I'm glad that they are going through with it, even though I voted to stay. Backing down would have been a big signal to the public that it has no voice. At least we can say that democracy is still functioning (partially).
c.f. the referendum on voting systems, where the public was asked if they wanted to vote in favour of an actual, flawed replacement system and decided to accept the (in many respects at least as flawed) status quo.
Ironically, I think what would have produced the reverse result in the Brexit referendum would have been a genuinely Eurosceptic government painfully awkwardly negotiating an alternative arrangement outside the EU and asking for the public to ratify it. The other irony being that - on account of the EU needing to be seen to be reasonable in their negotiations - the deal on offer would probably have been better than what we get.
He now gets the place in history he deserves. Shame everyone outside Westminster suffers though.
You know, in fact so strong that Brexit got a majority of votes.
He boxed himself into a stupid position by betting all on renegotiating UK's place then bringing home none of the things that mattered to their party policies, finishing by tellng the country what a great job he'd done. It was a play to diffuse UKIP and the EU sceptic segment of the party which has been a varying problem for decades. Certainly since Maastricht almost split the party. Referendum wasn't necessary, there was no new treaty, no change in our terms. That's when a referendum may make sense, like fter Lisbon or Maastricht perhaps.
Wilson gave us the 1975 referendum on the EEC (Britain's first referendum). That was called because euro sceptics were threatening to split the Labour party. Plus ça change.
The 75 campaign had nearly everyone for remain. Tony Benn and Enoch Powell were the main proponents of out - for remarkably similar reasons. Thatcher campaigned hard for remain! All long before anyone aside from Heath and a few FO wonks knew anything about ever closer union and so on, it's just the Common Market. As we've learned since, Heath knew full well what he signed up to.
Post Maastricht when realisation of union hit, UKIP and Tory Euro skeptics became more visible, and started to lead to some vote fragmentation. Some of the calls for referendum were actually audible now, and as we went through the Blair years we learned new government by pager and soundbite. This fed the rise of LibDems, Greens and UKIP (probably SNP too), as the electorate became disillusioned with media centric government.
Of course many were attracted to the various policies, but a time of plummeting turnouts, and politicians no one trusts, it doesn't matter who you vote for, especially with our electoral system. Remarkably we end up with our only coalition since the war.
In an age of government by ideology and Overton Windows, even on scientific and factual matters, the voters wanting a referendum was irrelevant, unless there's rioting in the streets. They sure as heck didn't listen.
After Brexit both Johnson and Gove looked ashen. Neither believed they'd win. They had no clue what next. A depressing amount of Brexit voters seemed to regret the morning after or just wanted to make an anti-govt protest.
A game good sir. Very badly played as it goes. Just another knee jerk idea so beloved of Cameron.
No wonder May made Boris Foreign Secretary - "you broke it, you bloody fix it".
This looks to me a bit contemptuous towards the voters.
And I think that contempt, quite visible in the campaign at least in British media, is precisely what turned the tide in the referendum.
Yes
> very large part, likely a majority, of the population wants a referendum
Not true. Noticable minority
> This looks to me a bit contemptuous towards the voters.
Politics since 1997. Hence the ever growing disconnect.
Tory majority government elected by 22.5% of the electorate - the lowest figure ever.
Of course it's contemptuous.
I don't know how you came up with that number.
Labour won a majority in 2005 with 35.2 % of votes, in an election with 61.4 % turnout. That's 21.6 % of the electorate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...
In 2015, Conservatives got 36.9 % of a 66.4 % turnout. That's 24.5 % of electorate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...
If the timing of referendums is a political game (actually I don't agree) played by the elites to manipulate the results then it didn't work out too well for them did it? They lost and the previously labelled fruit cakes and loonies (to quote David Cameron) won. The animus expressed by most of the elite against Leave was intense.
Indeed. For better or worse, the polling data so far doesn't show any great sign of "regrexit", and I've seen nothing so far to suggest that we'd collectively make a different decision if we voted again tomorrow.
Except you could say that about any election ever. Why is the public's desire to have Party X in power three weeks ago more binding than the public's desire to have Party X in power today?
No one - leave or remain - is going to get what they voted for from this.
In the 2012 US presidential election, 65 million people voted for Obama. In the 2008 election, 69 million voted for him. The population was around 314 and 306 million respectively.
A larger percentage of the population voted for brexit than the most recent US president.
And by your logic, similarly, a larger proportion of the population voted to \remain\ than in the US Election. Just because
Also, there are a very many important rights afforded to UK citizens by virtue of their treaty rights, which they will lose on actual Exit from the EU. The UK had a good in the EU, and it is shocking that we are chucking it away so frivolously.
Let's say, fantastically, only one person had turned out to vote in the Brexit referendum, and the whole thing were decided by one vote to nought. So long as the referendum had been free and fair, adequately publicised and properly counted, it would completely represent the will of the whole country. Elections are decided on the opinion of those who bother to come out and vote.
As for the regions and demographics, it's a decision for the whole United Kingdom. Are there actually any serious alternative ideas to giving one vote to each living adult person?
p.s. I voted Remain and agree with 'chucking it away so frivolously'. I just think trying to re-slice the sausage different ways based on subsets of the voting is pointless.
There is the legal principle of maintaining the 'status quo' and the preponderance of maintaining the status quo to maintaining a stable and governable society. My contention is that if 26% of the populace can decide the destiny of the wider society, and by a very slim margin, then democracy has not been served. If it was 26% to 10% that would be a different story, but it was not, it was 26% to 25% and that is a very slim margin indeed.
If 'my side had won' then that would have meant that the status quo would have 'remained'. It is a shockingly low threshold that 25-26% of the population could make such a large decision. That is my point. The threshold should have been higher.
So, in my view, 'tyranny of the minority' holds true. 26% of the UK polulation is a minority of that population.
That's 52% of the turnout; 38% of the electorate; 25% of the population.
One quarter of the population is a minority.
Brexit is also unusual, as others have alluded to, in how skewed the demographics were by age, which is pretty significant if the repercussions are expected to last for a decade and affect the proportion of the public too young to vote significantly more than the proportion of the public most significantly in favour of Brexit.
The other side of that argument is that the referendum saw an unusually high turnout for a UK election and the margin as wide as those which have produced comfortable Parliamentary majorities. On the other hand, more people voted against Brexit than for any party that ever governed the UK by itself.
As for alternatives, I mentioned higher quorums ("If 50% of the entire electorate vote Leave, we'll leave" would have seen no change happen, at least until Cameron was undermined by his own party) which are actually pretty common for major changes in democratic votes within organizations. There were also calls for 16/17 year olds to vote although this certainly wouldn't have affected the end result.
Tangential point for futile rhetorical arguments: the split between net taxpayers vs net recipients of state benefits/pensions which I don't think any pollster has been bold enough to evaluate. Usually pensioners are strongly conservative and the unemployed and unskilled part-time workers strongly left-wing which makes "our voters are the ones paying for it" arguments redundant, but Brexit is one cause that almost certainly united the votes of pensioners and the unemployed and underemployed, and depended on them to prevail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Commun...
...do you think there should have been a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty?
Although that immediately raises the question of whether a vote to remain was really a vote for the status quo in any meaningful sense. What if it was interpreted as, for example, giving an active mandate for the "ever closer union" advocated by many European politicians? What if the UK found its negotiating position within the EU weakened once the long-standing threat of leaving had passed?
As we're now seeing, the in/out status alone is only a very small part of the story.