I believe what I said was perfectly clear. I’m sorry you don’t agree.
Thread title altered to reflect new info.
Since “leave the EU” necessarily comported the process of leaving and defining a new relationship with it and every other country, it WAS asked. And the Leave campaigns’ answer was that a vote to leave meant all sorts of things that could not - and that they should have known could not (because they were told often enough) - be delivered: hence the dog’s breakfast that has now resulted.
If it wasn’t relevant, and the answer to the question gave clear guidelines on what kind of status was meant, then the current clusterfuck wouldn’t be going on. The question asked for an explicit choice between alternatives that were undefined, and so was decidedly fuzzy. It would be like having a referendum for Puerto Rico asking “Do you want to be part of the United States or not?”
The fundamental problem is that the British people had a choice of “Retain all of the benefits and responsibilities of EU membership” or “lose all of the benefits and responsibilities of EU membership”, but the majority of the people wanted “keep all of the benefits but lose all of the responsibilities”, without regard for the fact that that’s not possible.
Do you have a cite for that? Because that was not my experience of the Brexiteers to whom I spoke.
But the Brexit referendum was not binding; it was simply a consultative one. Parliament would not have been doing anything illegal or unconstitutional if it had simply ignored the result.
A pretty good CNN overview of May’s record, almost all of it bad: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/uk/theresa-may-legacy-of-failure-analysis-intl-gbr/index.html
Stop me if I’m wrong, but this language suggests you think of a referendum as something which can produce a settled consensus.
This is incorrect. A referendum may tell you whether you have a settled consensus, and if there is one it may help a dissentient minority to accept that reality, but it won’t produce a conensus that doesn’t otherwise exist.
We know the country is deeply and almost evenly divided over Brexit; we don’t need a referendum to tell us this. All that a referendum can tell is is whether support for leaving is (marginally) greater than support for remaining, or vice versa. The UK shoul only hold a referendum if that matters.
The thing is, if it mattered that in 2016 support for leaving was greater than support for remaining, its very hard to argue that it doesn’t matter in 2019 where the balance of support lies. The arguments that the UK must “respect” the 2016 result are the same arguments that suggest it’s important to hold another referendum.
Not sure I get your point here. Whether a refernendum was held or not, things were not going to "continue as they did before’, in the sense that the EU (and the UK) would continue to develop politically and in other ways into the future. The referendum was essentially about the question of whether the UK would continue to be involved in and profoundly affected by the development of the EU, or would cease to be involved in, and would be somewhat less profoundly affected by, the development of the EU. “Everything will remain as it is for ever” was not on the ballot paper, but I seriously doubt that anyone imagined that it was.