The UK, and any other member state, is allowed to leave the EU at any time. There is, however, nothing saying that a country leaving the EU get to keep the advantages of being a member state. Thus, the previous divorce analogy was spot on.
I have the impression that no-dealers generally believe that all EU membership benefits can be attributed to things other than the EU, or that they can force the EU to provide all important benefits post-Brexit regardless.
I mean, perhaps there’s someone who wants it so much they’re fine tearing up the residency and employment rights of 10% of the workforce while simultaneously messing up most import and export oriented businesses — tourist, service, industrial, and fishing/agriculture — and that having no further access to medical radioisotopes is a small price to pay for leaving Euratom, and who think it’s great (or at the very least ‘fine’) that the UK has already not only lost 10% of the value of the currency but also had a capital flight of approximately 20% of non-land assets…
But I think most of them hear stuff like that and say “project fear”.
So, are you one of the few people who thinks it’s entirely fine to seriously mess up an enormous part of the UK’s economy? You don’t think, for example, that such a concern is “just project fear, they need us more than we need them and will therefore give the UK a great deal”?
Theresa May is so tone-deaf she’s made 80-90% of voters think she’s on the opposite team to themselves, where half of the population think that means “Remainer” and half think it means “Leaver”.
Unfortunately, that 10-20% support for her deal means that literally no option has majority support.
No-deal and Remain both independently beat May’s deal in a direct competition.
If you put the question “do you want no deal?” to the population, almost all the supporters of May’d deal say “no”, but if you put the question “do you want to cancel Brexit and remain?” to the population, almost all the supporters of May’d deal say “no”.
If you make it a normal three-way referendum, I’ve seen Leavers complain that would split the vote.
If you make it a three-way vote with single-transferable-vote, you end up with a real-life version of Arrow’s impossibly Theorem, where voter preferences are non-transitive.
I don't think that's accurate. The vote was on Leave (with the specifics completely unspecified) vs. Remain.
Within those who favor Leave, no-deal may be what the majority want. That isn't the majority of the country, though. If you said that May's deal and no deal were the only two flavors of Leave available, then I think it would come down to 48% Remain (using the figure from the previous vote), at most 35% for no-deal, and at least 17% for May's deal. Even if the exact numbers are off, there's no way that no-deal has so much support among leavers that it has more total support than remain.
Worse, of those who support something like May's deal, some would prefer remaining to a no-deal exit. So it's unclear, if the only options on the table are specifically a no-deal exit and remaining, that a no-deal exit is what the people want.
