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Comment by MatekCopatek | Hacker News Reader

Because this would imply a public referendum is impotent - if you don't like the outcome, you can just keep campaigning and try again later.

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It was a non-binding referendum - they could have “carefully examined” the result for a week and then tossed it in the trash, politely declining the “advice” of the populace.

Oh yes, that would have gone over incredibly well.

As if what they did instead has gone over any better.

Bungling the split up a union is far better than ignoring the will of your constituents.

Assuming that a narrow result on a yes/no vote on a general concept means that the “will of your constituents” falls on one side of a complex policy issue irrespective of details of the concrete policies embedded in the available concrete realization of the broad concept that were not known at the time of the vote is quite ludicrous, even without the side that ultimately won using specific concrete descriptions as a sales pitch that conflict with that reality.

That's especially true when equally non-binding but current polling of your constituents on the same question shows that the opposite side quite likely leads now that the concrete options are known.

It's a well-established British Constitutional principal that a Parliament cannot bind a future Parliament. Why would one view the public will ant differently, even if it were fully informed?

Having a "do over" referendum and finding opinions have changed is entirely different than what the OP suggested which was ignoring the results of the referendum entirely.

Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.

> Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.

Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.

> they should determine policy anyway.

Then it should have been a binding referendum.

> if you don't like the outcome, you can just keep campaigning and try again later.

Quite honestly, there is nothing stopping you from doing this anyways. This is the point of democracy. Nothing is ever final.

Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply it's not possible, it just hurts your public image. They're looking for a solution that also lets them keep their jobs.

So presumbly if you keep trying to pass another referundum people will vote against it just out of spite. There is already pressure to not repeatedly do that, so its not a concern to argue slippery slope.

How are referendums brought to a vote? We don't have such a thing in the US. Certain states do, but not the country.

Depends on the country. In Slovenia you have to collect 40k supporter signatures or have ~1/3 of the parliament support it. And a referendum can only cancel already passed laws, it cannot pass a new law.

The one they had in UK was a non-binding one, which can usually only be brought to a vote by the parliament.

The British Parliament can do basically whatever it wants. The concepts of separation of powers and Constitutionally-mandated red tape are much less developed than in the United States.

So the answer to why anything happened in the UK, including holding a referendum, is basically just: because Parliament decided to.

> How are referendums brought to a vote?

Parliament votes to have them

> We don't have such a thing in the US.

Well, Congress doesn't choose to have them (separation of powers helps here; the Brexit referendum was very much about electoral strategy in a system where voting for a district legislator is also voting for a particular executive administration.)

> Certain states do, but not the country.

What many US states regularly have is binding referenda with Constitutional force and process; while these may sometimes be of legislative origin, they could do Brexit-style referenda (because of their general powers) but, again, separation of powers kind of eliminates the political use of them, or at least that of Brexit specifically, and a non-binding referenda on a non-profit proposal isn't something that makes a lot of sense outside of very particular political circumstances.

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