Thread by @BeccaGoldilocks

Dear leave voters,

You can’t honestly say you voted for a no deal Brexit in 2016. No one did. It simply wasn’t on the table three years ago.

We were promised a deal in 2016, and that is what leave voters voted for.

Not one leave campaigner spoke in favour of no deal during the referendum campaign. No one. Not UKIP, Farage, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Gove etc. Even Vote Leave was clear that we’d leave with a deal.

Be honest. All talk of a no deal Brexit emerged after Maybot’s terrible deal was published, over two years after we voted. At least something unites us: we agree her deal is awful. It’s far inferior to our current terms, not least because we’d take rules without making them.

Now you’ve seen how weak the WA turned out to be, you may have decided you’d choose no deal (/remain /a different strategy) over our strong and stable leader’s weak and wobbly withdrawal agreement but, again, that isn’t what you voted for. We weren’t given that choice.

It’s not right to keep repeating ‘I NEW [sic] WHAT I VOTED FOR. NO DEAL. GO WTO’. Especially in uppercase.

You didn’t vote for no deal, and you didn’t vote for our country to trade using WTO alone. You might have now decided that’s what you want, but this wasn’t presented as an option for the referendum.

If it was, many people would’ve pointed out we can’t simply default to WTO on day one because the UK‘s WTO membership is bound to our EU relationship. They would’ve also pointed out that no developed country in the world uses WTO terms alone, because they’re not adequate.

Experts would have given you a host of sensible economic reasons why a no deal brexit would be very bad for all of us. But they didn’t, because it wasn’t part of the binary vote.

Instead, leave voters were promised ‘we will negotiate the terms of any deal before we start any legal process to leave’ (Vote Leave, April 2016).
(Thanks to @ByDonkeys)

No one even suggested - let alone campaigned for - ripping up all current trade agreements, ruining relationships with our neighbours and allies, crashing our economy, threatening our food and medical supplies.

No one even implied we’d need to start all over again on the political, legal, technological, environmental, sociological, medical and economic systems we’ve spent decades building, growing and perfecting. No one voted for that because it wasn’t an option.

Our PM keeps repeating ‘the will of the people’ as if her deal is what people voted for. It’s clear from all the angry posts from leave (and remain) voters that her deal is actually the ‘will’ of very few people. That’s not democracy.

Even brushing over the court judgement that the 2016 result would’ve been deemed illegal had the referendum been legally binding.
(See
@UKEUchallenge @Suewilson91 )

Even ignoring those who chose not to exercise their democratic right to vote because they didn’t feel their view would count.

Even forgetting about those who knew their view would count but were deemed ineligible to vote, despite being on the electoral register and paying taxes.

Forgetting all of that, all of the lies, myths and deception, we are not a democracy if we have May’s deal - or no deal - imposed upon us. It is not what we voted for.

Further info & inspiration:
@A50Challenge
@Femi_Sorry
@IanDunt
@MW_Obliterati
@ByDonkeys

#PeoplesVote #RevokeArticle50 #NoDealBrexit #StopBrexitSaveBritain #StopBrexit #StopBrexitSaveDemocracy #EuropeanUnion

@threadreaderapp please unroll