So voters in the UK woke up to a majority count for leaving the EU. Their Prime Minister, who had promised to submit divorce papers to the EU the next day resigned instead. The populist Brexiteers admitted that of their arguments where lies or fabrication. People googled for answers to questions like ‘What is the EU?’ or ‘How do I get an Irish passport?’. Too late. A pro Brexit tabloid explained how much Brexit will cost the average voter now that the Pound is down and austerity measures likely.
The UK suffers a hang-over and asks: What have we done?
People looked into the small print of the law that enabled the Brexit referendum. They found that its outcome is not legally binding. It was more like a glorified opinion poll. They also found that a new referendum could be called if the outcome of the first one was not sufficiently clear (as in more than 60% of voter for or against) or if less than 75% had bothered voting (72% did). So a petition was started to demand a second referendum and caught more than 3 million petitioners (tens of thousands had to be removed because robots were programmed to vote on this website that had no bot-protection). The Prime Minister said: no new referendum.
Scotland threatened a new referendum to leave the UK as they saw that most Scots voted to remain.
The winners of the campaign were obviously taken by surprise. They have no plan how to exit and started back paddling. No rush to actually start the article 50 procedures the EU foresees to leave the Union. The EU is furious and insists divorce papers are filed immediately.
Both Labour and Tories are deeply divided and in some state of disintegration. Farage of UKIP has made himself kind of obsolete: UK will be independent. UK will also disintegrate if Scotland leaves.
I think the following will happen:
The Tory (governing party) will have a hard time to find a new Prime Minister by October. The government will NOT file for the divorce (article 50) even if EU insists, yet have no way to force it.
The parliament will be unable to agree on any new Prime Minister, they cannot even govern effectively: The government falls. New elections will come, putting more Remain MP’s in parliament. A new political landscape will appear, one where majorities of voters and politicians want to remain in the EU.
They will argue that the non-binding June referendum has thus become irrelevant and declare that they will not ever invoke article 50.
In the mean time, the economy will have suffered quiet a bit. The UK will have lost face and influence in the EU and will have less clout to negotiate any exceptions. The EU will gracefully accept a UK hiccup and congratulate the country coming back.
The EU will also push hard to reform a bit to avoid others calling referenda.
Populists in EU will hopefully lose some steam as voters observe in fear how the UK referendum damaged the country.
This will take a few years.
You see, I am the eternal optimist.
What do you think?