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.