I’d blame the politicians, mostly… taking a <4% margin on a non-binding referendum as an excuse to self-immolate was entirely a decision by the people in charge.
er what? david cameron immediately quit and then theresa may immediately went full-hard-brexit without bothering to try to figure out actual goals or compromise or get anyone on board.
1: "Thank you for your interest we will take the result under advisement and form a committee to study the matter" and then shit can it. If "the people" cared enough they'd make it an election issue.
2. "We have come up with three proposals for how to respond. There will be another referendum, this time binding, with ranked choice (or whatever) to decide which specific path to take, with status quo as option 4. At least 60% of at least a 60% turnout is necessary to pick one, otherwise we stick with the status quo." Then run that.
Or many other choices. But make no mistake there were LOTS of options beyond the extreme one picked.
There is precedent for this - Australia uses effectively the same criteria for constitutional amendments (both a majority nationally and a majority in the majority of states). Although, unlike Australia, the UK doesn't have a written constitution, and isn't formally a federation (although devolution has given it quasifederal features), the UK definitely needs something like that given the extreme lopsidedness of its population (one of its four members, England, being roughly 80% of the total
There’s a reason the resolution was non-binding. Maybe an act this big should have required 2/3 majority.
The Tories knew exactly what they were doing, and how they were doing it, and could have backed out at almost any time. Knowing that they were deliberately misleading people, they arguably should have backed out instead of going ahead with their colossally atrocious decision.
In short: referendum and people’s will kind of requires an informed populace and an informed decision, the Brexit vote was neither of those things. Maybe the only upside was demonstrating to everyone else what a godawful decision it is to self-immolate by leaving the EU is.
Good enough for something g as inconsequential as pressing alt-f4, but not for ripping away the birthright and citizenship of tens of millions of people.
If the desire is to do nothing or do something, and the vote is roughly equal, then generally you should just do nothing because of the increased cost of doing something. If 66%+ or 75%+ of people want to do something, then go for it.
Then after being elected large numbers of MPs announced that in fact they weren't going to let the UK leave, and wanted to impose a second "People's Vote". These MPs had done exactly what some people on this thread are asking for: they agreed to a referendum and then decided they didn't like the result so they wouldn't obey it.
What happened next seems to have been largely memory holed: Johnson kicked the rebels out of the Conservative party (Labour did not), sending his party from having a majority to deep minority. Parliament then went entirely rogue and attempted to take over the Brexit process from the government in order to directly kill it. Johnson asked for a new election to take the mess back to the people, and the rogue MPs denied that too. They knew full well they had directly stabbed the electorate in the back and they'd all lose their jobs at the next GE as a result, so they just ... refused to hold a GE.
This was by far the biggest constitutional crisis the UK has had in my lifetime. Representative democracy is built on the basic assumption that if politicians say they believe in X, campaign on X and then get voted in because of X, that they will actually vote for X in Parliament. If large numbers of MPs claim they will support something and are just baldly lying, democracy dies. And that's what happened.
The crisis was ended only by a stroke of luck: the head of the Liberal Democrats became so delusional she began to drink the rebel MPs own kool-aid, and think that the population actually supported their desire for a second People's Vote. After blocking a new election for a long period, she decided to vote with Johnson's remaining loyal MPs to trigger one, at which point all the rebels including her were wiped out. Every single one lost their seats.
So, what you ask for actually happened. It didn't work because the British people voted the same way and for the same things they did in the referendum.
If the MPs actually wanted to be successful in thwarting it, they should have blocked the sending of the Article 50 notification. i.e. either placed conditions on the notification Act, or denied it passing. My view is that they were too craven (or stupid) at the time to show their true convictions.
Anyway, the faffing about was a different Parliament, the withdrawal was sent 29th March 2017, then we had a GE and May lost her majority.
I'd not view any of those "rogue parliament" events as a constitutional crisis, they're representatives, not delegates. As has been pointed out before, we have no legitimate expectations from anything an MP says to be elected. Our only recourse is to subsequently vote them out.
A constitutional crisis would only really have happened if the Scottish MPs (possibly with MSPs) had acted to thwart things - i.e. end the Union; but the then SNP folks were (and still are) too happy in their gravy.
As to an earlier 2019 GE, with the FTPA they were not obliged to do so. Yes their faffing about was annoying, and I take the view that folks were just sick of them dithering, hence the 2019 GE result.
However, one should not really speak of the UK being a democracy.
We (well strictly England, as the Scottish rules are generally ignored) are an absolute monarchy where parliament has wrested away most of the power, and handed it to the cabinet, which really means the PM. (The Scottish monarchy was never absolute.)
As has been observed in the past, the UK is essentially an elected dictatorship, which depends upon those in power being "good guys". Recent events have shown how fragile that is, yet still it has not been (and probably will not be) reformed.
What happened was extraordinary and had not been seen before. Calling it mere "faffing around" suggests you either don't remember those events fully, or perhaps, wished the conspirators had succeeded. Again - all the MPs who engaged in that so-called faffing around were evicted from their seats at the next election and there were IIRC more than 50 of them. The Lib Dems were the ringleaders, and voters reduced them to a rump. In particular their leader was booted from Parliament. The citizens showed exactly what they thought of this "faffing around" and it wasn't pretty for those who did it.
> the UK is essentially an elected dictatorship
That's a contradiction, isn't it?
If you really want to lawyer things, the UK isn't essentially anything at all. There is not really a written constitution, the country just makes it up as it goes along. That means the constitution is whatever people think it should be. And pretty clearly, from the brutal destruction the Lib Dems caught in the last GE, the people think that MPs should meet basic standards like not baldly lying about their intentions, not attempting to overthrow their own government, not switching to parties with polar opposite key policies and not refusing to hold elections.
Any system of government is defined by what people expect to happen, what people actually do, and ultimately what the army does. A democracy lives only as long as whoever wins doesn't immediately take over the secret police and execute all their opponents. If a UK political party were to try and do that, it would be right and proper for people to be outraged and enact extreme severe repercussions on those who were doing it. The fact that technically tradition says Parliament could vote for such thing really just doesn't matter at all, and British history is full of de facto changes to the role and powers of Parliament.
Indeed, EU membership was exactly that. Lawyers will tell you that under the "unwritten constitution" Parliament may not bind itself, i.e. one party can't pass a law that forbids the next party from passing a different law. Yet EU membership did exactly that for decades.
In Scotland, the people are sovereign, can (and have) sacked their monarch.
In England, the monarch was sovereign, now it is "the crown in Parliament" which is sovereign after parliament executed a king, and took the power.
Those two positions can not be accommodated, so they're forgotten about, and the establishment acts as if the constitution is that of England - i.e. Scotland wass annexed.
And while we’re at it, make it illegal for politicians to spread baseless misinformation? If you say something you have to back it up.