Brexit

That's the thing with leave/remain - I thought remain wud be left and leave would be right but that really doesn't seem to be the case with my friends, who are all but left, with many voting leave

And my BF, who claims to be liberal but votes and thinks Tory, is voting remain

On Sunday, John Oliver has said it much more eloquently than I ever could, so I let him do the talking.

Several of the oldest members of my family are very anti-Europe, and their venom-filled rants about all things foreign make it difficult to be around them. It's no use trying to reason with them: all the facts in the world won't change that they know with every fibre of their being that Johnny Foreigner is shifty and untrustworthy, inferior stock barely fit to mix with humans. So I just keep well clear.

I used to wonder how 1930s Germany could have happened, how people could come to accept so easily the idea that some humans were less deserving of respect and consideration than others, and eventually come to think of them as less human. Seeing the way so many Britons have readily accepted UKIP's message and how willing they are to take it for granted that Europe is working to undermine them and hordes of immigrants are poised to overrun them, I don't wonder any more.

I've just been checking Twitter during the debate (a silly move, I know) and some of the comments on there are crazy. Things like 'everyone who supports the EU is a traitor.' With that kind of thinking around (encouraged by some politicians, I must say), I think it's going to be very difficult for the country to come back together properly after this.

As I say, certain politicians on both sides have encouraged and led by example with their disdain and dismissiveness for the other sides. I wish there could be a proper change in the politics of this country so we have less shouting, jeering and tit-for-tatness (especially in the House of Commons), but with the current lot, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Personally I think a referendum was a mistake. I think every referendum is a mistake. Love them or hate them, politicians are at least in a position to understand the issues involved and shouldn't, ideally, allow their decisions to be based on emotion. They're more expert than the public are in looking at the bigger picture because it's their job to be more expert. Having a referendum just means they're not doing the job.

I'm furious with Cameron. He made a referendum promise thinking he'd never have to keep it, not expecting to end up with a majority government, purely to appease the right-wing of his own party. It was purely selfish political manoeuvring, and look where it's got us.

Politicians are not necessarily better equipped than many in the electorate to take an intelligent, unbiased decision. They are tribal by nature and inclined to protect their interests - look at the expenses scandal, the way they protect their earnings and the European MEPs struggle against tax evasion and tax avoidance which begins by their not paying any tax themselves.

If we accept the above argument then there is no need to have general elections either and we can have what we're heading towards anyway - a political class which insulates itslef frm the public and which is almost as hereditary as the old aristocracy.

Yes, actually.

When we have a general election what we're really voting for is the general bias that the incoming government will have. When it comes to formulating actual policy we leave that to the politicians, and when it comes to the fine details of translating that policy into workable laws we leave that to thousands of civil servants and assorted experts in specific fields who have a strong understanding of issues the existence of which we can't begin to imagine. The general public as a whole aren't expert in anything, so it's vitally important for the functioning of any country that the decisions are left to the people who are experts. To use an analogy, you decide where you want to fly on holiday, but you rely on the pilots to fly the plane and they rely on the engineers to make the plane flyable.

The more important the decision is, the more important that it's in the hands of people knowledgeable enough to handle it. I know far more about the EU than most people but even I have no idea of the finer points of trade agreements or precisely what compromises have to be made to ensure that everything keeps flowing smoothly. Most people have this vague idea that trade goes on and freight is flowing from place to place, but how many people have ever paused to realise that pretty much every single thing they have ever owned was, at some point, freight? This stuff matters. It shouldn't be in the hands of people who think the three-volume, £324 UK Trade Tariff covering 16,600 commodity codes is useless bureaucracy created by people too stupid to make it shorter.

(Edited to add: I'd like to say how nice it is to have a political thread that hasn't degenerated into personal insults against other posters.)

Referenda are generally a bad way to decide things, because most issues can't be solved by yes/no decisions, and they lead to a polarised political debate that reduces the issue to lowest-common-denominator sound bites.

The EU is a big, complex organisation, and its drawbacks and benefits are also a complex cocktail. The vast majority of the people who vote on Thursday won't understand how it operates. That's partly because of the decades of misinformation and anti-EU press propaganda, and partly because the general public just haven't been interested in understanding the details of it. It all happens over there on the continent somewhere....

Many people don't really understand how the British Parliamentry system works, either. Hell, most people don't understand enough about how the press operate to understand that they've been drip-fed propaganda designed to serve certain interests over the years.

There's a reason why the press always denigrate media studies. It's the one subject where young people are taught about press ownership and how it impacts on editorial decisions!

I'd argue it's also partly the fault of a political system/elite who haven't shown much interest in communicating clearly to the public how the EU works. To be honest, even now with the case so pressing, I don't think they've come close to achieving that!

If we had a referendum if we should/shouldn't go to war with Iraq, I can guarantee we would have come up with a different answer than the politicians, the country population old be higher by 179, that isn't counting the suicides, also the many soldiers that lost limbs, the soldiers that suffered poor mental health, that in some cases has led to various addictions and the billions it cost the country to fight, which could have been spent better else where. Of course the press that encouraged us to go to war, they never admit they made a mistake.