Comments by "Cinderball" (@cinderball1135) on "Lib Dems battle to lead party that wants to stop Brexit" video.
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And this would be the long answer:
At the time, in 2017, the fallout from Brexit was only just beginning to settle. Theresa May was still new, and so was Jeremy Corbyn. Their respective positions on the Brexit debate remained unclear, allowing both Remain and Leave voters to project their wishes onto their leadership. Both Labour and the Conservatives benefited from this, and they were able to fight the 2017 election along traditional lines. We should've known at the time that this wouldn't last, but many pundits predicted that the old-school bipartite system of government was beginning to reassert itself (perhaps overlooking the fact that the election had still yielded a hung parliament).
This would not last, however. Theresa May tried no fewer than three times to bring back a compromise from the EU - a deal which the EU promised it would sign if only she could steer it through Parliament. Unfortunately for her, there was no appetite for compromise, either among her party's backbenchers or among the people of the country. It soon became clear that her promises to negotiate a fair compromise that would satisfy everybody was nothing more than hot air and platitudes. She had promised the impossible, and inevitably, had failed to deliver it. And because Jeremy Corbyn was saying the same thing, promising the exact same kind of negotiations would take place under his premiership, he actually wound up getting tarred with the same brush. Why vote for an even less competent leader to try and do what the previous one had failed to?
Fundamentally, the myth that it would be possible to craft a "Soft Brexit", evaporated.
And now today we can finally see the new political terrain in front of us. The smoke has cleared. Both the Remain and Leave camps have hardened. Voters are now pretty clear on what they want - on both sides of the aisle. And a "middle ground" position, as offered by Jeremy Corbyn and the "moderate" Tories has been resoundingly rejected - and yet many of them continue to hew to that same line. The Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party, by contrast, adopted hardline positions that appealed to the uncompromising single-issue voters. Thus, in 2019, they scooped up piles of votes from the Tories and from Labour.
At a stroke, the debate around Brexit has essentially deleted our entire country's political internet search history. We're starting out as if from scratch, with Internationalists and Liberals on one side, Nationalists and Authoritarians on the other. Neither the Labour party nor the Conservatives are suited to fighting an election on this kind of ground, and their efforts to pivot to more clearcut Brexit positions are likely to fall on deaf ears - their reserves of goodwill and trust among the electorate have been utterly spent. Meanwhile, the Liberals' history been reexamined. Many people who held them accountable for the worst excesses of the Coalition government are now prepared to lay the blame where, perhaps, it should have been placed all along - at the door of David Cameron and his Bullingdon cabinet. People are willing to forgive them, because right now, the Liberals offer Remainers the last best chance they have at a redo of the Referendum result, and to save the country from the madness that would be a crash-out exit.
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@stevengrice7502 I think you've touched on something which I've been bellowing from the rooftops for some time now - referendums are a terrible way to decide national policy. If you already know what outcome is likely, then they're a waste of time and resources. If you don't, then you're essentially flipping a coin, and locking yourself in to whatever result you get - knowing that it really is a matter of chance which way it goes.
As with the Brexit referendum, the implications are deep and far-reaching, and to this day, most people still don't understand the full ramifications of it. I think that matters of foreign policy, like this, are beyond most people's ability to get straight in their minds. I've studied this subject and I still find it overwhelming. When people are unable to apply reason, they fall back on raw emotion, and that's what we've seen hurled at us by the Brexit side of the debate, in spades.
On that basis, it doesn't seem like a safe and reliable way to decide national policy, and like I say, once you've had a referendum, you're locked in - even if the thing that people voted for turns out to be undeliverable, impractical, disastrous - and whether or not the vote was won fairly or whether it was won by fraud. On top of that, when the result was so close to begin with, the losing side will rightly feel that it's being discarded, and unrepresented.
Referendums are not democratic. They are the least democratic of all possible votes.
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