
That is a strawman because it’s not what I said.
I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you explain why you think a vote makes a decision inherently good? Break down the philosophical case for me, and show me how it leads to optimal outcomes and under which circumstances if such should be applied.
Not the one you were asking, but I agree with them, so might give it a shot!
You know how sometimes you do something stupid and then have to live with the consequences and then next time you don't make the same mistake?
For example, when you fall off a bike. Or grab the very hot stove. Or when you vote to leave the EU.
If you weren't allowed to make mistakes, would you learn anything? Would you have learned to ride a bike if you only ever used it with the helping wheels for fear of falling?
Saying that people's will should not be respected is very far from what democracy is. The will of the people is ultimate in democracy. And in the beginning, people will make mistakes. The only way to stop making mistakes is by practicing further.
you said do a study because of the referendum and make the decision from there.
Who would make that decision after a study if not experts?
why do we need experts if we trust the people?
you're an enemy of democracy and the free world
But “the people” didn’t decide on the deal because they were only given two choices and the interpretation of “leave” was down to the Government and Parliament.
It would have been much better to get experts together to decide what options there were and how each one affected us and for that information to be made available to everyone so that Parliament could have had a complete view of the various options that Government was considering.
Instead they hid away and came up with a single version of Brexit that got shot down and then they still triggered the leave process anyway.
They should have taken years to come up with a leave plan before triggering the leave process instead of the mess that happened.
Edit: and if this process determined that it really was a shit idea then act on that by either having a second referendum or just deciding that it was a bad idea and not doing it.
Yes, we must trust experts to ensure peace and security for society.
Yeah, because reducing an extremelly complex subject to a binary choice for the public, and then having people whose only qualification is being loudmouths figuring out what the option selected by the public actually maps to in the real world and hammering out the details of its implementation, is such a superior way and is working so well...
How complex is it really? You don't think British people are smart enough to understand being a member of the EU vs not being a member? Are British folks too stupid to govern themselves?
The evidence of its complexity was all around when the exit treaty started being negotiated - kinda hard to miss the trully gigantic mass of details that were there and needed to be agreeded upon merelly to exit, unless you're a bit of a simpleton.
Only a fool would think they know everything and can thus decide on everything without the help of domain experts.
To put it in really really simple way: would you grab a random Briton of the street and have him or her do brain surgery on you? Because your "we don't need any experts" "logic" implies that anybody would be fine to decide on anything, which includes the detailed choices in brain surgery. Surelly your brain is simpler than a massive international treaty covering just about anything related to the human economic activity of 520 million people and more.
Even experts need other experts for things outside their domain of expertise
You're complicating it. The choice is to be a member or not.
Negotiations are are possible outcome to the answer of this question, not a requirement.
If the choice was that simple, the Tories wouldn't have spent all that time and effort in negotiating an Exit Agreement and would have simply said "screw you" to EU negotiators and relied on the basic WTO trade agreement: there really was no way the EU could force exit negotiations on Great Britain, which could have left with no Exit Agreement at all since it's a fully sovereign nation within its on border, but then the UK would have no rights to access EU facilities and the Single Market beyond basic WTO.
Clearly there was a lot of complexity around the whole "access to EU facilities and the Single Market" (in other words, the stuff beyond the soverignty of the UK) and enough UK self interest related to those, otherwise why would the Tories even bother, much less spend so much time on and talk so much to the Press about the Exit Agreement?!
Just because you can describe something complex in simple terms ("Brain surgery is just poking around in people's brains") doesn't mean it is actually simple and hence that choices around it are simple: that you think something is simple just from reading a simple description of it can indeed mean that it is simple, but it can also mean that you're profoundly ignorant about it.
Judging by how the very politicians that campaigned for Leave ended up desperatelly negotiating the Exit Agreement when they did got what they campaigned for, profound ignorance is by far the most likelly explanation for thinking that the simplistic way in which the Leave choice was formulated for you actually represents the full depth of complexity on that subject.
Said ignorance was quite understandable before all this happenned, but by now it can only be willful.