Tuesday 23 April 2019

The People's Vote - why don't they just do it?

UKIP were, by and large, always a single issue party; leave the EU or at least have another referendum on the topic.

For many years, there was no referendum on leaving the EU on offer, so people settled for the next best thing, i.e. voting UKIP in the otherwise meaningless MEP elections every five years. The message finally sank in and David Cameron's UK government held a referendum in 2016.

Cameron was no doubt buoyed by the effectiveness of massive government-funded Project Fear campaigns in two previous referenda (on shifting towards PR and Scottish independence) and made the reasonable assumption that this trick would work a third time and get him ('Them') the result he ('They') wanted. 'They' pushed it far beyond the point of credibility and got 17 million fuck offs instead.

A small but vocal minority of Remain voters (and the vast corporatist interests which support them) is not happy with this outcome, so they want to re-run the referendum. Fair enough, they are just adopting the same tactic as UKIP/UKIP voters used to do, it's all part of the fun.

They also accuse Leave campaigners of running scared of a second referendum which might be true to some extent, now that the UK government has quite deliberately messed up Brexit and made it appear nigh impossible.

But are the hard-core Brexiteers really scared of a second referendum? At least they've had the nerve to treat the MEP elections as a quasi-second referendum by setting up the single-issue Brexit Party (they genuinely have no policies whatsoever, see their website) and are fielding candidates.

The hard-core Remainers have missed the deadlines now, so we'll never find out, but if they were really sure that there was majority support for Remain, why didn't they just set up the single-issue Remain Party and field candidates against the Brexit Party? That looks like a fair fight to me and the outcome would have been most interesting.

4 comments:

ThomasBHall said...

The CUKs should have called themselves the Remain Party- instead of Change UK: The Independent Group (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it!)

In reality- the CUKs are the Remain Party.

I am "scared" of Ref2, as not only would it show that democracy is optional for our ruling class, but because Leave wouldn't be on it- rather, it would be Remain vs. Leave with May's "Deal".



Mark Wadsworth said...

TBH, true dat.

Lola said...

TBH. Yup. Massive stitch up warning

Bayard said...

"I am "scared" of Ref2, as not only would it show that democracy is optional for our ruling class"

Democracy is optional for our ruling class, so is showing it such a bad thing?