EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Yeah the outline of what happened seems correct, but there are a few points here.

1) I don't get the tagline at all: "but because we nearly always vote again after an initial referendum, we didn't end up following that path of destruction" - there was no second vote after, as he writes himself in the article.

2) Similarly, this sentence is a bit... I don't know, skewed to suit the UK situation? "The Swiss are prepared to vote again and again to make sure that parliament correctly interprets their will." - that doesn't really make sense. The difference in the Swiss system is that you can force a referendum to happen if you get enough support, therefore if Brexit was happening in Switzerland there is no way a second vote wouldn't already have happened - it can't be blocked. Calling that 'being prepared to vote again and again to make sure that parliament correctly interprets their will' is a bit weird though.

3) "So the Swiss parliament drafted a law that forces employers to give priority to hiring Swiss nationals and residents in periods of high unemployment in their region or sector. No capping, no quotas, no violation of the free movement treaty." - Yes, and that was a massive and slightly dangerous bodge.

What 'actually happened' here is that the SVP managed to get a really fucking stupid referendum accepted, with not that many people in government being in favour of that at all - it wasn't this almost 50/50 split that you can observe in the UK today. There was a show of negotiating with the EU, which obviously did not work out as anyone with a brain and some honesty could have told you beforehand - though Blocher, the SVP billionaire-in-command, was spouting bullshit on much the same level and of the same sort as Farage.

In the end, actually doing what the referendum result mandated (and this one is not advisory) would have, strictly speaking, meant annulling the bilateral agreements with the EU (not sure whether it was the Bilaterals I or II, but it probably would not have made a difference as the EU is not very willing to play cherry-picking). Parliament and government did not want to do that, so they invented this pseudo-solution that kinda pretends to maybe do what the referendum asked for, perhaps, in a way, if you squint really hard.

Thank fuck they did. But I wouldn't say it's a particularly good example of why referenda work, more the opposite: they had to bodge their way out of implementing a really stupid idea.