alt Hacker NewsYou can flip any argument, but there isn't real symmetry here.
If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far-reaching hard-to-undo changes. But imagine the following situation: about half the population likes X and about half hates it, and every year we hold a referendum on whether to have X or not. Then about once every two years you flip between X and not-X and all the upheaval costs you more than the gain from whichever is the better choice would get you.
So before making a big upheaval-inducing change on the grounds that The People want it, you should have good evidence that The People really do, which means one referendum with a result much more decisive than 51:49, or maybe a series of 51:49 referenda all going the same way.
If I were setting up something like this and could choose the rules, they would be something like: we run a referendum every couple of years until we get a decisive result; a side that won the last N referenda needs a 20%/(N+1) margin to get its way. So, first time round you need to be 60-40 ahead to settle the question; if you won the first time then you only need 55-45 the second time; if you win again but still more narrowly than that then you only need about 53-47 next time; etc. If one position really does consistently have majority support it'll win eventually even if its advantage is narrow. If public opinion is very changeable then too bad, a decision will have to wait until The People have a strong enough opinion to measure with confidence.
(Obviously nothing like that will ever happen. Too geeky and complicated.)
Of course, that wasn't the only major problem with the Brexit referendum. The other catastrophic problem was that it was a choice between "stay in the EU", a well defined outcome with known good and bad points, and "leave the EU somehow", something that could mean dozens of different things. It should have been between "stay in" and "attempt to negotiate terms for leaving, and then hold another referendum on whether to go ahead". Or between "stay in" and "leave on such-and-such terms if we can get them, and otherwise ask again". Or the government should have held extensive negotiations first on what terms it could leave on, and then held a referendum on whether to leave on those terms. Or the referendum could have offered options "stay regardless of terms", "leave regardless of terms", and "leave if such-and-such terms can be achieved". Those possibilities are all pretty unsatisfactory, but they're all better than choosing between the status quo and An Undertaking Of Great Advantage But Nobody To Know What It Is.
Well there is symmetry. Based on the original comment of wanting a clear majority to 'leave', knowing the result now and the polling at the time, that would have ensured the status quo would continue, and I'm guessing there, that the parent commenter voted remain.
A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. If a majority vote isn't a majority vote, what's the point of calling yourself a 'democracy' and virtue signalling to the rest of the planet how great your governance is?
> a well defined outcome with known good and bad points
How so? What was the well-defined defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? What's your time horizon? Was that outcome still true in 1980, 1999, 2026? How does being a member of the EU make you immune to probability and chance? Was a 'well defined outcome' in 1973 that, under the Blair government, we would allow East European nationals with freedom of movement to migrate en-masse to the UK, and that, ironically, is claimed to be one of the reasons for the leave vote.
It's actually quite sad to me that in 2026 the whole thing is still so tribal. Everything promised by either side largely never came to pass, and it's now a decade on. I just wish both sides would recognise that it's been over three decades of continuous poor Government that's the root of most of the UK's problems, and spend their energy fixing that instead.