alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
What if 51% weakly want something and 49% strongly want the opposite?
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".
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.