@bob_the_fisherman Said
This is a serious question. If your side had won would you say there should be a second referendum now if the other side got a lot of signatures calling for one?
I would be making the same point that I made in my previous comment. That the matter should at the very least be debated on in Parliament under the 100'000 signature rule.
You have to understand that the Conservative government has behaved absolutely reprehensibly over Brexit which is why the depth of feeling is as strong as it is.
Also in order to answer your underlying question.... if the poles were reversed and Remain had won, but the situation had significantly altered since then, I WOULD support a second referendum.
Why..? Not because of this dumbass load of pigs***e about "democracy" (the one thing that is NOT happening here is democracy of any stripe), it would be because the conditions under which we voted to leave in 2016 have radically altered.
It's about doing
WHAT IS BEST FOR THE COUNTRY and Brexit is demonstrably not in Britain's interests.
Now.... there have been a multitude of polls and all sorts of stuff over the last year or so, some manipulated, some fair, some commissioned by self interest groups and some honest. Nobody knows what the real figures are. It's all being lost in the welter of claim and counter claim.
But the best estimate available for the real average of hard-core, die-hard Brexiters in the entire country is around 10 million. Yes, 17.4 million voted for Brexit in 2016, but (again, I will say "best estimate" ) around 7 million (give or take) who were not genuine hard core Leave voters only did so because of the promises made... promises that those making them knew were undeliverable and even if they were, they had no intention of delivering them.
Consider, for example, the lie that has become known as "The Big Red Bus Lie", you know, the one about £350 million a week for the NHS
This is probably the most famous lie, and most leave voters will admit to this.
The EU does not cost the UK £350m a week in any sense. The UK *would* pay £350m a week if its contributions were calculated in the same way as every other member state, but they're not.
If you manage to get a special deal on a new car with an RRP of £15,000, so that you only pay £10,000, you can't go around telling everyone that you spent £15k on your car just because that's the price everybody else pays.
The UK does not pay the "RRP" for the EU. One of the reasons why the UK's current deal with the EU is the best deal of any member states is that it gets a huge reduction on the membership fees that no other members get.
The UK actually pays a gross value of £252M per week because we get a rebate that no other country gets. Out of this, £87M comes straight back to the UK to pay for EU projects in the UK.
This leaves a net value of £165M.
It would have been perfectly acceptable to use either the gross or net values, but instead, the Vote Leave campaign used a lie.
Vote Leave were instructed by the electoral commission to retract this lie and to stop repeating it. But they didn't.
Unfortunately, the electoral commission has no power to pause, postpone or cancel referenda when one of the official campaigns lies and refuses to stop making a lie that they've been specifically told to stop.
Cost of £252M per week still *sounds* like a lot of money to the average observer, but on the political scale, it's quite small. Less than 1% of government spending.
And unfortunately, you can't make the argument that by leaving the EU, we'd be able to spend that money on the NHS, or anything else for that matter. Even ignoring the massive economic hit that will dwarf the EU contributions, the rest of that money (and more) would be needed to duplicate the services currently pooled with the EU.
This raises an obvious question though. If the actual gross and net figures still "sound" high to the average observer, why didn't they just make the exact same (ludicrous) argument with the genuine figures?
The Vote Leave strategy was to discredit the facts from the Stronger In campaign by flooding the debate with lies. If one side is telling lots of lies (and they're allegedly respectable politicians), this doesn't just discredit them, it also makes people assume that the other side are also openly lying. It serves to discredit the opposition, even when they don't tell any lies at all.
By presenting so many lies in quick succession it also kept the media busy trying to fact-check everything. But unfortunately, the way that the media works, the press releases are announced in the morning, when everyone is watching, listening to, or reading the news, and the fact checking takes all morning, so the rebuttals are announced at lunchtime, when very few people are watching or reading the news. By the evening, when people are watching the news on TV, the news channels have stopped reporting it because it has already been debunked.
So people hear the lies, don't hear the rebuttal, and end up believing the lie.
If Vote Leave had used the correct figures, the media would have been focused on pointing out the underlying flaws in the argument, and that wouldn't have helped the Leave campaign at all.
OK... I think my point has been made on that one. Moving on.
The lies have now been well and truly exposed and are now fixed in the public consciousness. Unsurprisingly, many people don't like being lied to in this way.... taken for fools.... and as these lies now mean that they are going to be seriously financially disadvantaged... many will lose their livelihoods.... this makes it even worse.
Have attitudes towards Brexit changed...? You betcha.
All that happens though, is that the hard core, noisy Brexiter lobby (the best estimate 10 million) are getting all the publicity in the Tory press which makes it seem that support for Brexit is as solid now as it was in 2016. It's a massive exercise in manipulation.
But I believe the people are entitled to that option because then there could be no doubt that, whatever the outcome, it would be a much truer representation of what people actually want. And at least it could be the start of the healing process that we all want for our terribly.... bitterly.... divided and wounded country.
I would respect a second vote if it were for leave because it would have been made in the full knowledge of what the consequences of leaving are. With what we know now, there could be no doubt that such a vote would truly be the will of the people.
If it went the way of remain, then that too would be what people really wanted.... the safety, security and known quantity of being a part of a great European project
that we would be able to help reform from the inside, rather than be at the mercy of without any say in what happens to us in the future.
A few days ago I posted Macron's letter to Europe. It indicates that a major figure in the EU hierarchy believes that the EU must reform. And his proposals sound like exactly what Britain has been arguing for for years.
Wouldn't it be the worst irony if, in a few years time, the EU is (or at least is heading towards) what we have always wanted it to be.......... only we have shot ourselves in the foot and gain no benefit from it..?
It couldn't get any dumber than that.