Brexit – where now? The flow diagrams

I&#x27;m not a Brit and the politics of this are not my concern. However the information dissemination and internet aspect of the story is quite fascinating.<p>I have no idea what&#x27;s going on. I tried to ignore it, but my friends who care deeply about it can get quite upset so I&#x27;ve been pulled into several private conversations. Because of that, on several occasions I&#x27;ve looked around the web in an effort to easily understand what&#x27;s going on.<p>No luck.<p>Two things come to mind. First, complexity can be used as a wonderful shield against openness and accountability. You can be as open and accountable as anybody would like, but as long as most people find the situation impenetrable and you do not, it doesn&#x27;t matter. It&#x27;s the same thing as not being open at all. Second, I don&#x27;t see how any reasonable public discussion happens at all in an information environment like this. It&#x27;s a fail. If they wanted no public discussion, they should have made that choice. This is probably the worst situation a democracy can find itself in: lots of upset people arguing about things which they have no idea the true status of. You might as well watch a puppet show. There&#x27;s no nuanced conversation possible. It is contrast turned as high as possible.<p>It&#x27;s not the decision as much as the uncertainty. I can&#x27;t help but think the net failed us here -- but I don&#x27;t know how it could have done better. The betting markets at least will give you an up&#x2F;down version of the likely outcomes. Oddly enough that might be the best source of information.

Tinfoil hat: I&#x27;m actually on record as speculating that Brexit is just a big currency trading scam. Imagine that you go into Brexit <i>knowing</i> that you will make it fail. You spend 2 years sitting on your prosterior, not actually forming a deal and then at the last minute: OMG what are we going to do. The currency bounces around like a yoyo. You time all the nice low points. And then you cancel it saying &quot;Oh we tried our best. Nothing we could have done. The EU was bent on screwing us if we left&quot;. The pound jumps 20 or 30 cents on the pound overnight.<p>I will literally fall over if it actually comes to pass, but like I said, this was my somewhat tongue in cheek speculation about 6 months ago (although I predicted that the budget would fail leading to a general election and an opportunity to repeal Brexit at that point, so I&#x27;m already technically wrong).

Imagine if Florida wanted to leave the US and renegotiate their trade and governmental relationship with China&#x2F;Brazil&#x2F;Iceland, etc?<p>- Why would a country give Florida a better trade deal or more rights than the US?<p>- How do Floridians benefit from suddenly being unable to freely cross the border to the US?<p>And this is why Brexit is so screwed up: the promise was &quot;all the benefits you have now plus we&#x27;ll renegotiate and get a bunch more when we aren&#x27;t being held back anymore&quot;, but it&#x27;s really hard to fundamentally see why&#x2F;how that could happen.<p>EDIT: bunch of replies to this that maybe miss the main thrust of this question which is &quot;Why would a country give a better deal to Florida in this scenario?&quot;

A few weeks ago I was in Basel, Switzerland, which is uniquely positioned at the cross of the Swiss, German and French borders.<p>There are suburbs of the city that are in German and French territory: Basel trams and buses will get to either side, with no notice you are crossing a national border.<p>You can cross the Rhine from Weil am Rhein (Germany) to Huningue (France) through a footbridge, with the only thing marking the cross being a German and French flags side by side, on the French side of the river.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.radreisen.at&#x2F;data&#x2F;thumbs&#x2F;_data_pic_Frankreich_Region_Basel_Sternfahrt_Huningue_WeilamRhein_2_jpg.1539077909.800x600x75.crop.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.radreisen.at&#x2F;data&#x2F;thumbs&#x2F;_data_pic_Frankreich_Reg...</a><p>No border, no checks, even normal police nowhere to be seen. 75 years ago (and pretty much over the course of their history) these two countries were at bitter war between themselves.<p>I cannot fathom why people would do anything that could cause returning to those times a possibility.<p>As flawed the EU is, it has been instrumental in ensuring decades of peace. The (partial but undoubtful) loss of sovereignity for individual members should be considered a fair price to pay.<p>&quot;Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.&quot;

Aside, a few click saving&#x2F;general things with draw.io (and as a UK resident you&#x27;ll excuse me if I avoid the actual subject):<p>1) Add #U to the URL then the path to the diagram to create a link that loads it directly:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.draw.io&#x2F;#Uhttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonworth.eu&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;29jandiagrams&#x2F;BrexitPlanB-V22.xml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.draw.io&#x2F;#Uhttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonworth.eu&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;29jandia...</a><p>2) File-&gt;Embed-&gt;HTML gives you an HTML snippet that you embed in your page to render a vector version of the diagram. Click the viewer opens up a lightbox, zoomable vector version, that can include the diagram data in the snippet, and a edit option from the lightbox to navigate to the editor with the diagram loaded.<p>3) draw.io is open source, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jgraph&#x2F;drawio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jgraph&#x2F;drawio</a>, if you don&#x27;t want to depend on a third-party for the viewer, clone the repo, host it as a static site (doesn&#x27;t need a back-end) and reference the viewer on that site instead of www.draw.io.

A parliament that HAS to choose among N possible futures or else the one of those N that is <i>least</i> popular wins.<p>Yet they seen convinced that the only thing they can do is do yes&#x2F;no votes to reach a majority for one of the N alternatives. If this is for legal&#x2F;constitutional reasons (it most likely is) then it’s a horrible mistake to not have realized this and corrected it.<p>Parliament needs a simple and legal way to swiftly select the most popular option among N options where none have a majority. This isn’t a dangerous legal loophole - the acceptance of such an N-way tie and the selection of the N options can still be decided with majority.<p>There should be a ranked or Condorcet vote and the winner should be enacted. It should have happened a year ago at least.

This is two days outdated. We are at meaningful vote 3 phase.<p>I assume this is going to fail again which gives it a 80% hard brexit chance with 20% rescinding brexit.<p>I have always been all-in on &quot;no brexit&quot; for last three years. It&#x27;s a dog and pony show.

Nice diagram, but it&#x27;s already out of date. The indicative votes already passed, there was no consensus and I think now they&#x27;ll do a second round? I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if a good chunk of MPs are confused about what&#x27;s happening.<p>Anyway, the central delusion of Brexit is that the British public vote to have a foreign sovereign government give them something. Technically they voted for the British government to leave the EU, but what they really voted for is to have the EU give them an unbelievably awesome deal that screws over the EU. That is not going to happen, so now we&#x27;re witnessing this mass political delusion crash into reality.

Unsurprisingly there are several possibilities not accounted for here.<p>One being that the 3rd vote passes, the PM resigns (which she&#x27;s already agreed to do), a new leader is elected <i>and</i> a general election is held soon after which will essentially be a &#x27;second referendum&#x27; election in which we end up rejoining the EU in less than 5 years. A true Schrödinger&#x27;s brexit.

No wonder the public feel powerless.<p>The options are so obfuscated behind political complexity AND ever-changing that a simple voter (me) can&#x27;t hope to keep up.<p>The moment you half-understand a scenario it is outdated, the days it takes to form a layperson&#x27;s reasonable opinion are wasted grasping at now-irrelevant information.<p>It takes multiple hours per day to try and understand the details and their strategic importance.<p>I will forever remember this as a contradictory moment when the British public&#x27;s political awareness was both at its greatest and weakest.<p>No positive outcomes look possible any more.

These are fabulous - they take serious work to follow through, but are clear, and give a great sense of structure.<p>Great work - props to Jon Worth!

Basically we&#x27;re sitting at no deal or no brexit. If no deal happens I have to leave the UK in the next 2 weeks...

These are great, but a little out of date (the situation has changed a lot in the last 48 hours...). It&#x27;s the visualisation I&#x27;ve wanted all along though!

Neat, but it seems to be missing the upcoming parliament vote on Monday. That one seems very important to me.

I don&#x27;t think this covers (MV3)&#x2F;2 or whatever today&#x27;s vote is called?

Excellent work!