Brexit Scuppered?
I saw a great bumper
sticker on my way back from Bath the other day. It just said
Brexshit.
Because I was bored
hanging abound waiting for some friends – no not bored with the
friends, just bored from waiting, I decided to buy a Times to read.
Got the day wrong and it was the Saturday edition, not the Sunday
Times which I buy every week without fail.
Incidentally, Bath
is quite interesting – in a Milton Keynes sort of way. Like the
new town in Bucks, it is uniformly uniform. Where ever you are it
looks essentially the same. Bath’s charm is that it is old whereas
Milton Keynes is a modern invention.
I digress. In the
Times was an article by Ben Machess entitled “In just three years
we will have a population that voted remain”.
One recent poll
suggests that 48% of voters back the idea of a referendum on the
terms of the final deal.
Interesting? But an
anathema to the real hard-core Brexiteers. Their mantra goes. “We
have had the referendum and that’s it. We have to get on and
leave.” They insist that to have another vote is a betrayal of
democracy. (Sorry, can’t see the logic there.)
Two points: the
2014 referendum was actually the second one on the EU.
The United
Kingdom European Communities membership referendum was a public vote
that took place on 5 June 1975, on whether the United Kingdom should
remain a member of the European Communities which was principally the
European Economic Community (the Common Market) as it was known at
the time.
Results Votes %
Yes 17,378,581
67.23%
No 8,470,073
32.77%
Valid votes
25,848,654 99.79%
Brexiteers don’t
talk about this at all.
Status of
referendums. ... Referendums are not legally binding, so legally the
Government can ignore the results; for example, even if the result of
a pre-legislative referendum were a majority of "No" for a
proposed law, Parliament could pass it anyway, because parliament is
sovereign.
So. if Dave
Cameron had any cojones he could have just said, “Wow – what a
close one – so close the government will now look at the options.
No balls.
Second
point: Referenda are very bad ways of organising this country – or
any country for that matter. The devil is in he detail – or the
question – ask the “right” question and you can get some very
different answers.
Leading
the campaign for another vote is Femi Oluole, the co-founder of Our
Future, Our Choice . . . the law graduate from Darlington has spent
this year hammering home a simple point: young people do not want
Brexit but are the ones who will have to live with the consequences.
Femi
tells us that he gets on-line abuse every two minutes and racial
abuse every other day. One of his key arguments rests on
demographics. By 2021 we will have a population that voted to remain.
. . enough Brexiteers will have died and been replaced by Remain
favouring young voters to make Britain more pro-EU than against.
The
fact remains that young people have only themselves for the mess.
73% of registered 18 to 24 year-olds voted Remain, but their turnout
was about 64%. 90% of Leave voting 65 year-olds turned out. That
did it for Leave.
Who
couldn’t vote?
The
flip-side of “who can vote” is “who can’t vote”.
You
can’t vote in the referendum if you’re under 18, even in
Scotland, where people that age could vote in the independence
referendum.
And
you can’t vote if you’re an EU citizen living here, unless you’re
from Ireland, Malta or Cyprus. Ireland has always had special
treatment, and the other two countries are in the Commonwealth as
well as the EU.
British
citizens living abroad for more than 15 years can’t vote either.
This was unsuccessfully challenged in the courts.
Non-UK
nations, as above, could not vote. Hard to see how this was fair.
Gerrymandering has a long and proud tradition in the UK.
Femi
tells us that Dave Cameron never once tried to explain what he single
market was. He says he can do it in 20 seconds. He made a video
explaining the single market in terms of beer production.
On
a radio talk show with Nigel Farage he forced the UKIPPER Supremo to
admit that EU treaties did, in theory, allow member states to
restrict immigration.
Femi
is also convinced that in the end self-preservation means that a new
vote will happen. The UK politicians will try to CYOA when it
becomes apparent that the cost of Brexit is just going to be too
high. He is convinced that a new vote can only happen after the deal
is on the table. This was the problem with the 2016 vote – no
details were available.
Hardly
a day goes by without some new problem arising. Dominic Rabb – the
new Brexit Secretary is only now publishing the governments
assessments of the impact of Brexit on various sectors of the
economy. They do not make pleasant reading to anyone – either
Brexiteer of Re-moaner.
A
good example is news today about the European sat nav system. The EU
says we cannot be in it if we are not in the EU. The government
says, OK we’ll do our own. Nah, nah, nah!
Cost:
up to 100 million pounds.
The
hits just keep on coming!
