Thursday 28 March 2019

More Brexit bonkersness

Here are our MP's net votes against the eight options (the smaller the number, the more popular something is, or less unpopular at least):

Revoking Article 50 to avoid no deal - 109
Confirmatory referendum - 27
Malthouse Plan B - 283
Labour's Brexit plan - 70
Common Market 2.0 - 95
EFTA and EEA membership - 312
Customs union - 8
No-deal exit on 12 April - 240


That's not the same order as in the BBC article.

UPDATE, they removed the list from that article, try this instead.

I have ranked them in order from "Remain" (or Their best hope of somehow remaining) via the various actual Brexit options from "softest" to "hardest". This is subjective of course and feel free to disagree on rankings, maybe I'll reshuffle them.

There is no discernible pattern at all*. In a polarised situation, both extremes would be a small minus and the ones in the middle a huge minus. In a conciliatory situation, the extremes would be huge minuses and the middle ones smaller minuses or even positive.

But nope, it's completely higgeldy-piggeldy.

Why did the second-hardest Brexit get the smallest defeat of all options (it's one I could live with) and the ones either side of it (my favourite and second favourites) the largest and third largest defeats?

* The only two that match up are "Labour's Brexit Plan" and "Common Market 2.0" which are quite similar and got similar mildly negative ratings; the ones either side got the lowest and second-lowest ratings.

2 comments:

Andrew Carey said...

Very good point. I can't explain it either, just wanted to offer some empathy and share the frustration.
You would think the referendum vote showed that the UK as a whole roughly wanted to be half in and half out, with about a quarter not concerned either way and not bothering to express a view. So leaving the outrageously bad bits of the EU ( which is surely the CAP and CFP imv ) and keeping the not so bad bits ( I call this the EEA option - Nor, Ice and Lie are no schitholes last time I checked ) should be popular with MPs. But it came last.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC, that's exactly my reasoning.