Problem with that view is that Brexit wasn’t impossible; just very damaging.
And democracy wouldn’t work if there was a get out clause that said the electorate’s choice can be ignored if - in someone’s view - the electorate’s vote was damaging and based on ignorance. As a matter of principle it can’t work that way.
And that was the tragic dilemma the referendum created. The result was idiotic but to circumvent the result would have been disastrously anti democratic and undermined the foundations of and trust in the entirety of the system.
And yet this is entirely what the purpose of an “advisory referendum” is. That is exactly the way it was supposed to work.
That the Leave campaign persistently conflated an advisory referendum (which is deliberately non-binding) with an election (which is binding) tells you more about the nature of the Leave campaign than about the nature of democracy.
Gyrate already addressed this, but it’s important. It wasn’t an election. it was a non-binding, advisory referendum. It was set up for exactly that purpose.
Sure that’s the technical position but democracy runs on perception and popular buy in.
Saying in effect “yes you’ve advised us what you want but you are too stupid to understand that what you want is teh dumbass so we are going to ignore you” is damaging. As I said.
It was not an overwhelming vote. It’s not rational to characterize it as the “people having spoken.” Especially given the number of people who immediately expressed their regret and their admission of not understanding what the implications would be.
And it seems to me that this is the whole point of a non-binding, advisory referendum. That it’s not binding. Using your reasoning, non-binding, advisory referenda shouldn’t exist. If you have to treat a non-binding, advisory referendum exactly like a regular election, then you should just present it in the form of an actual referendum.
Yes, that would be quite a damaging thing…if anyone were inclined to build that particular strawman. Whereas “We have considered and will continue to consider strategies for extricating ourselves from the EU, but to do so right now without having new trade agreements in place and without mitigating the issues arising with the Irish border would cause serious economic and political damage to the UK” is more accurate, more mature, and more in line with the intent of an “advisory referendum”.
Much as I enjoy seeing the old “it’s not mandatory but you have to” argument in play, the problem still lies less in the referendum result and more in the propaganda around it promulgated by one side in particular.
Precisely - and that is why the bulk of the blame lies with May and her advisers. She had ample opportunity to make this her platform, instead she attempted to leverage the issue for political gain, with disastrous consequences all round. She should have been able to quell the hard right of her party and the electorate by explaining that she was not standing in the way of Brexit, simply making sure we were well prepared for it.
ETA: apologies, I said I wouldn’t comment on this again in this thread, I forgot.
The Brexit referendum reminds me a bit of the various Puerto Rico referendums over the years. 52/48 is enough to make a decision in a binding election (heck, it’s a pretty good win in a single race) but it doesn’t tell you much about something large and complicated. They’re basically all very expensive opinion polls that don’t really tell us much about what the populace really wants. There’s good reason not to govern based on the results of a single referendum, with Brexit being the biggest, costliest example but also plenty of examples from just California.
Given that a win for “Remain” would have been simply to keep the status quo, it would have been much more subdued, much as the similar result in the Scottish independence referendum was.
As noted, however, the Leave campaign would have ramped up its demands for another referendum immediately, supported by the same tabloid press (and the Telegraph) that had been pushing anti-EU propaganda for decades.
One of the duties of an elected representative is to do what is best for both the overall polity and their individual constituencies, even if it costs him/her losing the election to their seat. Afraid of that? Get another job.
…I’ll wait while you all pick yourselves up from laughing on the floor…
But what is the point in having, as the UK does, a distinction between binding or self-executing referendums on the one hand and purely advisory ones on the other, if the purely advisory ones are going to be treated as absolutely binding?
One of the thing we learned in this sorry exercise is that there is no recourse in the courts for electoral irregularities and illegalities in a purely advisory referendum; as the referendum has no legal effect or consequence, there is nothing for the courts to nullify or set aside on the grounds of impropriety. Parliament decides the weight to be attached to the result of an advisory referendum. But Parliament effectively abdicates that function if it adopts a convention that the result of an advisory referndum is absolutely binding.
On this view, the sole purpose of making a referendum advisory rather than binding is to have a less robust and less democratically respectable process for making a decision. Why would anybody think that this was a good idea?
I think one of the lessons that should be drawn from this is that the UK doesn’t really understand what referendums are for, what they can acheive, and what they cannot.
Which they were always, always, going to do. Blind Freddy could see that. It’s all very well to say that this shouldn’t happen, but it did, and was always going to and was always going to severely piss off anyone who felt that their (winnning) vote in the referendum was not being acted upon.
Witness lum_s_husband’s reaction in this thread. You can say what you like about the veracity and wisdom of their response - it was always going to be the response.
Parenting 101 is - “do not offer your children the question of whether they want something if you are going to say ‘you can’t have it’” regardless". It’s just plain obvious that is a severely stupid thing to do. It doesn’t matter if you say “we aren’t necessarily going to do it even if you say you want to”. Just accept you are going to be under a strong obligation to do what they want if you ask the question and they say yes, or don’t ask the question. Anything else is going to make them feel frustrated and like you don’t respect them.
That is to say, it is going to damage public perception and buy in to democracy overall. Which is bad.