Parliament is a garbage processing plant that separates wheat from chaff

By George ILIEV
Brexit Metaphor No 93. 

In statistics and computer science there is a principle called "garbage in, garbage out" (GIGO): if you input nonsense, you get nonsense as a result. In political science, a referendum produces a good approximation of the GIGO principle: the inputs are noisy (e.g. campaigning on emotive rather than factually-relevant factors) and the outcomes are noisy (with unclear follow-up) as well: "noise in, noise out". The 2016 EU referendum in Britain is the perfect example.

Before your household garbage reaches the landfill, however, there is an intermediate step of collection and processing. Garbage trucks compress the collected garbage to increase transportation capacity while processing plants pick out recyclable materials from the garbage (paper, glass, plastic).

In the democratic process of representative democracy, parliament is the garbage truck and the processing plant. It separates the garbage from the recyclable materials and helps put recyclables to good use. The job of MPs is to work through the noisy and fuzzy data and come up with solutions that bring complexity down to a manageable sequence of rules, policies and actions. This is why representative democracy works much better than direct democracy for complex matters: no one but the professionals have the time to study each issue in its complexity.

It will become clear by the end of January 2019 if the EU wheat can be separated from the Brexit chaff by the British Parliament. Or if another referendum will need to be held.

Garbage truck (Source: Wikipedia)

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Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 93 have been posted so far and another 68 Brexit Metaphors will be published every day until the planned Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
2. Disclosure: The author has a master's degree in European Integration. He also thinks he knows a bit about business, economics, entrepreneurship, China, history, geography, nature, science and Rubik Cubes.
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