on a decision that they were not qualified to make in the first place,
There you go with the elitist thinking again. I am trying to be patient, but this is really offensive.
Who, pray tell, IS qualified to make such decisions in a democracy?
No you're not "trying to be patient". You keep dismissing my points with sweeping high-level statements on the concept without even trying to present an opposing view.
I don't know which country you're from but in most EU countries the citizens have at least a basic understanding of how the EU works and the benefits they get from it. In the UK the public never received that education. Successive UK governments have demonized the EU and blamed EU regulations as a scapegoat for their own incompetencies. For example, the UK government has always allowed completely uncontrolled, unmonitored immigration and blamed it on the EU. Most of the British people I have spoken to about this have no idea that EU countries are perfectly within their rights to require EU immigrants to register and to prove that they have the financial resources to live there without becoming a burden on the state. As a result there's a common perception among the British public that EU immigrants are freeloaders and that the EU won't let the UK do anything about it.
Another example: take Cornwall which voted overwhelmingly to leave. A couple of days after the referendum they realised that their local economy is highly dependent on EU subsidies.
Then there are all the people who voted to leave because of the slogan on the bus that claimed the money saved from leaving the EU would provide an extra £350 million per week for the NHS. That was a complete lie but it probably won the referendum.
And if you've followed this at all you'll have seen the people posting on the internet at the time that they wanted to leave the EU because there were too many muslims in Britain. Umm... how many muslim countries are there in the EU??
A person cannot make an informed decision on a subject they don't know enough about. And centralization issues aside, the UK democratic system is one of parliamentary representative democracy. That means the voting public don't normally get a direct say in political decisions. Rather they elect MPs to represent their interests in decision-making. The public don't need to understand the consequences of every political decision because it's the job of their elected MP to have all that knowledge and understanding and to vote in the best interests of their constituency accordingly. The EU referendum was highly irregular in that respect alone, and when it was called I hoped that both sides would use their campaigns to provide facts and inform the people so that they would be equipped to make that decision when the day came. They didn't. The Leave campaigners put on a big circus of very well-presented lies and the Remain campaign took their assumed win so much for granted that they did nothing but repeat the same line of fear propaganda that leaving the EU would be "a leap into the unknown". They couldn't even be bothered to explain why.
My friends and I spent a lot of time in the weeks before the referendum researching the facts and trying to understand the consequences of both outcomes, but solid information was just not available. Call this elitist if you like, but if we who wanted to arm ourselves with as much accurate information as possible had difficulty finding it, there will be swathes of people who went into those polling booths with only their emotions and the lies they had been fed.
