Brexs***

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!