Brittania sail away!

I sympathise with our former fellow Europeans, the British. But whether we like it or not, their electorate wants to leave the EU, no matter how stupid it's going to be. A short post on non-representative democracies.

When the British voted on Brexit, a slight majority of voters said "Yeah!" and the minority said "Oh, no!"

One can complain about how the Yeah!-side managed to win, there was a lot of help by the British yellow press partly owned by the same guy from Down-under who happens also to run Fox Fake News, Trumpelchen's propaganda outlet.

And of course, the usual exaggerations, half-truths, and blunt lies, right-wing, nationalist political movements deal in.

As soon as the disaster was voted for (a short reminder, the referendum was announced so the Tories could win the general elections being threatened by the Farangists of the UKIP party stealing their voters) and it became obvious it'd not gonna be cloud-cuckoo-land, the same people who run for or surfed the Brexit-wave (like the current British prime minister) quickly determined the culprits.

And since then, the drama went on.

However, there is one thing that strikes me as very odd (as a democratic extremist). With so many people complaining about how Brexit was and was not delivered (yet), and the percussions of it (it can only be a lose-lose-situation), the British electorate, especially the 45+% that don't want to leave the EU, seem to be largely ignorant how their old reliable strong parliamentary democracy works.

Because they still ensure that the no-matter-what-kind of Brexit party (the right-wingers) and soft Brexit party (Labour) would have a suffocating majority. Outspoken revoke-Brexit parties like the Liberal Democrats (LibDems), the Greens, the Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru (PC, the Welsh-ist party) and essentially all other Northern Irish parties, may be able to attract enough voters in Scotland, North Ireland and maybe Wales, but in Ol' England, they will never turn around the wheel.

To adapt an old classic (song with lyrics) that still captures the sentiment behind Brexit.

Sail, Britannia! Britannia, sail away!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

33% are more than enough to control parliament

For those who don't know: In Britain the candidate getting one vote more than any other candidate competing for a seat in parliament, gets it. Monty Python summed up the process in one of the Flying Circus episodes.

Which ensured for a long time stable majorities; something Brexit changed, too, the 'new' (Johnson) and old (by 'Mayday May') Brexit-deal hangs with an Irish splinter party that not even in Northern Ireland would get a majority. Sorry, you're DUP-ed, Mr Prime Minister!

There's a fun internet page called the Electoral Calculus, where you can make predictions how the British parliament may look like if there is a swing of 5%, 10% etc percent for each of the two dominating parties, the Tories (conservatives, soon-to-be-former EU-parliament ally of populist, national-conservative parties like the Polish PiS) and Labour (social-democrats), or towards the third not-so-big party (because of the voting system), the LibDems (Britain's version of the original French Party Radical, liberal not only in an economic sense like e.g. the German FDP).

Here's the current situation.

Even if the UK would, facing the abyss, change to a representative (or semi-representative) parliament, they still would (br-)exit.

Apparently, two thirds of the British electorate (left side of the pie chart) are fine with leaving the European Union, and happy to ensure a super-majority for Brexit (of some sort) parties (right-side of the pie chart). Given all odds in the prediction (and that the man behind the Electoral Calculus is a "liberal leaver"), quite an increase since the referendum.

Of course, the situation may be much different if the UK would have changed to a representative system a longer time ago. They may have grown accustomed to vote for parties that share their opinion.

Polling for a second Brexit referendum (80 polls summed up; source: whatukthinks.org)

Always have a positive ending

... is a good rule for a blogpost.

Turning around the wheel would not be entirely impossible (just this morning, Boris the Menace seems to be going for the nuke-em option, a general election). The in-favour of Brexit voters (currently about 40%, but we'll give them 5% on top) would only need to split their vote between the Brexit and the Conservative Party, and those against Brexit (remaining 55%) not vote for Labour but the SNP (a bit more to the right), Plaid Cymru (equally left, an opinion peace) in Wales, and Liberal Democrats in England.

The position of British parties in the Go-Brexit-election 2017 (source: Political Compass)

Three out of five English Labour voters (they currently poll around 25%) would do. Just for this one, LibDem policies are not really appealing to a left-leaning person (in contrast to their German allies, the SPD, Labour is, again, a party of the left; but LibDems are also not that ultra-right as their German counterparts, see above), so the LibDem's prime minister (Jupiter [Macron] would fall in love, I'm sure) can stop Brexit.