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Exclusive: Majority Of Voters Want Next Government To Take UK Back Into European Union
(www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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David Cameron may have gambled on the referendum but he still only had one vote in it. The citizens of the UK as a whole own the results. Also, as I recall, there were two elections after the referendum in which UK citizens doubled-down on Brexit by returning the Conservatives to government with landslide victories.
Also, anti-EU sentiment is one thing and may be common in various EU countries from time to time. However, voting for separation is quite another.
In any case, with such sustained support for the Tories post-referendum, it's hard to lay the blame for Brexit at anyone's feet except the UK citizenry itself.
Nobody else voted for it because nobody else had the chance to.
My whole point is that it's extremely likely other countries that also experienced a wave of anti-EU sentiment would've voted the same way, had they been given the chance.
I don't know why you'd think that the UK is unique in its anti-EU streak. It was huge in a handful of places at the time.
While I see your point, I feel like this doesn't take into account how our voting system can give a party a large majority even if less than half the population votes for them. Just over half the population voted for parties that weren't pro-hard Brexit, yes the Tories got 56% of the seats on just 42% of the vote. That kind of discrepancy means it's hard to infer the will of the people based on the composition of the Commons.
There is a pervasive idea on the internet that the popular vote is the "real" vote, compared to constituency-based voting. I don't find that to be a helpful attitude, especially when applied selectively. We live in a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. The House of Commons is a constituent assembly, which is a valid and reasonable form of democratic representation. The election system could be changed to better reflect the popular vote, but the popular vote is not automatically more valid than the constituency-based system. There are pros and cons to both, with constiuency-based voting typically giving somewhat more weight to under-populated areas.
The fact is that the UK voted for Brexit, directly and indirectly, multiple times and in multiple ways using its long-established voting system. There is no way to escape responsibility. Indeed, being a democracy, the citizens of the UK are ALSO responsible for their own voting system.
I'm not saying the popular vote is more valid than the constituency-based system. I'm saying there's more nuance to the situation than "the population wanted Brexit because the Tories got a majority", which is what I thought you were sayin here:
I can't deny the last sentence, but using the election as evidence makes it sound like over half of the country wanted the Conservatives in power, which is demonstrably untrue, that's the only thing I'm arguing against.