Slashdot Mirror
In the Aftermath Of Brexit, Brits Google About Irish Passport, Meaning Of EU, and Why it All Happened
As the world makes peace with the news that the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, people in the UK are increasingly trying to figure out what this means. Google noted on Twitter late Thursday that "What is the EU?" was the second top UK question on the EU since the news broke, with "Why did Britain leave the EU?" being the first. The questions also speak volume about the awareness of the issue among them. Understandably, some people also resorted to the search engine to look for Irish passports. "Getting an Irish passport" keywords saw a 100% surge.
Except Switzerland and Norway are in the EEA for trade advantages, are subject to all the freedom of movement rules and other policies of the EU absorbed into it (5000+), pay significant fees to Brussels anyway, and simply have no representation. EU membership is better.
Definitely not entirely anecdotal. There was a fair bit of buyer's remorse around our (mostly pro-remain) offices in Manchester today, with only a handful prepared to stand by their "Leave" vote, even before management confirmed that one entire engineering department - about 600 employees, or 10% of our UK workforce - was going to be wound up because EU regulations require that the work be done by staff located within an EU member state, and the bulk of their work was coming from the EU. As you can imagine, the atmosphere in the office went downhill pretty sharpish after that...
As for the do-over, despite the campaign on the UK Government's equivalent to change.org getting a huge number of votes asking for just this, the answer is "none". The guy at work (a Leave voter with buyer's remorse, as it happens) who brought this to our attention seemed to think it was asking the government to enact some provision of the official rules of the referedum concerning turnout levels and margins of victory. Turns out that was about on a par with the level of research many of the Leave voters with buyer's remorse presumably did; "none at all". A quick search with Google, a download of the actual legislation for the referendum from Parliament's website, a bit of reading (it's not a huge document) and it's pretty easy to see that this is a one-shot deal, in or out, and there is no such turnout/margin of victory clause. In fact the word "turnout" appears exactly twice, and one of those is to define the meaning of the word "turnout".
It's done. We're out, and we're now going to have to live with the consequences of that vote. From the state of the global markets and so on it also looks like quite a few people who are not UK citizens and didn't get a say in the matter are, at least to some extent, coming along for the ride. Sorry about that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Turnout was almost 73% of eligible voters. That's a very large number.
That means 27% of people of voting age didn't bother to vote, and I'm quite willing to bet that this non-voting group was skewed towards the younger end of the spectrum. (#)
Thus, it's probably fair to say that if enough of those non-voters *had* actually bothered to vote, the result would have gone moderately but clearly the other way.
As it stands, this is all academic now. But let's bear these people in mind- those who had a reasonable opportunity to vote, but didn't bother- because they have no right- not now, not in ten, twenty, forty years time, not ever- to complain about the consequences of this decision or anything remotely related to it.
You didn't vote? Then you voted Leave. End of story. STFU.
(#) This is almost always true, but it's quite clear in this case that older voters were not only more anti-EU and likely to support Leave, but also more actively cared about it than younger voters' tendency to be more pro-EU but generally passive. An illustration of how those older voters skewed the debate was the endless stream of newspaper letters, commenters on Radio 4 et al explaining that "I voted for a common *market* in 1975, blah blah blah". To put this into perspective, anyone old enough to have had a vote in 1975 would have to be almost sixty at the very least today. Yes, those people making the most noise about Europe are those already approaching- if not well into- retirement age, with their careers behind them and a "Back to the 50s" post-war mentality. Yet the consequences of their choice will dictate the future of a 19-year-old student long after they die off in 15-30 years time.
Still, if that student couldn't be bothered to vote anyway, he can STFU too.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).