Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrcarrot | Hacker News Reader

And it seems like a good example of why more referendums wouldn't do much good in the current UK political system.

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?"

View on HN

The majority of the Tories wanted to stay in the EU. They didn't want the referendum. They provided the referendum because the public demanded one by giving a single issue party (UKIP) 12% of the vote at the previous general election.

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.

> The majority of the Tories wanted to stay in the EU. They didn't want the referendum. They provided the referendum because the public demanded one by giving a single issue party (UKIP) 12% of the vote at the previous general election.

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.

About 20% of the Tory MPs wanted to leave the EU. So yes, that did play a part in the decision I'm sure. But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP. The Tory party was under threat because of the gains UKIP was making.

> About 20% of the Tory MPs wanted to leave the EU

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com