In article , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
In article ,
Clive Page wrote:
On 17/09/2019 16:07, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I don't want a second referendum anymore than I wanted the first one.
But it does seem those who who did secretly believe it was a fluke.

The Brexit supporters are against a second referendum quite simply
because the Remain side would almost certainly win. Look at public
opinion polls: all those published in the last 18 months show Remain
ahead by several percentage points. Of course polls have errors but
this consistent lead in all of them is above any likely error, and means
Remain would almost certainly win in any re-run.

Hmm. Remain were predicted to win by a decent margin at the referendum.
And the polls were miles out at the last GE.

The reason is simple: in 3 years about 2 million electors have died,
most of them elderly, and we know that about 75% of the elderly (those
over 70_ voted to Leave. They have been replaced by about 2 million
people in the 18-21 age group, who we know are in favour of Remain by 80
to 90%.

You may think that as people get older their views get more conservative
and perhaps incline more towards Leave. But the limited evidence
available suggests this is not true. One reason is that Leave voting is
much more correlated with lack of education than with age: of course the
70+ group were young when only about 8% could go to college so it's
hardly their fault that they never got a decent education. This means
that many of them have the world-view of a little-Englander. Education
does not seem to vanish with age and neither, as far as pollsters can
tell, does being in favour of remaining in the EU.

That must explain me. I'm well over 70, but had a pretty reasonable
education. But is doesn't explain all my pals of the same sort of age. The
vast majority of whom voted remain. But moslty live in the SE.

Conclusion: the Leave side may have left it too late. Indeed if we left
now it would be profoundly anti-democratic, as the majority of the
population already don't want it and it will be hard to reverse. Even
if nobody has changed their mind, the electorate as a whole has. Hence
Boris's fanatical determination to leave as soon as possible. He knows
it will be too late to do it any later.

If we do leave, I think there will be an inexorable rise in demand to
rejoin within a few years. That will have left us all worse off.

What most seem to have failed to address is that leaving will only be the
start of the story. If we leave with no deal, we'll be down to many years
of negotiations to get a new trade deal with the EU. And very likely with
very worse conditions for some things than if we took the May one, and
negotiated based on on that later.

Nothing could be worse than starting trade negotiations from the basis
of the WA.
--
bert