Does anyone still think the referendum was a good idea?

[whydidhesaythat]

Just checking.

It was a terrible idea, done to appease the right of a right wing party and not at all for the electorate.
There are plenty of issues that MPs vote on on our behalf that are too complex to be understood by us all in detail - I don't think that's patronising. It should never have been called and we are digging ourselves deeper into a hole that we'll likely never get out of.

I always felt it was a terrible idea and would agree that the issue is just too complex for the general public. I don't care who likes or dislikes that statement.

It is done now and the result is disaster. I hope that Article 50 will never be invoked.

Yes.
Absolutely.

Yes
still v. happy
still wish juncker would be sacked and commission disbanded for the sake of the rest of eu. Get rid of euro army and free movement (let it be managed) and i would go back in.

JudyCoolibar Wed 06-Jul-16 00:07:34
Oh FFS - www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/wales-has-changed-its-mind-over-brexit-and-would-now-vote-to-stay-in-the-eu-poll-finds-a7120246.html
Rubbish, pollsters got it wrong because there was a surge in voters who hadn't voted in decades who also don't respond to pollsters.
Again - don't respond to pollsters geddit?

The ideas were too complex for a binary choice.

"The ideas were too complex for a binary choice"

I think this sums it up perfectly. It forced people into a binary mindset, and the discussion became-and remains- hopelessly polarized.

No

Yes, I believe it was right to give the people a day. Politics is rotten when cross party agreements are struck among a few senior politicians, closing the electorate out of a debate.

In 1973, when we had the referendum on the ecsc, my parents' generation was promised a referendum if the community changed significantly from a free trade area. It clearly has done so.

The failure of successive politicians to seriously debate the deepening and broadening of Europe through Nice, the European constitution and Lisbon allowed the formation of the single issue party UKIP. This, in turn, pressured the toried into promising this referendum.

We do live in a representative democracy. The public have spoken and now the politicians can negotiate with the EC with a clear mandate. I have no idea what the final solution will look like but I suspect that it will be better than where we were before.

It is not surprising, though, that in a culture where investors force companies to give quarterly updates, that the short term may be rocky. However that is an excuse to never rock the boat, never have political stand offs, never go to war etc...

Sometimes we need to think longer term and take a short term knock.

"We do live in a representative democracy. The public have spoken and now the politicians can negotiate with the EC with a clear mandate"

This referendum -indeed any referendum- is actually incompatible with a representative democracy.

No it was only to keep ukip at bay for Cameron never done for the will of the country.

I do believe we will now be totally fucked over by the EU (and rightly so)

I feel really sad the people see free movement as a bad thing.

Wèll said, Officially.

The very idea that the English have been allowed to vote for a new hard border for Ireland while the Irish had no say in the matter is the opposite of any kind of legitimate democracy.

This referendum was a disgrace.

Not at all.

The representatives decided to ask the people their opinion. It is not legally binding. It is not undermining the sovereignty of parliament,

Also, direct democracy has its place in constitutional issues.

It is not legally binding. It is not undermining the sovereignty of parliament,

No but it would now be difficult for parliament to vote against it, because of the way in which it was promised and set up.

I was quite taken aback when a very good friend was very stressed about which way to vote and said she didn't feel intelligent enough to be asked to make this decision. She is intelligent, just didn't have much academic success at school and therefore says she is 'thick' which she absolutely isn't .

Now it's done I think she identified the issue of it being too complex a decision just in different words and she was right.

I don't usually find myself agreeing with you larrygrylls but I agree here with much of what you say.

One of our problems is that we are not a country like, say Switzerland, where Referenda (Referendums?)are the normal way of conducting political business, so we haven't honed the rules, as we have done with parliamentary votes. To my knowledge we have only had two others: the first the 1975 EEC referendum and the one in the last Government about PR.

But the idea of 'we live in a democracy, the people have spoken' etc. could come back to bite a lot of politicians on the bum. Yesterday, the junior doctors overwhelmingly voted to reject the proposed new agreement by 58% to 42% on a 68% turnout. It didn't stop Jeremy Hunt bleating that only 40% of junior doctors had voted to reject the contract. Yet, their rejection was far greater than the Brexit vote.

No. It was always a terrible idea to put something so complex to a referendum.

Definitely not a good idea. Many who voted did so for the wrong reasons. Most who voted didn't understand the complexity of the possible outcomes.

Most who voted didn't understand the complexity of the possible outcomes.

Nor it seems, did a good many politicians, for whom decisions on running the country are their day job!

What I find bizarre is that Cameron was very clear back at least since January 2013 that he would be bringing an in/out referendum. People have had 3 years to investigate what this might mean, the Scottish Indyref and the last general election were held with this having been public knowledge and yet the view seems to be that this was bounced on us all with no prior notice.

Everyone, including Cameron, thought he was bluffing.

crumpet - because the campaigns didn't start until 10 weeks before the vote - that is ridiculous. Before then, there was no attempt at all to engage with the voters - and actually not a huge amount afterwards. In IndyRef, the campaigns formally started 18 months before the vote and 'Scotland's Future' - a document hundreds of pages long full of precise details about how things would be done after an indy vote and exactly what we were voting for - was published 10 months before the vote, and examined in minute detail by the media and across the country. We were prepared for the vote in Scotland. We really weren't for this one.

medium.com/@kirstymhall/brexit-was-a-con-67532113a7c#.epkc2whzg

In part though, wasn't it that politicians conveniently ditch parts of their manifesto, and in the case of the current government (and maybe previous ones), try to introduce things which weren't in their manifesto?

Cameron didn't think he could lose. He thought he would just shut the euro-sceptics in his party up.

He didn't bank on a multi-million pound campaign, funded by the likes of Dominic Cummings & Arron Banks - making all sorts of untrue claims and promises, like the £350m to the NHS, and he didn't bank on his best mates turning against him.

Read how much the ec publicity budget is. Don't you find it concerning how little they try to engage with their citizens?