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Merged Now What?

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The Don said:
Was listening to some **** of a Tory MP parroting some of the Leave lies; "half of our laws come from the EU with no say for us", "all this money that will come back from Europe", "of course we'll have the right to travel, live, work and study in Europe, we'll control their access to the UK", "net migration in the tens of thousands"* and wondering who that colossal tool was.

Turns out that it was my local MP (and colossal tool) David Davies :o - who interestingly claimed to be a small businessman, my understanding was that he was "encouraged" to leave the family firm because he wasn't up to running it.
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That'd be the same-sex marriage opposing, global warming "skeptic" David Davies MP?
 
The AV referendum had a turnout of only 42% - so nowhere near the bar set by the petition.

I've not checked the others quoted yet, if anyone has please list the ones that had a more than 75% turnout with a more than 60% vote one way.

Edit to add: Okay, I've looked at them all myself now. The only one that met the criteria was the Northern Ireland Good Friday Referendum. It has an 81% turnout with 71% voting Yes.
 
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Some light reading for thread participants.
The process of withdrawing from the European Union. A House of Lords report..
Some excerpts:

Can a Member State’s decision to withdraw be reversed?
We asked our witnesses whether it was possible to reverse a decision to withdraw. Both agreed that a Member State could legally reverse a decision to withdraw from the EU at any point before the date on which the withdrawal agreement took effect. Once the withdrawal agreement had taken effect, however, withdrawal was final.
Sir David told us: “It is absolutely clear that you cannot be forced to go through with it if you do not want to: for example, if there is a change of Government.”

Professor [Derrick] Wyatt supported this view with the following legal analysis:
There is nothing in the wording to say that you cannot. It is in accord with the general aims of the Treaties that people stay in rather than rush out of the exit door. There is also the specific provision in Article 50 to the effect that, if a State withdraws, it has to apply to rejoin de novo. That only applies once you have left. If you could not change your mind after a year of thinking about it, but before you had withdrawn, you would then have to wait another year, withdraw and then apply to join again. That just does not make sense. Analysis of the text suggests that you are entitled to change your mind.
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Professor Derrick Wyatt.

The last word should go to Sir David Edward
The long-term ghastliness of the legal complications is almost unimaginable.
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MikeG said:
That's a holding position, obviously. The new leader will have his own people do the job.
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But who will the new leader be? How will they decide, draw straws?
Looser gets to be PM for brexit.
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Of course it's wrong to say all Leave voters are racist. It's just quite likely that if you voted Leave you are a racist. Some may have merely ticked the wrong box by mistake. ;).
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Sorry, but: 1) I'm American. and 2) there are perfectly valid issues of economic and national sovereignty that need discussing that are in no way "racist" that from what I have read motivated many "Leave" voters.

The really sad thing is that those same voters have been nose-led by the REAL forces behind leave: Big Business interests who wanted to be shut of worker rights and wage standards imposed by the EU.
 
MikeG said:
That's a holding position, obviously. The new leader will have his own people do the job.
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It may well be a "wrecking position" to make his successor's task if not impossible, at least unpleasant.
 
Information Analyst said:
It was never "any old petition."
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lol no, it was actually meant to constrain the Remanians in their imminent victory from diving deeper in with flimsy margins. btw ..should I take it by your passionate defense of it's legitimacy, that you support this Petition?

Information Analyst said:
Petitions on the likes of Change and 38Degrees are essentially worthless. Petitions on Parliament's own website cannot be so easily ignored.
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here's the totals from that site, you can see, the majority are in fact ignored, although I have a feeling your one might become No 28 given that it is a clear 10x larger than all the others there.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=open

Other lists of petitions

All petitions (10,738)
Open petitions (2,742)
Closed petitions (2,366)
Rejected petitions (5,630)
Awaiting government response (24)
Government responses (234)
Awaiting a debate in Parliament (5)
Debated in Parliament (27)
Not debated in Parliament (10)
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I do hope they ignore this one though https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/129823
 
McHrozni said:
Why not? The next referendum could conceivably pass either bar.

The petition does raise an important point by itself however. In decisions as important and far-reaching as this one you do need to set the bar higher than the 50% plus one vote.

McHrozni
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For big, largely irreversible decisions, I agree. I've often thought that a "Supermajority or Best-of-Three" strategy would work.

1. Have an election. If either option gets a supermajority, then that's the only election. If no Supermajority, have a second election a year or two later.

2. If the second election chooses the same option as the first, then go with it, even if both elections were close. If it gets different results, have a third election a year or two later.

3. Assuming it has gone on this long, the winner of the third election gets selected.

The idea is to make sure that the decision made reflects the settled opinion of the electorate, not the short term emotional response to a single election campaign.

This would be different than selecting for political office. After all, electing candidate "a" does not mean that candidate "b" would need to jump through a decade's worth of bureaucracy just to run for office again. However, leaving the EU would certainly commit the UK to a long re-application process should the UK ever decide that leaving was the wrong thing to do.
 
kevsta said:
lol no, it was actually meant to constrain the Remanians in their imminent victory from diving deeper in with flimsy margins. btw ..should I take it by your passionate defense of it's legitimacy, that you support this Petition?
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I think the sentiment of the petition is valid, whatever the way the result had gone. If it have been 51.9% for Reamin, I doubt the Brexiters would have caved in and shut up, do you?

here's the totals from that site, you can see, the majority are in fact ignored, although I have a feeling your one might become No 28 given that it is a clear 10x larger than all the others there.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=open

I do hope they ignore this one though https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/129823
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Obviously petitions that fail to pass the threshold of votes fail. Not sure what point you're trying to make otherwise.
 
Information Analyst said:
I think the sentiment of the petition is valid, whatever the way the result had gone. If it have been 51.9% for Reamin, I doubt the Brexiters would have caved in and shut up, do you?
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At least in the case of a Remain win, the post vote picture was reasonably clear. My problem is that I have no idea what the UK Brexit plan is aiming for - much less what they'll actually be able to negotiate.

If it turns out that we're "doing a Norway" then I'll be mildly annoyed about all the money, time and stress associated with such a minimal change but otherwise not unduly upset. Sure we'll lose our ability to influence and vote on EU legislation but at least we won't be out in the cold.

OTOH if we're going full nuclear, shut the borders, send the ***** home then that's a different matter.

It's disconcerting that Brexeters had no idea what they were actually voting for.
 
Information Analyst said:
It's certainly clear that some of them were motivated by thing that could not be delivered, while others were not clear on exactly how their vote would be counted.
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IMO Boris' vision of Brexit is very different to Nigel Farage's.

Even within the Conservative Party Brexiters there seems to be quite a spectrum of views. My local MP David Davies seems to be more towards the UKIP end of that spectrum.
 
The Don said:
At least in the case of a Remain win, the post vote picture was reasonably clear. My problem is that I have no idea what the UK Brexit plan is aiming for - much less what they'll actually be able to negotiate.

If it turns out that we're "doing a Norway" then I'll be mildly annoyed about all the money, time and stress associated with such a minimal change but otherwise not unduly upset. Sure we'll lose our ability to influence and vote on EU legislation but at least we won't be out in the cold.

OTOH if we're going full nuclear, shut the borders, send the ***** home then that's a different matter.

It's disconcerting that Brexeters had no idea what they were actually voting for.
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I'd contend (as I did upthread or on the other earlier thread) that a significant proportion of Brexiters had a, shall we say, less than full understanding of the issues and the implications of voting to leave. I have no doubt that at least a significant minority of "Leave" voters were well-informed and took a reasoned decision (albeit, in my opinion, the wrong one).

And I also have no doubt that a sizeable proportion (maybe even a majority) of "Remain" voters had a less than full understanding of the issues and implications. But IMO 1) this proportion of the total "Remain" constituency was less than the proportion of under-informed in the "Leave" constituency, and 2) the implications were obviously vastly more profound in a "Leave" outcome than in a "Remain" outcome (and the "Remain" issues were easier to conceptualise and understand, since they were the prevailing situation).

So I conclude that it was, in the end, the under-informed element of the "Leave" voters who swung this referendum into an overall "Leave" majority. And that's unfortunate, to say the least - especially as evidence continues to mount that significant numbers of Brexiters now say they didn't realise what leaving really meant and implied, and/or that they didn't really think "Leave" would ever win anyhow, and/or that they now regret voting "Leave".
 
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