Regardless of the outcome of the EUref and your position on it - Do you think Cameron was right to even call a referendum in the first place?

[AdrenalineFudge]

Just curious? I think he could have still won the election without calling a referendum on the EU. The whole issue of 'shy' tories coming out in force to elect the Conservatives as the major governing party.

That said, it was the first time a new generation would be able to decide on their future in the EU - make what you will of exit polls in that most people who will have to deal with the consequences voted to remain but do you think that the referendum was needed in the first place?

Yes of course he was right and i am very happy with the result.

No. Even if the result has turned out the way I wanted it, the whole campaign was divisive and toxic. Same with the Scottish referendum.

No. Not because people can't be trusted (though I do think this generally) but because of his reasons for doing so. I hope history will remember the lot of them as the conniving, over privileged, self serving weasel shits that they are.

No. Because what does Out mean anyway? One Leaver's idea of Brexit is different to another's.

It's not a yes/no question so it shouldn't have been decided by referendum.

His motives for calling the referendum were not in the best interests of the country. It was all about party politics. As the fall out in the last few days has shown, we weren't actually supposed to vote leave this was not meant to happen. They didn't even have a plan in place for what would happen if we did vote to leave FFS.

No, the referendum should not have happened.

We were rookie jurors trying to get to grips with a case of labyrinthine complexity at the mercy of prosecution and defence lawyers gifted in rhetoric and personally invested in a particular outcome with no presiding judge to offer independent guidance on points of fact or law.

We might as well have read tealeaves and voted according to whether there was a blobby ‘Y’ or blobby 'N' at the bottom of the cup. (And maybe some of us did!)

I don't know who was advising Cameron, but I'm not impressed.

No he didn't need to call a referendum, nor at this point in time. It has totally divided the country, I remarked that it was doing this during the run up, so my views are not coloured by the result. Whatever the outcome, half the country was going to be pissed off.

History will judge him harshly.

He inserted the referendum because polls were telling him there was a groundswell towards UKIP and the Eurosceptic wing of his party were getting restless. He was worried about winning an election.
It's turned into a very pyrrhic victory.
I said at the last election that the PLP had gone all metropolitan and internationalist and lost touch with their core vote. The people in post industrial areas aren't thinking about exploited people when they have no job, their children don't expect to work and yet they're demonised as workshy. The very people that did the donkey work that was too important for conscription.
Nobody in London was doing anything to make it better.
Ideal breeding ground for nationalism.
So Cameron shouldn't have promised it and relied on a coalition opt out.
He shouldn't have led a campaign
Labour should have seen what was obvious. I think Corbyn did but was hamstrung by Internationalism
The whole thing has been an almighty cock up from start to finish.

No. He's a sell out. Shouldn't have given into the political pressure for holding a referendum

No he shouldn't have. He called it to appease his own party because he was incapable of controlling them effectively.

The whole thing was handled badly, there should have been a referendum commission set up, for starters. There should have been more than two options, to realistically reflect the opinions of the electorate. There should have been a list of "voting to remain, however x needs reform" or "voting to leave because x of too great importance" sort of options.

No. Putting such an important question to the electorate was reckless and irresponsible.

Alis whilst I agree that a third option would have been nice the problems with that would have been:

1. With a 34% of votes potentially any option could have won. Leaving 66% dissatisfied and not crushing the Eurosceptic wing
2. The UK govt has no real way of effecting that option. Cameron said "Vote Remain to stay in a reformed EU". He had no way of delivering that.

In his commons speech of 22 Feb, Cameron said

"Then there is the legality. I want to spell out this point very carefully. If the British people vote to leave there is only one way to bring that about – and that is to trigger Article 50 of the Treaties and begin the process of exit.

And the British people would rightly expect that to start straight away."

That's true Giddy.

Really this isn't a question which should have been put to us but as it was, I cannot get over how poorly handled it was, just utterly ludicrous.

Oh yes Alis I agree. It needed a person of far more substance than Cameron to handle it.

No, it shouldn't have been put to us. And it shouldn't have been handled as shoddily as it was.

No there shouldn't be any democracy. Everyone is an idiot unless they agree with me.

We should rerun the referendum and keep doing so until we get the right result else I'll ball up my little fists, stomp my feet and consider standing in a corner if you ignore me.

In fact I'm going to continue propagandising and kidding myself that I'm not delusional for as long as it takes.

Cameron and the rest of his party are 100% at fault, they argued for it. They were worrying about losing votes to UKIP, even though they had no MP's and now just one. Cameron was worried about a challenge for 'HIS' job.

At the time UKIP was very limited to the south and if Cameron had done a bit of research instead of being in his London bubble he would have realised he could have won the GE without giving a promise for a referendum. All of this was about the Tory party, not what was best for the public. The Lib Dems and Labour were not interested in changing our relationship with the EU at all, it was hardly mentioned.

So yes Cameron and his Party are 100% to blame for the referendum taking place, whether you were glad you were given the chance to vote on it or not is another matter.

Here's something completely absurd that rarely gets mentioned. Roughly 20% of voters would have cast postal votes, meaning that they had already voted well before any of the higher profile campaigning got underway - and before the terrible death of jo cox, the awful poster, the transparent blunderings on TV of Nigel et al - and the majority of postal voters were older and statistically more predisposed to leave the uk. In other words postal voting, so early in the process, generated a built in swing towards a brexit outcome. Functionally undemocratic and flawed. Desperately inept. Terribly sad for all of us.

Like a couple of other inappropriate promises in the conservative manifesto, eg the ludicrous commitment to repeal human rights legislation, many believe the referendum promise was inserted into the manifesto to capture the ukip vote, because the conservatives didn't expect to win a majority in the 2015 election and these were bargaining chips to give away in the inevitable coalition negotiations. If ever there was a time to reconsider issues such as AV, this was it.

In a sense it also all shows the enormous risks that emerge when you have no effective party of opposition. It gave the Tories a once in a lifetime opportunity to tear themselves apart without risking their position as the party of government. To me, it shows the crucial need for balance and countervailing forces in our political settlement and shows what happens when one side gets of their end of the seesaw.

Measures designed to attack this basic balance, such as the attacks on Labour Party funding in the trade union act 2016, are a symptom of this malaise. There were a lot of constitutional alarm bells ringing in the house of lords when these measures were being debated, which turned out to be the canary in the coal mine.

The other completely crazy thing was to call a referendum and then campaign to remain in the uk on the basis that voting to leave would be an act of unimaginable economic self harm. I'm sure this is true, but to campaign on this basis having called the referendum yourself makes you look either stupendously incompetent or else an exaggerating liar. I fear a lot of voters believed the latter.

I think conservative party was legit to promise a referendum. It was in their manifesto & they were elected on the package. I don't see how DC had a choice, Tories have been divided on Europe for 20+ yrs. Vote had to happen eventually.

there was no good news about the EU.

Um, you mean like ease of travel, 60+ yrs of peace & prosperity, Erasmus, funding for our universities, ECHR, blue sky thinking, free / easy trade, freedom of movement for British workers, retirement to sunny Spain, passporting for the city, working time directive, (long list of other things)? Every time someone tried to say these were good EU things to hold onto, we got shot down. The good news was very much there; it got outshouted by negative campaigning... and total know-it-allness in reply.

"We can have pie in sky rainbows instead!" they said.

No.
Cameron did it for his own interests, to placate his party. He is vile.
He should have been neutral.
The campaign was putrid, shoddy and a farce. Mainly lies.
Boris and Farage? Yuk.

It is a very complex issue. Too hard for voters.

Remain - we can only change if we are still in - that's not true. We can't change anything. The EU has morphed into this uncontrollable thing, not what it was designed for. Junker and the rest want more unity and are uncompromising on negotiating. Why would we want to stay?
But leave? Really. It's good business for us to stay.

Leaving or staying isn't a good option for us. It's a no win situation. I neither wanted to leave, nor stay.
Where does that leave us. In a right mess, is the answer to that!!
And funnily enough, that's exactly where we now are!!

He should have had the gumption not to have it on the manifesto before the GE.