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Comment by hollander | Hacker News Reader

How to get out of this mess: quit with this government, call for new elections. Then you make it an election subject: will we follow the referendum or not?! The referendum is advisory, not legally binding. So they can ignore it. If the new elections are clear and people vote 55% to stay in - it's a clear cut case.

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The way our election system works, nothing is clear cut, it's partly why so many don't vote in general elections and why so many did vote in the referendum. (66% vs 72% turnout).

How would the conservatives pledge? Half of them want out and spent the last few months campaigning for it.

Many Labour areas of the country voted to leave, calling an election would just provide more confusion.

I also don't think it's a good idea to just vote in a government based on 1 aspect

> Then you make it an election subject

It was one of the main election subjects back in May 2015 to whether to hold the referendum or not. Making whether to follow through another election subject would be wasteful considering leave has the majority.

As things stand, Cameron will be replaced by a new Conservative leader in October who will be under pressure to call a general election more or less immediately (without the present mess we were not due another one until 2020). The Liberal Democrats, our third largest party, have pledged to run an election campaign based on nullifying the Brexit vote. So it seems what you propose is going to happen, but unfortunately the "Illiberal Undemocrats" are an unpopular choice for a wide variety of reasons...

The PM can't call for a general election anymore due to the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011. Only a vote of no confidence in the Government by MPs or a unilateral decision by two thirds of MPs can break the five year parliament and result in a general election.

And that's exactly what we'll probably see here – 2/3 majority call for a general election. Just read the current headlines.

  Then you make it an election subject: will we follow
  the referendum or not?!

If we had AV or STV this might work - you could have "Conservative, exit", "Conservative, remain", "Labour, exit" and "Labour, remain" so the exit/remain decision was decoupled from the labour/conservative decision. But we don't, we still have the shitty FPTP election system.

I'm sure there's been some buyer's remorse among leave voters - but if remain can't win a remain-vs-leave vote, I doubt they'd fare better with a remain-labour-corbyn-vs-leave-conservative-boris vote.

It seems crazy to me that such a thing can be decided with a simple majority vote. Such a big decision and almost half (or more than half?) of people very much against it. Certainly more than half of the money & influence against it. It's the sort of thing that would cause serious infighting.

I'd say 2/3, or some requirement for a certain % of the total population.

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