Thursday 15 November 2018

National Suicide UK

Referendums are probably not a very good idea. They are posed as a once-off vote rather than a cyclic four-year election. Whoever loses wants another one. Whoever wins piously says 'the people have spoken'. 
In elections, the people speak, and they can then change their minds four years later. 
In a referendum, it's different. It's a singularity. They are rare beasts, these single-issue plebiscites, when there is a call for one to be made on a specific issue and, apparently,  to be sealed in stone for evermore.
Referendums are unusual and, evidently, they are divisive. 
Take hanging. A poll on this barbarity would probably bring in a popular majority for Capital Punishment.  
Which is why, God knows, they have never proposed such a thing.
But David Cameron, surely to be remembered in the same breath as Charles I for being Britain's two worst leaders of the last 400 years, called a referendum to divide the country - pretty much down the middle. 52 to 48 is not a swinging win for anyone.
Two years later, as the UK flounders in its own mishmash of xenophobia, jingoism and ignorance, between a rock and a hard place, the dreadful result of Cameron's betrayal brings us to a head:
We must now call for another referendum.
Of course, everyone knows such a vote would bring a decisive swing to the 'Remainer Camp'. Those against such a poll say 'well, we already had one and it was a democratic result', yet they are precisely the people who don't want a second one. 
Because this time - even without the vote of those of us who live in Europe (and would cheerfully be left behind by the Brexiteers) - the vote this time would be made by more-or-less informed people rather than the hitherto gullible readers of the billionaire media owners. 
Mrs May said on Wednesday that her draft proposal was '...a deal that delivers. The choice was this deal, no deal or no Brexit at all’.
Whether she will be around by next week is anybody's guess, but the point remains - she is no longer representing nor speaking for the majority of the British as we approach the end of this fraught period where the United Kingdom is now more at risk of breaking up than is the United Europe we apparently yearned to abandon.
We need another vote and we need to stay (a trifle embarrassed perhaps) within the European Union. 

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