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Showing posts from January, 2018

Do you really want another referendum? Be careful what you wish for

Many people in my Twitter timeline have been calling for another referendum on Brexit. Since most of the people I follow regard Brexit as an unmitigated disaster, one can see they are desperate to adopt any measure that might stop it. Things have now got even more interesting with arch-Brexiteer, Nigel Farage, calling yesterday for another referendum. Unless he is playing a particularly complicated game, he presumably also thinks that his side will win – and with an increased majority that will ensure that Brexit is not disrupted. Let me be clear. I think Brexit is a disaster. But I really do not think another referendum is a good idea. If there's one thing that the last referendum demonstrated, it is that this is a terrible method for making political decisions on complicated issues. I'm well-educated and well-read, yet at the time of the referendum, I understood very little about how the EU worked. My main information came from newspapers and social media – including articles...