The case in the European Court regarding the illegality of the referendum because so many UK citizens were prohibited from voting and thenpromise from Theresa May that they would be able to vote by the next general election would be an important consideration for tge next election.
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I wonder how many of the Brexit voters are deep down far right people.
People who are white, âstraightâ and Christian.And they sincerely believe that
those who are not the same should not share their world.
And it is, of course their world!
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The Electoral Commission is fining Vote Leave for breaking financial regulations during the referendum and referring the case to the police.
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Slap on the wrists.
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Oh I bloody give up!
JRM is running the show and there is no effective opposition to this madness.
At least if Parliament wonât stop this thing the EU should pull it up short.
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It wasnât just Tiny Tim, Vince Cable also wasnât there.
I know - in fact it mentions it in the body of the article
Could be the Liberals are at last thinking of giving up?
I meant to add that Cableâs absence was even more ludicrous IMO given he is the current leader.
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What is a bit ludicrous is that they were not there because they âdidnât realise the vote would be so closeâ.
The really sad thing is that Cable appears to be the best option that the LibDems have for leader.
The whole thing is increasingly a farce
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Farce doesnât come close, four rebel Labour MPâs voted WITH the Government last night so the White Paper pro-Brexit amendments got through but tonight Labour MPâs as a block will vote FOR another amendment on a Customs Union changing the White Paper yet again in the opposite direction.
Iâve also read that the Referendum wasnât subject to the same election rules as a GE or even council elections so a legal challenge on itâs validity following the Vote Leave campaign ruling would likely fail.
It is under European Law that the challenge is being made and as we were subject to that at the time referendum it is a valid challenge.
Currently the Labour party couldnât organise a piss up in a brewery.
Itâs largely down to the fact that it was only supposed to be advisory. Iâm not clear when, in practise, it became binding - perhaps when Cameron started saying if the vote was for Leave he would send the Article 50 letter on Jun 24th - that was one of the more spectacular own goals in a pretty impressive series by Cameron.
The fact that the government followed bad advice in triggering the Article 50 withdrawal does not (in so far as I understand the situation) make that action illegal - it was never legally bound to honour the referendum result in the first place.
Itâs not all doom and gloom thoughâŚthereâs the Brexit dividend to look forward to,
Oh hang on a minuteâŚ
TM scrapes through again thanks to those pesky Labour rebels.
Found this on Wikipedia - British politician Chris Patten summarized many of the arguments used by those who oppose the referendum in an interview in 2003, when discussing the possibility of a referendum in the United Kingdom on the European Union Constitution:
I think referendums are awful. The late and great Julian Critchley used to say that, not very surprisingly, they were the favourite form of plebiscitary democracy of Mussolini and Hitler. They undermine Westminster. What they ensure, as we saw in the last election, is that if you have a referendum on an issue, politicians during an election campaign say: âOh, weâre not going to talk about that, we donât need to talk about that, thatâs all for the referendum.â So during the last election campaign, the euro was hardly debated. I think referendums are fundamentally anti-democratic in our system, and I wouldnât have anything to do with them. On the whole, governments only concede them when governments are weak.
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Brexiteers are so busy telling us all that Brexit is âthe wiil of the peopleâ. Well, a quarter of them anyway!
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To be fair the graphic above is a bit disingenuous because it tries to give the impression that only those who actually voted leave wanted to leave and everyone else wanted to remain. I donât think you can make this claim.
One can argue that those who did not vote were happy with the status quo and therefore would have backed remain had they turned up at the ballot box. However you could just as easily posit that they wanted to leave but felt the vote would be overwhelmingly Remain (as the opinion poll results predicted) and their vote would nt change the outcome.
In the end there were probably some in both camps and, other than assume that those who voted are representative of opinion as a whole, I donât think you can make any useful claim regarding how the abstainers would have voted.
More problematic is the âCanât Voteâ section which is not defined at all - however a similar chart (with a slightly different figure of 18,099,999) appeared in the Indy and there they explained that they had simply subtracted the total on the electoral roll from the whole population of the UK.
So, clearly the largest group within the 18 million is going to be children. Those old enough to understand the issue but too young to vote (i.e mainly the 16 & 17 year-olds) might have had a preference for Remain but one canât really tell. For what it is worth, given that the referendum was supposed to be advisory I think that they should have been included but they werenât so we will never know.
Finally Ex Pats who have been abroad >15 years - it is not clear how they would have voted at all. Clearly anyone who is reliant on a UK pension will be hit directly in the pocket if the ÂŁ devalues but we have seen from the large Leave vote in already deprived areas (who will be hardest hit by any economic downturn) self preservation does not seem to be the defining characteristic of a Leave voter.
Tl;dr: Pretty graphic but I donât think it shows what it claims to show.
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But it does show how small the âWill of the Peopleâ actually is and suggests that, rather than jumping over a cliff and risking the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, it might have been better to use the vote to address the specific concerns of the leave voters. Iâm sure that there are a few traditional phrases that cover the current position. If I start with âThrowing the baby out with the bath waterâ , âCutting off your nose to spite your faceâ and âLook before you leapâ perhaps others can can come up with a few more.
No, it shows you that you know how just over half the population voted and that you have no idea how the rest would have voted.
I agree with the rest of your post (after the 1st comma) as
48% of those who voted wanted to remain in the EU. One can presume they would support EEA membership if remaining in the EU is not possible.
The Leave campaign (when it wasnât out and out lying) offered EEA membership, âCake and eat it (leave but somehow retain membership benefitsâ, Swiss-style, Canada-style, and âtake our chances with WTO rulesâ as equally valid possibilities
We might therefore assume there is a majority (all of the 48% remainers plus, say, 10-15% minimum in the Leave camp) for âsoftâ Brexit
That is, therefore âthe Will of the Peopleâ and is what should be bing implemented.