I'd rather the UK did something about the effective disenfranchisement caused by FPTP parliamentary elections first.
For the voting system a lie was spread about how it isn't fair one person gets to vote once while another can vote 6 or 7 times.. this was the description of the AV system.
You then have Brexit which was a shit show. It worries me how few people ask to see evidence. This is why I do not feel people should have a say in complex decisions via referendum. If the should then Britain has demonstrated how not to do it.
Democracy isn't always about getting the right answer. It's about distributing decision making power and making sure everyone gets an input. Even when they're wrong.
Who's going to be setting the questions? Presumably the government? Which means realistically the Conservative party or Labour (generously assuming they can recover to a position of electability at some point). Why would they then ever pose referendum questions where they wouldn't like one of the answers (especially in light of the last referendum)? How does anyone really get more of a democratic voice when you'd just be choosing from options selected by the 2 big parties so that their preferred option is all but guaranteed to win?
"Should we: A) waste £90 million on a complicated new voting system, or B) keep our traditional voting system and spend the money on the NHS?"
The Tories wanted to remain in the EU, yet when the electoral commission recommended they change the wording of the question because it favoured staying in the EU, they obliged.
Personally, I still think the question was biased towards the status quo and should have been:
"Should the UK be a member of the European Union"
Rather than what it actually was:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
I wonder if the remain vote would have been even lower with a less bias question?
Referendum wording is generally heavily scrutinised. I'm sure if we had more regular referendums a process would be created to make sure it remained that way.
No, they provided the referendum because their leadership thought that the split within the party on the issue (while the majority was against leaving, there was a substantial minority for it) would result in loss of vote share if the party was unambiguously for staying, so they promised a referendum to keep their internal coalition intact.
Sure, but the split I was talking about is in the party-in-the-electorate, not the party-in-government. It wasn't a technique to maintain party unity in the Parliament, but to avoid losing party of the electoral base for the 2015 general election.
> But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP.
Sure, but that wasn't the public demanding an isolated referendum on the issue; the referendum was just a Tory tactic for minimizing the controversy over EU policy as a general election issue for the set of voters that, their view on that issue aside, were generally aligned with the Tories.