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I feel like, at this point, a possibly likely option is a continued bump of leave dates until the British population gets sick of the BS and forces a stay decision in like 20 years once the old racists go away - but my money is still on UK doing a no-deal brexit because they can't decide on anything else... that will probably happen during the next european recession when the EU gets sick of wasting bureaucratic effort on supporting the UK being silly... and it looks like we're 9-18 months out from the next global recession.


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It is a complete mess.

The MPs in office overwhelmingly oppose Brexit. They don't support anything else, but they oppose Brexit as well. But the country is fairly evenly divided. However the Conservative party hung itself out to dry on a promise to deliver Brexit, and the Conservative base very strongly wishes that Brexit had happened already. If it doesn't, it is not impossible that the Conservative party will fall apart.

The Conservative leadership's opinion is that their base consist of "swivel-eyed loons", but without that base, the Conservatives don't win elections. Also the Conservatives are in a coalition right now with the DUP, and the DUP is strongly for Brexit. (As I commented to a friend today, if the Conservative base consists of swivel-eyed loons, the DUP base consists of steel-eyed goons.)

The country as a whole is fairly evenly divided. Polls suggest that a re-do would come up Remain. But polls suggested the same thing before the referendum as well. Demographics suggest that the country as a whole will support Remain in the future. However large parts of the country are strongly Leave and that won't be changing any time soon. And no, they aren't simply stupid racists. They have some valid concerns, such as the long-term effect of EU regulations (such as GDPR and the new Copyright bill) on economic growth.


Honestly, this is a reflection of my greatest fear of the modern world - cuts to education and social services from the last generation of Regan/Thatcher-nomics has both cut western countries economies off at the ankles while simultaneously saddling us with an overwhelming majority of unquestioning individuals that are happy to go along with whatever they are told.

I don't know how the west will recover from this but if there is one thing I've come to view as a vital component of that recovery it's arts spending. We seriously need to up critical thinking skills in the general populace instead of continuing to pump out trade-schooled apprentices (that includes a bunch of us developers, many of whom are more heavily rote taught than anything else).

Our purpose in the universe is... well probably nothing, but it'd be nice if we equipped everyone to deal with life and their journey through it with as many tools as possible. It is possible to find some educational spending wasteful and desire to make it more efficient, but the people who say "we're wasting money educating all these people" those are the most dangerous of all.


You seem to be assuming that more education implies better informed voters which implies no Brexit.

But it was the best 'educated' voters who took the dire economic warnings of the cost of voting leave most seriously, which have since been proven false (e.g. no 800,000 lost jobs due to uncertainty post-vote).

So there's an easy argument to make that huge numbers of remain voters were just, as you put it, "unquestioning individuals that are happy to go along with whatever they are told" i.e. they were to vote remain or else economic disaster, didn't question it despite the obvious holes in this story, and did as they were told. Leave voters thought for themselves, concluded the risks were exaggerated and didn't do as they were told.


The main problem with Brexit is that EU must ensure that it's bad for UK in the long run. If UK left the EU and was successful without it, it'd prove that EU is useless and other countries would follow suit.

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