It works better with an informed electorate. However, one of the reasons that voters don't bother informing themselves is the campaign of cynicism aimed at convincing them that all political parties are the same, that their vote doesn't matter, etc. etc. One might just as well say that an informed population requires democracy: why bother keeping track of national policy if you have no control over it?

In the days after the Brexit vote, it turned out that a significant minority of 'leave' voters had been convinced that their vote would be an ineffectual protest with no actual influence on Britain's membership of the EU. Lazy and cynical anti-democratic rhetoric just feeds into that cycle of ignorance and stupidity.

Yeah, but you can't legislate people to care.

No it doesn't, democracy means rule by all the people not rule by some educated elite.

That can only be true for a definition of 'elite' that excludes the Eton and Oxford educated Prime Minister of the day and the majority of his government. So I mean, yeah, some people wanted Brexit. If those people had some sort of sinister behind-the-scenes power to bring it about, you have to wonder why Brexit only actually happened after the referendum vote and not in the decades prior, during which those very same people had been continually agitating for it.

>the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go

Clearly not, in this case. Remain was forecasted to win, and David Cameron called the referendum because he felt confident that remain would win.

>they would've brexited even if remain won

This also is obviously not the case. David Cameron would have remained Prime Minister. He was always in favor of EU membership, remaining in the EU was part of the policy platform of his party, and he would have been under much less pressure from Brexiteers than he was before the referendum.

>What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote

This is in fact what happened. David Cameron resigned after losing the vote and was replaced by someone committed to implementing Brexit.

"The media" is not an entity and anybody with enough money can become "part of it". If you think "the media" controls the public opinion, you can just let the money vote directly, this is simply not a environment where democracy can exist. People still need to think for themself, if they refuse to do, it's their choice.

> I think you're being revisionist

Do you believe that either Leave.EU or Farage’s circus had the power to make a binding exit plan? How? What powers do you believe they had to do so?

> It's not about the people in power, it was about the media. They controlled the narrative, and they were the ones that convinced everyone of illegal bendy bananas

Errr, so the media should have made a plan? Not sure what you’re on about there really?

> When has any tory ever been pro-eu?

Osborne and Cameron were both very pro-EU. Ken Clark (now retired) has always been very pro-EU. Generally the “business is good” side of the Tories were pretty europhile. They have since been hounded out of the party, AFAICT, by the likes of BoJo.

> i think you're misremembering how things went down.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/david-camer...

“David Cameron’s government committed an act of gross negligence and deepened the uncertainty surrounding the impact of Brexit by instructing Whitehall not to make any contingency plans for a vote to leave the EU”

To take my mother as an example she hadn't thought about it properly at all. She was surprised that her daughter (my sister) had voted Remain because apparently my mother who knows about the EU funding which enabled what my sister did, hadn't connected "EU funding" to the EU she was voting to Leave. "Oh" was basically all she had to say about that.

In the broader scheme of things you could also see this in the response of Brexiteers who were stunned that, as non members they now weren't able to travel freely across borders.

Voters aren't very bright because they're people, you've met people. I used to think that FPTP was a good idea because it's so simple that "The candidate who had more votes won" means the idiots won't be confused by the outcome. We saw that they're confused anyway, so, fine, since apparently simplicity wasn't achievable we should use a more complicated voting system with better outcomes.

The idea of independence wasn't ridiculous, it's just the details made it hard to make it work.

Depends on whether you are referring to the Brexit that was actually implemented or any conceivable type of Brexit.

Haha, so dogmatic. You reckon calling half of the UK fuckwits is a smart position? Maybe you’re the fuckwit.

At least you got it half right.