All surveillance should start with ministers first. Their private lives streamed 24/7 over internet for the public to watch.
Of course, this is only for national security since humans are corruptible, and these people have vastly most control over a nation's resources, thus, 24/7 monitoring of their private lives, by the public, is super important... for national security ... or else how we can be sure they have not been compromised by a foreign power.. or are not being blackmailed to act against the nation?
While this may be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment, I've started to think that this is exactly how it should be:
People that are elected by the public and hold the power to define every aspect of our lives, should be held to the absolute highest level of scrutiny possible. Every aspect and every single moment of their lives should be transparent and recorded while they hold office, no exceptions whatsoever.
I will concede that having it broadcasted may be a tad hard to do, but there should be a record of what happened during their time - in fact there should be a way to answer the question "what was minister X doing at 2026-08-29 20:13:14 UTC?"
And for the argument that says "oh then nobody would want to do it", I think that's in favour of this approach. Look around at what we're dealing with, and which people want to win elections and the fervour with which they go about it.
We should be trying to make this kind of "job" as unappealing as possible. It should be a chore, not something to go after.
In the US we have tech companies complying with sketchy DHS subpoenas that don’t require warrants. We have DoJ targeting political enemies. We have FISA mass surveillance.
It’s naive to think politically motivated surveillance can’t happen in the UK and elsewhere. Or to assume that only the “right people” will be the ones able to break encryption.
> It’s naive to think politically motivated surveillance can’t happen in the UK and elsewhere.
It's naive to think it isn't already happening in the UK and elsewhere and has for a long time. The only thing technology is changing is to increase the depth and scope of what they surveil.
Technology has the scale. The billionaire giants have unprecedented amounts of data -- Soviet Russia, Nazi germany, they'd have loved this level of insight.
But worse that that, they have a population that thinks its fine as long as it's not the government, its just the free market doing its thing, and it's all about freedom for the most powerful
Maybe I’m naive: I can believe the e2e encryption happens, but it takes a lot of faith to believe there’s no front-end telemetry that would render that ineffective.
> In the US we have tech companies complying with sketchy DHS subpoenas that don’t require warrants. We have DoJ targeting political enemies. We have FISA mass surveillance.
You also have a president who has just said he will "report" a journalist to the FCC for "rebuke or punishment".
I regret to inform people that fear over people cracking your encryption is quite niche, at this point; you have a looming fascist regime and should be more afraid of the $5 wrench.
Trump will be gone in two years and may even become a lame duck in two months.
I'd be more worried about European democracies which don't put a limit on the tenure of a president or prime minister. It was a close call in Hungary and Poland. If Orban had won the elections he could've manipulated Hungarian institutions to such a degree that he'd be president for life with unlimited powers.
The same has already occurred in Turkiye. I chuckle at the Turks protesting against Erdogan. That ship sailed about 15 years ago, there's no way to remove him from power. The only thing they can do is wait until he passes.
Destruction of potential evidence of a crime is a crime. Obviously here there is nuance and the courts can determine if this is the right interpretation or not. If he had compromising information and he reasonable suspicion he’d be asked to unlock his phone he should have “wiped” it way before he got to the border.
Yes, they would have to prove that there was incriminating data on the phone. However, destroying potential evidence before there is suspicion of a crime is also a crime if done with intent to undermine a future investigation.
It's quite unadvisable to destroy data in front of any sort of law enforcement. Last ditch effort? Sure, you better your odds but it's not ideal. If you have evidence of a crime, you know, wipe it way before you need to hand things over for examination and be in the position of having to destroy data as they knock on your door.
You keep saying "potential evidence." What does that even mean? If I factory reset my phone right now, am I guilty of destroying "potential evidence?" Do you have "potential evidence" on any of your devices? Let's not make up phrases to help justify what they were doing. There was either an actual crime committed, and wiping the phone destroyed real evidence. Or there was not. You can't just consider all data everywhere to be "potential evidence" while you look around for some kind of crime that it's evidence of.
The implication they are making is that the person _intended_ to destroy potential evidence on the phone. That the person felt there was evidence on it that needed to be destroyed to hide a crime.
IMO, even if that's actually illegal, there's zero way to prove it that the fifth amendment doesn't address.
That’s the weakness of most modern “democracies”: people vote once every few years for one or other party who then do largely whatever they want, outside of some immutable manifesto commitments (which are often flexible anyway).
So no, people don’t vote for such things - they vote for parties who turn out to do such things at some point.
As a Brit I've never been asked to vote on that. If you are talking about the general election it's not a main issue compared to other things on the ballot.
For whom have you voted? We have almost no referenda sure, but sometimes there are strong hints in the manifestos, or things to learn from past behaviour of each party
I can't imagine this is at top of mind for many voters, or even in mind at all. People are more concerned with things like the cost of living, immigration and things like local planning law.
Truth is these things are being pushed by heads of department behind the politicians, the ones who have lifetime jobs and dont get voted in. These people and lobbying business owners are pushing very hard on all politicians and lawmakers to force this through, which is why there are more and more politicians in favour of it who dont even understand it.
If they were otherwise reasonable that might be a solution but their obsession with immigration is getting worse. In get the feeling they are turning into into Restore. Maybe next time they will accept a donation from Musk.
I've seen a lot of changes going through since 2024, and I saw a lot of difference between the 2010-15 coalition and the 2015-24 conservative administration, or the 1997-2010 labour administration.
I mean, i go through the motions of voting. but i'm voting against an overwhelming amount of feelings-voters that are easily manipulated. i don't think it makes much difference anymore.
If i wasn't busy, local politics is where one could make a difference. Nation politics seems completely captured by now.
Local politics is broadly objecting to planning permission and decide what potholes to spend the tiny amount of discretionary budget on, as the vast majority of council tax goes to paying for care for elderly home owners
Exactly! It's not like we have decades of evidence that the demographic which has consistent high turnout is consistently and significantly politically pandered to in many, many regards. No sir
It gets easier with an electoral system other than FPTP (e.g., ranked choice, instant runoff), whereby more than 2 parties appear. You can then mix and match multiple parties that support policies you want in a way that you're aiming for particular policies to become the majority rather than any party.
For example, for issues taxing the rich (TR), taxing the poor (TP), spending on military (SM), spending on infrastructure (SI), privacy protection (PP), and privacy intrusion (PI) and parties A, C, and D, which support TR/SM/PP, TP/SI/PP, and TR/SI/PI, the coalitions the three parties must form to pass individual bills may get you what you really wanted: TR/SI/PP, even though none of the three parties individually support all three.
That's not universally true. It will, eventually, produce a comically unrepresentative group and the time it takes for that to happen will depend on the size of the pool of representatives compared to the population.
Fifty representatives randomly selected from a pool of a 300 million has a high chance of being supermajority non-representative.
Yeah I’m inclined to agree. Even with choices of services and their choices on the internet… it’s just not a priority for most users in a way that matters.
I mean, at what point do we say that wilfully refusing to absorb relevant information and then knowingly and willingly making a decision based on that lack of information is, indeed, their will?
I think this ignores the fact that there are very converted efforts to use well-researched methods to manipulate and mislead people at the ballotbox in favor of the vested interests.
The same interests also conspire to keep people preoccupied with basic needs and distractions that leave them with little time to properly research issues.
Generally speaking the more important an issue is, the less it is allowed to be affected by democratic processes. That's why Brexit was such a big upset, it bucked the trend (the management miscalculated, nobody expected the result and would not have put it to referendum otherwise).
It was virtually 50/50 and should not have proceeded. The bar to leave was set too low. 2/3rd better, and larger turnout should have been mandated. 16 year olds should have voted. The campaign to stay too weak. Mass confusion. Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing. Brexit wasn't 100% going to happen, it was more like...
My understanding is they considered a vote on the type of brexit, but were pretty convinced the public would vote for a hard brexit that no one in the regime wanted.
Britons may choose to change their minds but this is not a single party decision. The EU will likely not readmit them on the same terms and the UK is not nearly as powerful or relevant to European interests as it once was.
As a safe far away island, the UK has much more use in a captive alliance to defend a threatened continent than it is as a participant in Europe that gets special exemptions. And Europe already has them for that.
Turnout was about 72%, so really it was (approx) Leave 37%, Remain 35%, Don’t Know/Care 28%.
Also worth pointing out that the hard Brexit we got, where we left Schengen and abandoned much of our cross-European programmes, was almost unthinkable, and not seriously considered by the media. Whenever it was brought up, it was decried as “project fear” by those who pushed for it.
I don’t think the UK was ever in Schengen (at least as far as my visa was concerned). That is one bright spot here. Traveling to the UK is much easier than travel to Europe for much of the world. The UK allows for paying for QoS so you can pay a large fee and get a visa soon or a much smaller fee and get one in two weeks. By comparison, Schengen visas from all participants are granted equitably by fee and the wait time is months.
Did they even have a referendum on joining the EU? Just skimming through, it looks like [0] they only had a referendum on EEC membership which sounds like it would predate the EU. It is a bit of an unfair ratchet where people can sidle in to the EU but require strong consensuses to leave. It should be symmetrical.
Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage various aspects of life. It looks like they might be trying to rebuild the US federal government.
This brings to mind the government set up in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: it takes 2/3rds to pass a law, but only 1/3rd to repeal it.
The thinking being if a law isn't good/useful enough to garner 2/3rd support, it shouldn't be law. And if a law is so bad that it can't even get more than 1/3rd the people to support it, it should no longer be a law.
Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's too easy to import the votes you need, and people are too lazy to understand a law beyond the headline or what the news tells them about it.
55%, maybe. But that still leaves a divided country for decades afterwards. It was handled badly from start to finish. Many 'remainers' didn't take the threat serious enough. Never under estimate your opponent.
Cameron put a Eurosceptic in charge of the Remain campaign, and Nick Clegg - supposedly an arch Remainer - went to work for Meta after Cambridge Analytica and its contribution to Brexit became public knowledge.
The public were conned. The oligarch-adjacent ruling faction of the ruling class knew exactly what they were doing, the lack of specificity for any Leave plan was deliberate, the lies and propaganda were cynical and calculated, and they were delighted with the result.
Then they gave us Boris as the first of a succession of clown car comedy Prime Ministers, and started hyping Farage.
It's all a stage set. The public in the UK have zero influence on any of these developments.
If the vote outcome is directly influenceable by campaigns, you can just let the campaign owners perform the decision. Campaigns only distribute information, voters still need to make a choice.
I blame Corbyn as much as Cameron if not more. Corbyn was supposed to represent the working class but because Remain could have benefited some Tories he backstabbed the working class and at least a whole generation if not 2 and for what?
Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few with reduced quality of products, increased prices, worse access to other countries, and a host of other problems...
> Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few
Few? 51% is a few? I mean, I also think Brexit was a monumentally stupid decision, but 51% of people wanted it, no?
Even assuming that everyone who didn't vote would have voted for remain, given the voter turnout of 71% (which is already very high for any election, typical turnout is around 57%), 35% of people said yes. That's not a few, that a big chunk.
The biggest issue is that at the time of the vote, nobody had any idea of what Brexit actually meant. The leave campaign could literally promise anything and a) they wouldn’t have to deliver it and b) everyone who voted for Brexit can reasonably suggest that they voted for something other than what was actually delivered.
The best you can say about the Brexit vote is that 51% wanted something other than the status quo.
The "few" I'm talking about are the politicians who pushed for the referendum, and the politicians and media execs that cheerfully portrayed it as if Brexit was going to cause Europe to give the UK everything it wanted with zero drawbacks or tradeoffs, as if they were still the Mighty And Unchallengeable British Empire.
And in any case, the point of my post was the "suffering", not the "few".
That's a good point, but sometimes it's a good thing for people to see the consequences of their (and others') choices. Perhaps it could have some good medium / long-term effects.
But that's the point of democracy, whoever was interested in the isue, went out to vote, kids are too young to vote, and more than half of people interested enough to go out, voted to leave.
You personally might have wanted to remain and wanted to raise the bar, but that's undemocratic, you can't just change the rules when you don't get the outcome you wanted.
I'm not from Britain, honestly I don't care what you guys do, but a majority of voters decided in a way they did, and you have to respect that.
I said 16 yo should've had a Brexit vote/say because, especially in this case, it's the kids that reap the choices made.
More Generally 16 year olds are old enough to take part in democracy vote-wise, and maybe in all votes too. The point being - look at the short term, actually make that 'not long term', policies being made now by us olds, they don't favor young people, on the whole - or their children.
I mean, so do the 14 years olds and 10 year olds, and newborns, and the ideas still separated, because future mommy and daddy didn't have sex yet.
But as a society, we've decided that 16 year olds are too young to do many proper things, be it buy alcohol in most countries, drive a car in many, open a bank account, or legally jerk off to porn. They don't watch the news, they have no recollection of previous governments and the promises that were made, never kept and are being made again, they have basically zero sense of taxes and also mostly don't pay any and have little experience with anything related to politics. Neither do most 18 year olds, but if we let them buy booze and drive, we also let them vote.
Usually the push for younger voters comes, when someone prefers a push to a generally more "left" side of spectrum, but even this is turning around, since in my country (slovenia) more and more younger voters are turning right (eg. in the last election), especially young men, since they feel left out by the "left" parties.
Ideally children are taught more about what voting is at school. Additionally they could vote in elections with their vote recorded but not counted. So they get into the swing of it. This might avoid rampant apathy, which suits extremes. Sidenote, I wouldn't want you to read into this I am ignorant just how third rate most political parties and their policies have become.
You could flip that argument. The bar set to remain was too low.
As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21.
> Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing
Both sides lied, both sides exaggerated.
The referendum to simply leave or remain would never have happened if UK Parliament went to the public more often with referendums about various treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Rome. Giving people the illusion of choice would have been enough.
The UK seems to be an outlier for an arrogant Parliament that thinks it knows best, in spite of public sentiment.
You can flip any argument, but there isn't real symmetry here.
If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far-reaching hard-to-undo changes. But imagine the following situation: about half the population likes X and about half hates it, and every year we hold a referendum on whether to have X or not. Then about once every two years you flip between X and not-X and all the upheaval costs you more than the gain from whichever is the better choice would get you.
So before making a big upheaval-inducing change on the grounds that The People want it, you should have good evidence that The People really do, which means one referendum with a result much more decisive than 51:49, or maybe a series of 51:49 referenda all going the same way.
If I were setting up something like this and could choose the rules, they would be something like: we run a referendum every couple of years until we get a decisive result; a side that won the last N referenda needs a 20%/(N+1) margin to get its way. So, first time round you need to be 60-40 ahead to settle the question; if you won the first time then you only need 55-45 the second time; if you win again but still more narrowly than that then you only need about 53-47 next time; etc. If one position really does consistently have majority support it'll win eventually even if its advantage is narrow. If public opinion is very changeable then too bad, a decision will have to wait until The People have a strong enough opinion to measure with confidence.
(Obviously nothing like that will ever happen. Too geeky and complicated.)
Of course, that wasn't the only major problem with the Brexit referendum. The other catastrophic problem was that it was a choice between "stay in the EU", a well defined outcome with known good and bad points, and "leave the EU somehow", something that could mean dozens of different things. It should have been between "stay in" and "attempt to negotiate terms for leaving, and then hold another referendum on whether to go ahead". Or between "stay in" and "leave on such-and-such terms if we can get them, and otherwise ask again". Or the government should have held extensive negotiations first on what terms it could leave on, and then held a referendum on whether to leave on those terms. Or the referendum could have offered options "stay regardless of terms", "leave regardless of terms", and "leave if such-and-such terms can be achieved". Those possibilities are all pretty unsatisfactory, but they're all better than choosing between the status quo and An Undertaking Of Great Advantage But Nobody To Know What It Is.
Well there is symmetry. Based on the original comment of wanting a clear majority to 'leave', knowing the result now and the polling at the time, that would have ensured the status quo would continue, and I'm guessing there, that the parent commenter voted remain.
A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. If a majority vote isn't a majority vote, what's the point of calling yourself a 'democracy' and virtue signalling to the rest of the planet how great your governance is?
> a well defined outcome with known good and bad points
How so? What was the well-defined defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? What's your time horizon? Was that outcome still true in 1980, 1999, 2026? How does being a member of the EU make you immune to probability and chance? Was a 'well defined outcome' in 1973 that, under the Blair government, we would allow East European nationals with freedom of movement to migrate en-masse to the UK, and that, ironically, is claimed to be one of the reasons for the leave vote.
It's actually quite sad to me that in 2026 the whole thing is still so tribal. Everything promised by either side largely never came to pass, and it's now a decade on. I just wish both sides would recognise that it's been over three decades of continuous poor Government that's the root of most of the UK's problems, and spend their energy fixing that instead.
> A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain.
But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages and disadvantages of being in one state or another.
There is a symmetry here, one you remarked on earlier, but it maps the Brexit referendum not to itself with roles reversed but to earlier EU-related decisions that were made without referenda. You could absolutely argue that, say, signing the Treaty of Maastricht was a major change that the individual states involved shouldn't have made without consulting their populations. I'm not sure I agree -- see below for why -- but it's definitely the same sort of issue as with Brexit.
The reason why I'm not sure I agree is that the entry of the UK into the EU was done gradually. The UK joined the EEC (without a referendum at the time, but there was one a few years later on whether to stay, which a large majority voted for, suggesting that joining without an explicit referendum was maybe a reasonable step), which was a substantially less major change than joining the EU would have been if it had existed then, and then the EU gradually increased its scope: Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon. The combined effect of all those things was large, but each individual step was smaller, less risky, and (maybe) more undo-able.
(I do think, on balance, that probably each step should have been subject to referenda in the countries affected, with rejection triggering a rethink of how much European integration to aim for how quickly.)
If the proponents of Brexit had been able to divide Brexit into phases, each much smaller, less risky, and more undo-able than the whole, then that would have had many advantages and the downsides of a simple-majority referendum would have been less, though they'd still have been big changes and I think should still have needed more than a bare plurality of votes. I don't know whether any such thing could actually have been done, and kinda suspect not.
> If a majority vote isn't a majority vote [...]
Not every vote has to be a majority vote. Being a democracy doesn't mean that at every instant you do what The Majority wants at that instant, no matter how slimly it prefers that. Not because there's anything particularly wrong with The Majority, but because like an individual it may change how it feels too often for that to be a good idea.
(Likewise, having my own interests at heart doesn't mean that at every instant I do what I want to at that instant. That's why we have things like marriages and contracts and deliberately-established habits. My preferences are noisy and benefit from a bit of low-pass filtering, and I think the same is true of almost everyone. So we deliberately get ourselves into commitments it takes some effort to get out of. We can still get out of them -- you can get divorced, quit your job, explicitly break off a friendship, etc. -- but it's to our advantage that those things aren't so easy to do and we will only do them when we are really quite sure that they're a good idea. I think research suggests that most people are a bit too reluctant to make such changes, but the amount of friction we want getting in their way isn't zero.)
> What was the well-defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? [...]
I am bemused by the question because I never so much as vaguely hinted that there was any such thing. I said that in 2016 the option of staying in the EU was a well-defined one with known advantages and disadvantages, unlike the "leave the EU somehow but no one's specifying any details at this time" option it was opposed to on the ballot papers.
I completely agree that joining the EEC in 1973 was not like that. That too was a major change, though a smaller one because the EEC was a smaller deal than the EU became over time, and holding a referendum on that (with something more than a mere plurality being required to proceed) would probably have been a good idea. As I said above, the result of the referendum held not long after suggests that joining would probably have won by a comfortable margin, in which case holding a referendum wouldn't have made much difference -- but as a matter of principle I'm in favour of explicitly running such things past The People unless it's already very clear what they want.
The definition of major is completely subjective. Adopting the Euro if the UK remained is major. What was a ‘major’ change when leaving? Everything has been mitigated by slow change. Euro migration was overnight in 1999 (I worked on it) that was major. And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?
Obviously majorness is a matter of degree. And, yes, different people can weight things differently when deciding what's major. But you can't escape having to decide that sort of thing -- after all, you can't hold referenda on everything and so you have to decide what things are "major" enough to need a referendum.
(I am inclined to think that most things major enough to need a referendum are also major enough that if there's a "change" and a "don't change" option the latter should need some kind of supermajority.)
> And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?
If it was set up with a 60-40 threshold then 59.9-40.1 means no change, just as if it was set up 50-50 then 49.9-50.1 means no change. I'm not sure what the problem's supposed to be here.
I would say if the age of voting increased then there should also be an upper limit as over a certain age, it's not your future. Prisoners should be allowed the vote for everything also
>> As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21.
Why? Brexit will impact 16 year olds for decades. A large number of the old farts who voted for it are dead now and won't have to suffer the consequences. If you're going to adjust voting ages but don't want to lower it, it makes sense that those over 75 don't get a say in something like Brexit.
And if your thought is that 16 year olds don't have the education yet to understand the implications of something so big, I'd say they're much better informed than most people over 60 who are consuming Facebook AI slop and believing it wholesale.
> A large number of the old farts who voted for it are dead now
You must meet extremely weird old people. Most old people care a lot about the future of their "offspring". Also they have already seen a lot and are able to see through influence much better.
As a middle-aged person, I can't agree with that. Declining social interaction as one settles into a narrower world of job and family, and less free time for activism and engagement, means that my peers and myself have less clue than we used to about how to vote; the general feeling about politics when it comes up at get-togethers with friends, is aporia.
Also, part of getting older and wiser, and becoming more aware of history, is knowing the damage that old people like us have done at times. It was people our age who caused the failure of May '68, for example.
Well if you're dismissive of an entire generation by calling them 'old farts', I'm not sure I can take you 'better informed 16 years old' argument seriously.
The country is demonstrably worse because of their 'views and opinions' and many of them don't need to worry about it - because they're dead. Fuck them.
>And if your thought is that 16 year olds don't have the education yet to understand the implications of something so big, I'd say they're much better informed than most people over 60 who are consuming Facebook AI slop and believing it wholesale.
Because the UK had a preferential agreement with the EU and a leadership position. It would be impossible to restore that state.
Even if there were a UK referendum where a clear majority voted to rejoin the EU as a member state, not at the top table, our return to the EU depends on the EU accepting our application. We burned a lot of bridges on exit that we need to rebuild.
And also the favourite party to win in the next election is spearheaded by the very people who orchestrated Brexit. The EU will not be receptive while it seems that a majority of people are still voting for an anti-EU party.
The sensible course for rejoining is to work towards Schengen or similar, while acting as a partner state in good faith for a decade or two.
>The sensible course for rejoining is to work towards Schengen or similar, while acting as a partner state in good faith for a decade or two.
Except nothing logical or sensible is ever done by the government. Which means it won't happen. At least not in the next 10 years.
By the time they come to that conclusion it will be 2035. And starting any talks or preparation would take at least another 5 years if not 10 given how slow these things move. And that is on the assumption public is not against it.
We are looking at 2046. The probability of Scotland breaking out and join the EU is higher than that happening.
I do not expect it to happen in my lifetime. I dearly hope we manage to strike a deal that restores our freedoms to live and work within the EU, but I’m not holding my breath.
The government is not the people. The process goes something like:
A) I get voted in if I give the people what they want
B) The people don't want to be spied on
C) I increase spying
D) ???
E) Profit!
I'm still hazy on the details. But the politicians really can't plead ignorance. At least in the US you regularly hear things like "the Senate convened at 11:30pm on Friday night to push through unpopular legislation". They know.
> I don't understand why they don't just hold another referendum and undo everything.
I see you follow the EU model of democracy; keep putting matters up for a vote until you get the result you want.
Despite what you may have been led to believe, there's still a substantial number of British people that reject EU membership, and this goes beyond the "racist" and "economically illiterate" arguments that remainers typically fall back on. I would suggest you do what your predecessors did not and consider the consequences of losing.
Including those who pushed for Brexit. Farage gave a speech accepting a defeat around midnight, the value of GBP skyrocketed for a moment etc.
The referendum was supposed to be a tool for the political class to wrestle each other, not a real life changing decision. Turns out if you fuel enough BS you may not be able to control it.
The same for this fear mongering about evil people messaging in secret each other. It’s not a real discussion, if someone should lose their privacy its the people in power. Make it illegal having secret messaging for politicians and people rich beyond some point. The danger doesn’t come from some regular people talking about something nasty in secret, the danger comes from billionaires talking secretly with politicians. We should have been able to see the messages that led the pro-brexit billionaire "gifting" Farage 5 million GBP. Of course the secrecy is needed even for the politicians and the super rich but we should be able to "debug" them, we should be able to have a committee or something of that sort that will be able to decrypt and check all their communications when needed.
In my more cynical moments I think that was the whole point of Brexit. An awful lot of the big names in the pro-Brexit movement were in one sort of investment-management business or another, and I'd love to see what positions they and their companies held in June 2016.
This is conspiracism-adjacent, IMO. Plenty of consequential decisions have been put to referendums, if only because the political class may not want to take responsibility for them. And the outcome of a referendum is never certain.
The more interesting difference is surely in how the elite responds to unexpected referendum results. Plenty of mainland Europeans assumed that Brexit would somehow be canceled (which was surely the right thing to do on paper). That was never going to happen. British political culture sacralizes majorities. Canceling a referendum "victory" is as anathema as proportional representation, coalition government, or limits on parliamentary sovereignty. This (IMO archaic) understanding of democracy partly explains the Brexit result itself.
> British political culture sacralizes majorities.
I'm genuinely curious what you would offer as an alternative? Democracy should ignore the majority if it disagrees with the controlling cabal who hold the correct opinions?
Perhaps a misunderstanding. In this case "majority" (or "majoritarianism") really means plurality. British (and US) democracy fetishizes winners, i.e. whoever comes first, whether or not they represent a majority of the electorate. In Britain you get all the power with 30% of the vote. Some might call that undemocratic.
it isn't undemocratic, the purpose of the system is to produce governments that are able to govern
look at the last few governments, now imagine that we had a system that meant it was impossible to form a government if the government wasn't popular. there is no natural majority for any position that a political party in the UK can realistically take.
you don't end up with greater democracy, you end up handing unlimited power to unelected people working in government who end up being the only source of administrative stability
one of the main problems is that people in the UK who are in politics often disagree with voters at a fundamental level. changing the electoral system will not fix this. you will have elections, they will say they will fix problems they don't want to fix to win the election, and then their popularity will plummet shortly after as the insiders take over and do weird stuff that no-one voted for or wants. when you have governments that are repeatedly unable to perform very basic state functions, the problem is not the electoral system (or voters, one of the unusual aspects of politics in the UK is the blame and contempt that politicians have for voters, it is easy to see on this thread...perhaps you realise why they want proportional representation now).
As a Brit, I certainly think it’s a problem, because as you say, you can end up with a government with a large majority of seats based on a small proportion of electoral support.
I much prefer the ranked choice system here in Australia. I’m sure there are flaws, but you tend to end up with candidates who are more representative of the wishes of the electorate, and you eliminate that “I’d better vote for A in case B gets in” vote-splitting thing.
Then you push the coalitions forming outside of the party process to parliament where voters have no say compared to forming coalitions to within the party where party members have a say.
The big coalition in Australian politics, the LNP, has been integrated enough (in most states) to share a platform and field single candidates, giving people that choice ahead of time. We haven’t had a post-election coalition formed in some time.
But I think you might be thinking more of PR systems rather than preferential votes. In Preferential systems you still have a single winner of a given constituency, but the method of choosing that winner is more focused on a wide basis of support rather than on just who has the most votes.
I.E. if you have three parties for a seat, Centre-right gets 40% of the vote, Centre-left gets 35, “Legalise Everything Dudes!” get 25.
Under FPTP Centre-right takes it.
In a preference vote, we discard LED and count its voters’ second preference. Let’s say the split is 4:1 left/right. This leads us to Centre Right getting 45%, Centre left on 55% and the seat goes left. In this case we end up with a candidate acceptable to a larger part of the electorate. And the existence of LED didn’t split any votes, you can’t say a vote for a smaller party is wasted in this system, or blame smaller-party voters for Right getting in rather than left.
Under PR you’d split the seats in the parliament by national vote share (as in the Australian Senate)
These were not only ads, but shadow ads; they were different per person and effectively couldn't be vetted (if I have the technical underpinnings wrong do let me know)
It's bad regardless of which political side or issue you support. You go on FB to talk to your friends and you get... that? Come on now, Zuck. Remember the human
> nobody expected the result and would not have put it to referendum otherwise
I think you're right, you see this sometimes where the powers that be are extremely over-confident in themselves and think "sure, let's put this thing up for referendum and show those stupid right-wingers how unpopular they really are." Which works until it doesn't.
A US example was Proposition 8 in California (banning same-sex marriage) in 2008. I have zero doubt the thinking was "sure, let's put it up for a vote and show those morons how behind the times they really are." When it passed, in _California_ no less, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and accusations of all sorts of treachery. Anything but doing a little self-reflection and considering that maybe it wasn't as popular an idea as they thought. Didn't matter in the end, courts said "yeah well too bad, you can't ban it anyway, sorry" (kind of funny those legal arguments never came up BEFORE it could even be put up for a vote, again showing the level of confidence on display).
What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
It's even a bit sillier than that. David Cameron promised a dumb thing to get elected, on the assumption that he'd be in another libdem coalition, and the libdems wouldn't allow it. Then he got a majority. And campaigned against his own dumb thing.
Not only was it expected to fail at referendum, but the referendum itself was never really meant to happen.
> What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
It went very much the opposite; they went for almost the most extreme possible version of the thing. A lot of people voting for Brexit had been sold on, basically, Norway's status (effectively in the EU, but can pretend not to be, and has its own rules on fish and can have whatever weird passports it wants). This is part of why support for it evaporated so quickly (the last time any serious poll showed staying out as having more support for rejoining was early 2022); the delivered product was simply not what most people had been sold.
Little did they know that the UK effectively already had Norway's status and then some, what with all the special privileges they were granted in the EU.
> (kind of funny those legal arguments never came up BEFORE it could even be put up for a vote, again showing the level of confidence on display)
Actually, IMO, it shows one of the weaknesses of our legal system.
The courts can't rule on something that someone's talking about doing. They can only rule on actual legislation.
It would genuinely be great if there were a formal legal process for writing a bill, submitting it to some particular court (maybe the top state appeals court?) for review, and only after that review letting it be voted into law.
> What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
There was an attempt.
A campaigner managed to get the courts to issue a verdict that the referendum was not binding, and Parliament must then have a vote on whether or not to implement the result. Remain voters rejoiced and lauded her as a hero. Brexit voters demonised her as an enemy of democracy.
Parliament then duly voted to implement the result.
(Edit - looking back this may have been counterproductive. The argument that the referendum was not legally binding could have continued for some time, maybe even long enough to try to change something. But forcing a parliamentary vote to affirm the result put all that to bed)
Which was, procedurally, the correct course of action: the referendum was non-binding, because the UK's constitution only allows for non-binding referendums. Parliament is sovereign, whether you and I like it or not (and I'm generally ambivalent about it).
Given one of the major themes of the leave campaign was "restoring parliamentary sovereignty", it's darkly ironic that leave also campaigned against parliament actually using that sovereignty, and indeed came closer than anyone else (including the EU) to restricting parliamentary sovereignty.
I wouldn't call it ironic. The forces behind Leave were - still are - far-right nationalists and wannabe autocrats. They consider democracy an annoyance - ideally a temporary one.
Their idea of sovereignty is telling everyone else what to do. They wrap this up in flags and Sptifire biscuit tin patriotism for the poorly educated, but it's all for show.
What they want is unlimited power over others. The EU has always been an obstacle to that.
The different nationalists - the Republicans in the US, the Putinists in Russia, the Zionists in Israel, the Brexiters in the UK, the Saudi oil imperialists - are all tentacles of the same creature, and more likely to cooperate with each other against their native populations than act independently.
Well, they would have loved to stop migration and voted in droves for brexit for that. Cant have that though, democracy or not, can vote for any party, but cant have that result they all promise before the vote closes and never deliver once the vote is in.
The sad thing of course was that the people coming across on boats or clinging to the underside of lorries etc are not EU citizens arriving legally. Plus it's not like EU is the only source of migration (hellow commonwealth).
I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with Trump's election, we saw it with Brexit. We'll probably see it with a reform majority in the UK parliament next election too.
There are global trends that the PM of the UK cannot change, but we live in a world of instant gratification so if the current PM can't make things change literally overnight, people are angry and annoyed.
Go read the comments section on any UK newspaper (left or right, tabloid or broadsheet) and the comments are really eye-opening (recommend doing this to at least get a flawed and partial cross section of what the vibe is). People are quick to anger and quick to point fingers. Might explain why we've had so many PMs these past few years.
There were all of the negative feelings caused by general alienation and wealth inequality, but people don't blame alienation and wealth inequality - they blame immigrants. Because the people causing the alienation and wealth inequality told them immigrants were the real cause.
> I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc
Hmm GDP was growing well, inflation was down, real household income was on the rise, annual wage growth was on the up, it was a long time since the great financial crash, unemployment was crashing in 2013/2014, and things comparatively were quite cheap.
Though I can't recall the general sentiment at the time. Net migration did have an historic spike (part of a longer term rise) for a couple of years. Perhaps the Brexit campaigners capitalised solely on that?
Crazy to imagine that economically things were doing great, by many metrics, but so many people got duped into thinking some foreigners were going to tank everything
(Personally, it was a fantastic period. Wages were good, jobs were good, things were cheap. I know many people who bought their first house during that period)
FWIW, Brexit was never, ever, ever about stopping migration.
It was about right wing elites deciding which migrants they wanted, and at best about regaining control of that policy from the EU. It was sold in a racist and bigoted way.
The reason we have less control over illegal migration is exactly Brexit, which, as people were warned at the time, torpedoed our actually cushioned position with respect to "first safe country" asylum rules, and meant we had no cross-border agreements with France.
The "Brexit" that people thought they were getting was always in their own mind because it had no definition. It was an imaginary victory which only has downsides, just as was pointed out.
no it was %90 about that finance and regulation thing for sharing banking and finance data to EU and related, I even fully forgot what was it. It was well hidden and among years it got lost but this was mainn reason. They will not tell you this unless you really deeply read it and see it.
To take my mother as an example she hadn't thought about it properly at all. She was surprised that her daughter (my sister) had voted Remain because apparently my mother who knows about the EU funding which enabled what my sister did, hadn't connected "EU funding" to the EU she was voting to Leave. "Oh" was basically all she had to say about that.
In the broader scheme of things you could also see this in the response of Brexiteers who were stunned that, as non members they now weren't able to travel freely across borders.
Voters aren't very bright because they're people, you've met people. I used to think that FPTP was a good idea because it's so simple that "The candidate who had more votes won" means the idiots won't be confused by the outcome. We saw that they're confused anyway, so, fine, since apparently simplicity wasn't achievable we should use a more complicated voting system with better outcomes.
If voters can't understand ranked choice voting or similar, how could we possibly expect them to understand the impact of what they are voting on? It's a self-defeating argument.
Actually that was by design of the anti-Brexit faction.
Before you get ranty at me - I voted remain. But your comment is revisionist. The pro-Brexit shysters were not in power. After the referendum, whichever way it went, the pro-Brexit people were not going to be given power, it was not an election.
They had no mandate to implement anything. Any plan they promised would have been irrelevant to the UK government and had no more force than you or I scribbling on a pub napkin.
You know who was in power, who was in a position to make a plan, arguably whose duty it was to make a contingency plan if the referendum went south?
The very pro-EU faction at the head of the Tory government. But they didn’t. They told the public they weren’t making a plan so that it didn’t look like a low-risk option that the country could go for and be OK. The lack of plan was no accident, it was a Remain-side tactic.
The Brexiteers were/are wrong, hateful, shysters in so many ways. But your ire in this specific case should be aimed squarely at David Cameron. The Brexit shysters just didn’t have any power, and Brexit voters voted without a plan because it was the choice they were given.
I think you're being revisionist. It's not about the people in power, it was about the media. They controlled the narrative, and they were the ones that convinced everyone of illegal bendy bananas.
> The very pro-EU faction at the head of the Tory government.
When has any tory ever been pro-eu? i think you're misremembering how things went down.
"The media" is not an entity and anybody with enough money can become "part of it". If you think "the media" controls the public opinion, you can just let the money vote directly, this is simply not a environment where democracy can exist. People still need to think for themself, if they refuse to do, it's their choice.
Do you believe that either Leave.EU or Farage’s circus had the power to make a binding exit plan? How? What powers do you believe they had to do so?
> It's not about the people in power, it was about the media. They controlled the narrative, and they were the ones that convinced everyone of illegal bendy bananas
Errr, so the media should have made a plan? Not sure what you’re on about there really?
> When has any tory ever been pro-eu?
Osborne and Cameron were both very pro-EU. Ken Clark (now retired) has always been very pro-EU. Generally the “business is good” side of the Tories were pretty europhile. They have since been hounded out of the party, AFAICT, by the likes of BoJo.
> i think you're misremembering how things went down.
“David Cameron’s government committed an act of gross negligence and deepened the uncertainty surrounding the impact of Brexit by instructing Whitehall not to make any contingency plans for a vote to leave the EU”
David Cameron was guilty of over-estimating the British public. The Brexit vote was intended to put an end to the anti-EU contingent in the conservative party, he never expected that it had any hope of passing.
Britain leaving the EU purely because a majority voted for it in a popular vote is a pretty bad example to use in support of the claim that democracy isn't real. It's probably this sort of vague cynicism about democracy that led Cameron to call the referendum in the first place, only to discover that people can actually vote however they like!
It works better with an informed electorate. However, one of the reasons that voters don't bother informing themselves is the campaign of cynicism aimed at convincing them that all political parties are the same, that their vote doesn't matter, etc. etc. One might just as well say that an informed population requires democracy: why bother keeping track of national policy if you have no control over it?
In the days after the Brexit vote, it turned out that a significant minority of 'leave' voters had been convinced that their vote would be an ineffectual protest with no actual influence on Britain's membership of the EU. Lazy and cynical anti-democratic rhetoric just feeds into that cycle of ignorance and stupidity.
Yes, you're entirely right. One further, I was at a talk from a law professor at a big uni once, where he had printed the entire text of the Medicare bill on a giant pile of paper. He explained that it had taken him, a professor, several months full-time to understand everything at stake; what chance has a representative to do so, let alone on every bill? What chance has a voter? What does it mean for democracy that no one with decision powers understands what they decide?
A truly wonderful point. Some attacks on low-information voters in other comments which I understand but none of us have read that whole Medicare bill. That’s even if we don’t have three jobs and six kids. Considerations when we reach for “lazy” or “dumb” to describe voters.
Boy, the number of hours to research candidates & propositions on the last ballot in California…
How does that work with courts that work to the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law? That rule based on the exact text instead of the history of what went into the drafting and passing of the bill, and refuse to even ask legislators what the intent of the law would have been under certain conditions?
The UK government usually publishes explanatory notes together with the text of the bill itself. It's quite feasible to read these if you're interested in the details of a particular piece of legislation. E.g. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/pdfs/ukpgaen_20...
Which is how autocracy governments get hold of countries without military action, it only needs enough patience and uninformed electorate to win the election.
They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship.
> it turned out that a significant minority of 'leave' voters had been convinced that their vote would be an ineffectual protest with no actual influence
+1 to this.
"I didn't thing it would actually happen!" IIRC there were polls soon after asking people if they'd change their vote or vote the same way again, and there was a fair amount of people saying they would have voted remain had they known.
Madness really
What annoys me is that Farage said something like "if it's 50.1% remain then this is not over" I.e. he'd be calling for a recount or a second vote. Yet it was basically that for leave and we got no recount or second vote. Similar deal for Scottish independence referendum... They keep on seeming to want to do another one so they get the answer they want, despite it being shutdown fairy recently.
Forcing political speech to be truthful (or at least have a reasonable expectation of being truthful) with serious consequences (jail time) for knowingly lying would go a long way to counter the misinformation that caused Brexit.
It happened because it was voted for and the elite wanted it.
Several counterfactuals are plausible: either the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go, or they would've brexited even if remain won, or they don't care either way. What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote, because in that case they simply wouldn't have left.
A long time ago I walked into a public library to get a library card, already my ID in hand. Staff looked at me aghast "why would we need an ID for a card, that'd be ridiculous!". I feel Brits take privacy quite seriously.
You can have the same issues with more than two parties. Only big-enough parties matter and as long as they have the same opinion it's going to be that way. I mean that is not bad in the general sense. Imagine if there were disagreement about whether money should exist in every election. Society can only function if some basics are simply accepted by everyone.
> The trick is to have a two party system and agree on all the important points.
This is the exact characteristic about US politics that Americans wish were removed so their government was better for them. It favors a two party system, so no one is actually represented and have to choose between two parties they likely only agree with on few points, unless they are subscribed to that party's propogandic kool-aid.
Plurality ("first past the post") voting systems always converge to a two-party system. There's even a theorem saying so, though of course the real world isn't always so polite as to behave the way the mathematics tells it to. Countries with better electoral systems don't so consistently seem to converge to a two-party system.
Caveat: it's per seat. Each seat gets two parties to pick from. There can be more than two parties in the government - some other force caused the US to agree on the same two parties in every seat.
When one party is secure in a seat and the second is weak, other parties can challenge each other for second place. For example libertarians could try to beat republicans in a place where republicans do poorly.
GCHQ has done it's job of obfuscating it's existence pretty well, for most Brits to still think they've had any privacy at all for the last few decades.
That’s tinfoil hat nonsense. Of course there is privacy, otherwise those agencies wouldn’t be constantly lobbying for more invasive surveillance powers. What would be the point of that, if they could already read everything?
To all of us, British or otherwise, who're posting our rabbit-holing Democracy and Brexit comments, a moment of cutting light relief. Enjoy some "Yes, Prime Minister".
Inconsistent with the implicit acceptance of age verification laws (forbidding YouTube to minors, may Diderot and D'Alembert and all the democratizers of knowledge raise from their graves and sneer and taunt). Or was there a large turomoil against keir starmer that did not properly reach the news?
How do you prove your age without either sharing your identity (or using twisted ways entailing other possibly unacceptable compromises like the eu is trying to do).
Remember that the australian side (which moved first) framed it as "no underage access to encyclopedias, no underage access to search engines": age verification, i.e. identity verification or other "nonsense" to access encyclopedias and search engines. In the USA, some voices would include LLMs. Remember that in the uk Wikipedia had to win against the state to get exception under the mandate from keir starmer - it "exceptionally won", and after having lost at a first stage.
The privacy of online browsing and the privacy of messaging are equally critical, yes.
(Edit: if you wish to really rank them, then a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are reading a book is more dystopian and farcical than a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are writing a letter - yes.)
You don't prove it. Under California AB1043 (often called the "age verification law" by propagandists) it's illegal for a social media website to demand you to prove your age.
We are talking about "Brits" here. But you seem to be stating that California has tackled the issue and deliberated that - do I understand correctly? - somebody installs an OS on a machine and sets manually, without verification, a date of birth for the user (setting that will be shared with relevant servers).
Are you sure that that would be the way Britain is going to implement it? Why have not britons raised to get that crucial detail very, very clear? We understood that past limitations involved people using webcams in the uk to access forbidden sites.
And the eu? That Californian decision does not seem to have conditioned the eu much: the eu idea is that you should have an "official OS" with the technical capabilities required by the open source age-verifying "app" to get access.
(And I would insist: forbidding access to the video museum to those in the formative age is one of the most blatant events in history. That happened in britain, it just happened. To call the world reaction disproportionately absent is an understatement.)
I don't think they do. The revealed preference is online safety this online safety that - although in fairness some of this is out of a desire to avoid deeper issues.
In the sense that direction and magnitude are two things of separate importance to most, and any system must account for both. An opinion you express only when asked is far less important than an opinion you express unasked. It’s the latter that dominates interpersonal coordination.
Of course Brits are going to answer that they'd rather not have the government read their private correspondence. But at the same time there has been very little protest over draconian legislation in the UK like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 3 that cover just these aspects.
Most Brits have no idea what's in the Online Safety Act since it expressly mandates the neutering of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps.
And protesting is very difficult when everyone doing so is branded a child molester.
Britain isn't a true democracy. Neither is Australia. They're Orwellian societies where the populace has been trained to believe that "the government knows best."
Brits want something roughly akin to the online safety act - they want liability for online unsafety. I doubt many of them care about the requirement for platforms to register or the fees for doing so, and would still support it if that wasn't in there.
We should be trying to give people what they want in the best possible way. Otherwise, other people (with ulterior motives) will give it to them in the worst possible way.
For kid's online safety, it would be sufficient for each device to ask upon installation if it's for an adult or a kid, and send that as an HTTP header to each website. We should recommend that, so we don't get a much worse solution to the very real problem - such as UKOSA.
Those are the ulterior motives people I referred to. Asking on installation is robust enough because parents buy devices for their children and set them up. You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee to do it. Whatever way someone is authenticated as a cellphone store employee would surely leak, but again: robust enough. An example of something not robust is asking the child upon access to the site. Brits tolerate ID checks for cigarettes, even though parents can buy cigarettes for their children.
I don't believe the Online Safety Act does require that. RIPA did.
But again, most Brits are using WhatsApp anyway; end-to-end security is wholly meaningless in that context.
I don't really recognise this "branded a child molester" accusation either, TBH. That seems fantastical but I suspect you are not British.
There are plenty of people on the right (e.g. in Reform) making reasonable points about the burden of requiring adults to identify themselves to access legal material and people are not branding them child molesters (not least because that sort of screeching typically comes from the right).
The simple reality is that in the UK the majority don't think it's that troublesome, in general, that adults should have to prove they are adults to access adult material (or use a VPN, which the government is actually not acting to ban or add new regulations to). We already have default adult content blocks on mobile data, for example (and the adult content block, once disabled, can therefore be used as a way to identify adulthoot).
I tend to find that foreign observers, especially American foreign observers, always tend to conjure up really abstract arguments about inalienable fundamental rights, reduce everything to freedom of speech, whatever.
Life is messier and more complex and despite our more nuanced, complex set of laws, they are more moderate than various laws from US states, and it is not the UK that is the first to run headlong into fascism: that is happening in the USA, which voted for it.
British law is untidy. Life is untidy. We aren't fucking idiots or ill-informed children. We just draw the lines differently.
In theory everybody supports healthy eating, in practice most people are overweight or obese.
In theory everybody thinks exercising, energy conservation, caring for the environment is good, in practice almost no one does it.
In theory everybody thinks studying and reading good books is a good thing, in practice most people just want to switch off their brains in front of the television or social media.
Most people lie mostly to themselves. Politicians and marketers know this, that's why they only tell people the lies they want to hear.
Of course, this is only for national security since humans are corruptible, and these people have vastly most control over a nation's resources, thus, 24/7 monitoring of their private lives, by the public, is super important... for national security ... or else how we can be sure they have not been compromised by a foreign power.. or are not being blackmailed to act against the nation?
All for national security... nothing else.
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