UK to leave EU

[Tiberius]

To dismiss everyone who voted to leave as not understanding the issue is just flat out douchebaggery and bitterness. There has been just as much if not more outright stupidity in the remain camp than I have seen for leave.

Assuming this was mostly directed at me, I would like to point out I don't think I ever said "everyone" who voted didn't understand the issues. My point was most people didn't, and I stand by that view. The EU is a complex beast; it can't be explained to the average person, not because the average person isn't intelligent, but because the average person doesn't have a clue when it comes to complex economic issues. If they did, well, then the average person would be very rich and powerful.

I even admitted that I didn't fully understand the issues, which is why if I had voted, I would have voted "Remain" because the economic experts (i.e. the people we are supposed to trust to know these things, and the people who the government relies on for financial advice) predicted economic collapse, the start of which we may very well be seeing today.

But when it came down to it I did not vote on immigration, the economy, or because I particularly like Nigel Farage or hate David Cameron. I voted because I believe in democracy. In my (dare I say it, reasonably informed) opinion the EU is wholly undemocratic. It is not something I ever signed up for and given the choice I have gladly voted to leave.

If you think the EU was "wholly" undemocratic then I'm sorry but you clearly aren't "reasonably informed". Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, is an elected member of the European Parliament. These people represent your views in the EU. In fact, the EU parliament is *more* democratic than the UK parliament, because they don't use a first past the post system to elect representatives, but rather a proportional representation.

Also, just because the EU was not something you ever signed up for doesn't mean it is undemocratic. You never signed up for the Magna Carta either, or the way we currently run elections. Americans today never signed up for the Constitution. The fact remains that all those systems, and the EU, were democratic.

I did not buy the doomsayer stories and I still don't. The "experts". These very people had pushed the pound to its strongest ever just moments before the first votes came in. It was predicted in the economic world at this point just before the first results, that the remain camp had won. Nigel Farage himself admitted defeat before a single vote had came in! If you want to know my reason for not trusting at all what these supposed experts were saying, who had got it wrong countless times before, you need only look at how they got this result so horrendously wrong just moments before Sunderland announced its vote count.

You are conflating two issues. Economic experts are experts on the economy, they are not pollsters. Pointing out that economic experts got a prediction about people voting wrong and claiming that as a reason we shouldn't trust them is like saying you shouldn't trust a mechanic to repair your car because he didn't choose the correct numbers in the lottery.

Yeah. I'm chuffed. Call me a xenophobe, insinuate I'm a racist, call me a moron for not paying attention to the experts, tell me I don't know what's good for the country.

I know you, you're not a xenophobe or racist, or a moron. I do think however that you were misled by extremists who even now are backtracking on things they said to try and win the vote.