The thread has moved on quite a bit since the thing that I wanted to comment on, but I'm going to say it anyway.
People who say that the majority voted to leave - while that's true, do you think that everyone who voted to leave voted for the same things? I watched a lot of debates in the run up to the referendum, and I saw leave voters with very different priorities and perspectives.
I remember one person saying that he had no problem with EU immigration, but felt that EU membership restricted free movement of non-EU citizens unfairly. Someone else was quite happy to keep freedom of movement and membership in the common market, but didn't like the ECJ. Some people said they were voting leave because they didn't like the ECHR, but other leave voters insisted that leaving the EU didn't have to mean leaving the EHCR. Some people said they were voting leave so that £350bn per week could go to the NHS. These are all statements from leave voters that I remember hearing in the lead up to the referendum.
What struck me at the time is how confused the whole thing was. We were given the option of maintaining the status quo or changing it, with no information at all on what the change would look like. Yes, some people will have hated the EU so much that anything would be better than membership, but the impression that I got at the time was that most leave voters were voting for 'their' version of leave, with no guarantees that the particular issues that mattered to them would actually be part of the package. You really could have voted leave on the basis of any single principle, which may well not be part of the deal that we finally get. How is that democratic?
Personally, I don't think we should have ever had a referendum in the first place. We have a parliamentary democracy, and if this was an issue that mattered so much to the general public then we could have voted in a party that had leaving as part of their manifesto. That's how our democratic process works. As it is, we did have a referendum, with a very woolly question, and we got an answer. I don't agree with the answer, but I accept that the majority of people who voted do.
However, I don't think that means that all conversation on the issue should now stop, and I think that attempts to silence the debate are undemocratic. It's not a win/lose issue for me - we're talking about a significant change to our country that will have wide-reaching and almost definitely irreversible effects. Of course we should continue to debate it, and if it starts to look like the majority are no longer in favour or like the impact will be unreasonably damaging, then of course we should ask whether or not we should still go ahead. Not saying either of things are the case at the moment, before anyone jumps on me! 'You lost - get over it' is not helpful, and it's not democratic.
For me, given that we've now had a referendum, the ideal result would be what a PP suggested - a second referendum once the bulk of the deal has been hammered out. Once we know exactly what we're getting, in detail, we can vote to say whether we want it or not. If that means three options (leave with no deal, leave with that deal, or remain) then so be it. They could even say that remain needs to beat both leave options in order to be carried through, if people were worried about the leave vote being unfairly split. At least then people would be voting for or against something concrete and measureable. And yes - I do realise that this isn't realistic.
