Quite why this vote and this vote alone must be held as so absurdly inviolable and unquestionable I don't understand. Yes, a vote was held. A marginal Leave vote was obtained : by exactly the same margin that, had it gone the same way, Leave said would justify a second referendum. No-one questioned this, because being able to change your mind is a fundamental, normal, and entirely expected part of the democratic process. Yes, U-turns can be politically problematic, but they can also be expedient (witness Gordon Brown's honeymoon period in which he instantly stopped Blair's supercasino plan, to almost universal approval). There's nothing the slightest bit undemocratic about responding to protests when the opinion is perceived to have shifted, let alone by holding another (perhaps more meaningful) vote.
Constant U-turns (as May is well-known for), now yes, those are a problem because chronic instability gets us nowhere. But the other extreme is just as bad, and worse in this case because of the long-term nature of the decision. If you can't allow any rethinking at all - if one particular non-binding vote is determined to absolutely and unquestionably represent a very specific course that the question itself made no mention of, with no further questioning of the voters allowed - then that's not democracy. That's a tyranny by transient and whimsical majority, and it's just plain dumb.
I've said all this a million times before. It remains true.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/brexit/2017/09/i-ve-annotated-government-s-response-petition-calling-another-brexit
My uneducated guess: There's more anger on the leave side. If a second vote was held, all the leave supporters would fight to make sure those who allowed the second vote to lose their jobs, regardless of the result of the vote but especially if it went for stay. The politicians are cowards.
ReplyDeleteJordan Henderson I'd go further; if you look at polling results, the people who voted Leave overlap more with the people who vote in GEs (historically) than the people who voted Remain do.
ReplyDeleteThis most recent GE broke that, to a degree, but it takes a lot longer than one election to break a politician's dependence on the past as a strong predictor of future outcomes.
I think that's very plausible for the Tories. It would be interesting to see polls as to how the latest supporters of Labour view the issue - there seem to be mixed opinions as to how many of them are hoping Corbyn is secretly anti-Brexit, despite his repeated protestations that he'll stick with it.
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