The blame for Brexit. Its not those who voted to leave.

[RBeer]

Something has been puzzling me for a while and i have yet to read it anywhere.

I know people who voted for the referendum by voting Tory , voted to remain and yet blame the brexit on those who voted leave.

Surely the blame should be squared directed at those who elected that King of Spades, Cameron, into government.

You cant blame the child for shooting himself in the face if it was you who handed him the gun.

The ballot paper had two choices....so, we kinda did know what we voted for.

Vote abstainers are assumed to agree with the will of the voters, so, they 'voted' leave by their lack of voting.

Or the abstainers were indifferent, so happy with the status quo?

But which of the Leave options were people voting for? You know, the ones you needed to turn the paper over for and read the invisible ink.

Leavers didn't know what they were voting for, they knew what they were voting against, but even looking at my list above it could have been a vote against Westminster, or a racist vote etc. etc..

Exactly! They knew what they were voting against, and even though the alternative was vague they still wanted it! The EU shouldn't have been so easy to hate, and it might have kept us.

I disagree that abstainers agree to go with the result of the vote, I'm involved with a small local charity, when we wanted to change our legal set up we had to get a clear vote in favour from all stakeholders, this is quite usual. An abstention is a complete lack of information and you cannot take it as an instruction to go ahead with change. So leave won the popular vote, but not by nearly enough to mandate leaving the EU, it is not clear at all that this is what the majority of people in the UK want.

The turn out for the referendum was higher than many elections. If people cannot be arsed to vote then they have no excuse to complain if they don't like the result of an election. A country is never going to make a unanimous decision when there is an electorate of 40 million.

www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/the-brexit-hangover-just-got-worse

From RBeer's link

an operation that will likely be worse than amputation without anesthetic.
Painful.

I wonder if it will be a case of "Operation a success, but the patient died."?

The thing that I find strangest about the entire thing is all these voters coming out this time to vote, who haven't voted previously, but complain that their voices aren't heard. The sad thing is, that what they voted for they are unlikely to get and mainly because when it comes to a GE they won't vote.

To be fair, people in Sunderland used, in the past, to turn out in droves to vote Labour. But it's the Tory voters in the south who put Cameron in, so no amount of getting more voters out in the north east will change things for them.

Labour does need to wake up there and challenge Farage/UKIp, and his racist, bigotted lies. To make it clear that he can offer them nothing.

It's very odd that this particular vote was chosen as the protest.

If we'd had more protest votes at the previous election, the Tories could have been voted out.

Not that I'm arguing for Ed Miliband as PM, far from it, although ironically he would probably have done less damage to the economy.

It's very odd that this particular vote was chosen as the protest.

Why?

If we'd had more protest votes at the previous election, the Tories could have been voted out.

I doubt it. What kept them in was a split vote in combination with FPTP.

FPTP is probably contributing more to various problems than we realise. Presumably you would include Brexit in that category.

Because the obvious vote to protest against being overlooked by the government is a GE.

Because the deprived areas who voted in protest have shot themselves in the foot by voting in the furthest right cabinet since Thatcher. Against workers' rights, against EU (and indeed global) financial investment, potentially against their own jobs, and certainly for futher public spending cuts in an uncertain and probably recession-headed economy.

What kept them in was a lousy Labour leader - Ed Miliband, and an uncertain Labour party.

Plus a weakened LibDem party who posed little effective opposition in the coalition.

I don't envy our transatlantic cousins much; but I do see their boundless optimism and wish (in that sense) we could be more like them

Oh why can't a woman be more like a man?

In this case because the US is the world's largest economy.

I think too, there was the feeling that Cameron would pull the Remain vote off, in the way that he surprised himself by winning the last election, so those who were dissatisfied with him could take a punt on a Leave vote to tell him they were dissatisfied with his austerity policies.

Scottish nationalism isn't really Ed's fault, for a start. And Labour's long regrouping phase isn't so surprising after the long Blair/Brown reign.

I think Cameron thought he'd pull it off too. In the same way he pulled off a first with a mediocre mind, and election to PM with no political vision.

I don't think a referendum was inevitable by any means. It was his choice.

The blame lies squarely his hubris and his shallow PR gesture politics.

And yet there were enough non-Tory votes at the previous election for a hung Parliament.

Labour made a big mistake not replacing Brown before the 2010 election. Then compounding the problem of Miliband being elected leader, by not replacing him in time for the 2015 election.

Brown and Miliband were box office poison. Although neither can compete with Corbyn for the title of poison king.

Sure, but I think SNP's rise was partly due to the collapse of Labour with credit due to Sturgeon's strength as a leader.