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Tomorrow the People go forth If you find yourself in London tomorrow, you can go on the March for a People’s Vote.
On the 23rd of June, we will march to Parliament Square to demand a vote on the final Brexit deal. Join us, for this historic event!
Remember this is the march for a People‘s Vote. The last one didn’t have enough proper people taking part.
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First link is very broken 🙁
Thanks for pointing that out, Mr Testicle. It’s fixed now. Phew, I’d have hated for People to miss it due to my bad html.
Não há problema. It’s a bit far for me to come to pis on their parade anyway, I’m in Brazil 😆
Presumably the whole ‘People’s Vote’ thing is organised and promoted by the exact same people who have spent the last two years whining that the ‘People’ are too thick, bigoted and uneducated to be trusted with the vote* and that the Things That Really Matter should be decided for them by their utterly-non-self-interested betters like it’s 1818 instead of 2018?
So, no cognitive dissonance going on there, then?
*(Except of course in the ordinary Conservative-vs-Labour elections which effectively only amount to giving the Oysters a choice between the Walrus or the Carpenter)
So … you guys aren’t actually going to get Brexit from your government, are you? What’s next after they find an excuse to back out?
We found a new Party Mad…
I have been thinking hard of a name for it. Anything with British in it is bound to get trashed before you could send out a manifesto, so I think I have cracked it. How about the…
17.4 Party?
The people at Democracy17.4 might be a little put out . . .
Well well! Never heard of them before bobby b. Best of luck to them then. And the fact that I’ve never heard of them is perhaps they lack funding? No Soros type funding behind them then? 😉
The Imperial Party. Because we suport feet and inches, pints and gallons and pounds and ounces.
Erm… Have you any idea what the SJW’s would do to a party with Imperial in its name? Or perhaps you are being ironic.
RAB wrote: “We found a new Party Mad… ”
How about the Curved Banana Party? That would get straight to the point.
Or the Wine Lake Lido Party, or the Butter Mountain Alpine Adventurist Party?
It’s funny how they say there needs to be a new vote because new information has come to light. From what I can see, every time Junker opens his mouth he confirms the wisdom of Brexit.
RAB
Hi, long time no speak. Yes, I’m being ironic. I wanted to make the point that if you let your enemies choose your name you’ve already lost, so go for broke.
It sounds very dull. Give it a more European name, like ‘Volksabstimmung’, or if the march gets excited, ‘Volkssturm‘.
Is it a re-run of the March on Rome, or is that sort of thing out of fashion?
The independence of this country (independence not “Brexit” – a made up media word) should not be subject to any “deal”. We voted to leave the European Union more than two years ago – and we should be independent, right now.
We should certainly NOT send the European Union another 40 Billion Pounds (as the “Remainer” Prime Minister plans to do), and we should NOT incorporate European Union regulations into British law (as the “Remainer” Prime Minister also supports) – still less continue to accept NEW European Union regulations, such as the European Union plans to crush what little is left of Freedom of Speech.
As for the people on the march today – they are enemies of freedom, enemies of the basic principle that the people of this land should decide their own taxes, government spending and laws.
The Fish Faced Cow has failed to wreck Brexit so far. Now the treachery remains in her “deal” bullshit. Even tho’ the UK slimestate has done buggerall about no deal lots of private firms etc are preparing so let it be no deal and we save our money.
As for the peoples wank–sorry– march. Well the Plod-scum had no problem clubbing the Countryside Alliance a few years back so clubbing today’s womiccumalobus shower should be no problem.
The second anniversary of the vote deserves some fireworks tho’. How about warming up this crowd of leftists with a barrage of the largest number of rubber bullets ever fired in one volley.
How about the Darling I’m leaving EU, don’t try to stop me party.
Pro-EU people did all they could to stop the people getting a vote on membership and now they can’t get enough of them.
They want as many ‘meaningful’ votes as it takes to render the 2016 people’s vote meaningless.
We found a new Party Mad… I have been thinking hard of a name for it.
The WWJRMD* Party.
Moggie laid out his vision of a post-Brexit Britain in a speech at Speaker’s House. BrexitCentral has the text here. Long, but well worth the effort.
Moggie is right. About everything. Always. I have such a man-crush on the chap. LOL
* What Would Jacob Rees-Mogg Do
The People’s Vote?
Would that be like the People’s Republic (any of them)?
Or “The People’s Convention for a People’s Peace” that demanded Britain make peace with Hitler in early 1941?
Some earlier comments discuss words we should avoid but the left never think to avoid the word “People’s”. I guess they are confident the memory hole is deep enough or their rewriting of history loud enough. (I also guess it’s the People-who-Matter’s Vote. 🙂 )
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For your amusement, I include some historical reflections:
I said in a old comment what a loss it was to comedy that the notorious R. Palme Dutt’s book “The People’s Convention for a People’s Peace” was not quite through its publication process when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Its drafts were hastily pulped and he instead rushed out a hastily-written book demanding that Britain prosecute the war more fiercely.
However since then I’ve discovered that in 1941 ‘The Workers Library Publishers’ in New York did manage to publish “The women want a people’s peace” by Dolores Ibárruri – known as ‘La Pasionaria’ from her days in republican Spain when she was a passionate (but not compassionate!) purger of any who deviated from Stalin’s line. I also gather that ‘Imperialism or People’s Peace?’ was published by the American Students Union on the astonishingly appropriate day of April 1st 1941.
I wonder if any of the Workers Library Publishers were among the three communists whom a friend of Robert Conquest’s met in central New York earlyish in the morning of Sunday, 22 June 1941. He asked them what they would think if Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. They replied that the idea was a typical propaganda provocation of western capitalism. He then showed them his morning paper.
Maybe this is the wrong time or place to say this — but I have concerns about societies making big long-term decisions based on narrow democratic majorities.
Whether it was Brexit, or Catalonian independence, or Scottish independence — the popular vote in each case was pretty close, 52/48 or something like that — deeply divided societies. The only clear democratic majority for a major change in recent years was when the people of Crimea voted for close association with Russia (a vote which of course has been ignored by all the right people).
When the voting margin is small, the side which narrowly won the vote generally takes Erdogan’s view of democracy — you get to the station, and then you get off; African democracy — one man, one vote, one time. On the other hand, the side which narrowly lost the vote is of course in favor of the EU tactic of vote and vote again, until we get the right outcome; then switch to the Erdogan view.
It would be much better if Large Changes were supported by Large Majorities.
Looking at the Brexit situation from abroad — if the effort is to be successful (not just in leaving the EU but also in creating a successful aftermath), it does seem that there needs to be a lot more of an effort to win hearts & minds and build an unstoppable majority.
the popular vote in each case was pretty close, 52/48 or something like that
Seeing as most people default to the status quo, this was actually a significant achievement, and belies the narrow margin, most people reject change, but for more people to want to change than not is far bigger impact than just any other vote.
It would be much better if Large Changes were supported by Large Majorities.
I don’t recall voting for the “large change” that sold off our democratic law making wholesale to unaccountable foreigners in the first place, must have missed that one.
Perhaps if there’d been a political party that gave us an alternative, and they won a GE, do you think that would be enough? Just think about the rise of UKIP and how that forced Cameron the Coward to relent to a referendum in the first place, don’t you think that was democratic, how do you think he got a majority vote?
For a huge amount of people his was a long a painful march, not just a one-off jamboree that everyone regrets the morning after.
This is a wake up call for democracy in this country, there is a seething mass of people who are just about fed up with being nannied about, and at some point one party or another is going to announce they’ve had enough of this sh*t and they’ll ride a wave of populism into government, just like what is happening elsewhere. Hopefully the British version wont be so moronic or fascist as the European flavors we’ve seen so far.
The older leavers know it’s going to be all right, because we knew what it was like before, and years from now when the rest of Europe inevitably sinks into a cesspit of bureaucracy and economic chaos of it’s own making, you’ll be thinking “thank f*ck we’re not part of that”.
We’ll probably have to save it all over again, again.
Interesting stuff, Niall. Ibárruri would be the woman of whom there’s a statue on the Broomielaw in Glasgow, right? I knew it was something dodgy connected to the Spanish commies, but I never realised just what a nasty piece of work she actually was. Apparently the Basque section of the Partido Populaire requested that a street named after her in Bilbao be renamed, because of her “terrible” role in the civil war. (Fortunately the statue isn’t easy to find unless you’re looking for it.)
And Gavin, I couldn’t agree more. When I was on a stall for the 2014 “No” campaign in Sauchiehall Street, I remember talking to an American tourist. (It was late summer, and a surprising number of foreign visitors were interested in what was going on.) We were quite some way in to the conversation before I could see a realisation dawned on him. “Wait… it’s a simple majority? If 51% vote ‘Yes’, that’s it?”
“50% plus one vote, actually.”
He’d been quite animated up to that point, but he stopped for a moment to take it in.
“Wow. That’s crazy. We need a two-thirds majority in the Senate for a constituional amendment.”
I knew that already. And it is. How on earth anyone expects to govern a new state that only half of the population (actually less than half, considering turnout) actively endorses beats the hell out of me.
But it’s Scottish Nationalist moaning that has brought us this state of affairs. They whined for years about being “cheated” out of an Assembly in 1979 because there was a threshold requirement (a surprisingly modest 40% of the total electorate – still not nearly enough, in my opinion), which wasn’t met. The result was 51% or so, on a turnout of 64%.
So when the devolution referendums were held again in 1997, that evil Red Tory Tony Blair, who hates Scotland and never gave us anything, made sure they were on a simple majority. And set a precedent.
If a threshold of 50% of the electorate, 66.6% of those who voted, or whatever, had been in place in 2016, we would probably not be leaving the EU. (Of course, different rules change the way the game is played. Knowing that the hill it had to climb was steeper, the campaign would likely have concentrated harder on getting the vote out. Unlike the Nats up here, throwing every principle they ever held under the bus in a frantic attempt to be all things to all men, I firmly believe that a majority of the electorate, or very near it, already agrees with me.) That would have been frustrating, but at least the decision would have been clear. I certainly wouldn’t claim to have been “cheated”; it’s right that major decisions aren’t taken lightly.
We need something like they have in Canada – I think it’s in the 1982 Constitution Act – which sets out, once and for all, the rules governing referendums. That doesn’t mean we have to have one every ten minutes, but we need a set of rules that says, “This is how we do this”.
Sam D,
Re thresholds, the 2014 and 2016 referendums were seeking to ask if the status quo ante should be restored, be it 1707 or 1972 (with entry in ‘73), so a simple majority seems fine to me.
What amazed me about 2014 was that I heard, and could find, nothing at all about Scots losing British citizenship, which surely ought to have followed a ‘Yes’ vote.
Long-term decisions are being made for Europeans without democratic majorities all the time, so it’s hard to see why a decision with a majority should be a concern.
For those of us from the north Pacific basin, “Pele” is the Hawaiian goddess of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes. Imagine my confusion when pondering her endowment with a right testicle.
As for the marchers, how many times do they have to make you vote before you finally get it “right”?
Runcie: “I don’t recall voting for the “large change” that sold off our democratic law making wholesale to unaccountable foreigners in the first place ..”
That is exactly the concern about Large Changes made without overwhelming support from the population.
UK’s entry into the EU was made without winning the hearts & minds of a large majority of the UK population. It took a long time for the discontent to bubble up, but now we have Brexit because of that lack of widespread support for Large Change in the first place.
But since Brexit itself is a knife-edge balanced vote, it is easy to predict that there will later be a backlash against it — which may make life in post-Brexit UK unpleasant in unpredictable ways. Think of Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. That is why, to an outside observer, it looks like the pro-Brexit side should be working much harder to sway the hearts & minds of their currently unwilling co-venturers.
It took a long time for the discontent to bubble up
The point is it wasn’t actually just the one vote itself, the slow and steady rise of UKIP above its unpopular origins, and finally the adoption of a referendum policy that won the Conservatives an outright majority, and all this against a tide of establishment strategy to keep the “Euro-skeptics” out of government and parliament, I even recall this “division” during the Thatcher and Major eras, that’s why we’ve ended up with a majority Remain in government and a majority Leave outside of it, it’s an engineered situation that needs urgent correction.
This is not “a house divided”, it is the bloodymindedness of a large proportion of our elected representatives who refuse to do the people’s will, that is what needs to change, not some f*cking convoluted PR stunt to convince anyone else.
The hearts and minds have already been won, most people now want them to get on with it and leave, probably because they know there’d be riots if they don’t.
Runcie — if the hearts & minds of an overwhelming majority have already been won by the Brexit side, then by all means allow the people to have a final vote on Brexit – and show 70-80% in favor of leaving the EU!
Doing that would eliminate all sorts of future trouble with a house divided. Face it — in reality, nearly half your countrymen voted to stay in the EU. Anything that goes wrong post-Brexit (and this is the real world — of course there will be things which go wrong) will be portrayed by the EU supporters as being due to Brexit — and reason for rejoining the EU. Hence it would be very desirable to change the minds of that nearly half of the country now — not just steam-roller them with a close-run one-time victory.
It is understandable that, having won a narrow victory, the Brexit side does not want to risk another election with maybe a different result. But in principle that is no different from the EU practice of repeated voting until the desired outcome is obtained.
Looking at UK politics from the outside, one of the interesting things about the Brexit vote was the age-related differences. If exit polls are to be believed, the young tended to support the EU while the old tended to support independence. The problem is that older voters leave the rolls every year, eroding that narrow majority in favor of leaving. To an outsider, it seems clear that the Brexit side ought now to be engaging in a major effort to convince younger voters of the benefits of being outside the EU — not clinging tightly to a narrow victory and declaring all discussion over.
Gavin Longmuir (June 24, 2018 at 7:30 pm), your argument seems confused. Not holding another vote is not
but exactly the opposite of that policy. Were the EU’s fans to hold a second vote in the hope of an outcome they preferred, that would be the EU’s “heads europhiles win, tails eurosceptics lose” approach.
and younger voters grow into older (and hopefully wiser) voters every year. After losing their referendum, the natz hoped those who voted against them would die off, but so far the opposite process is more noticeable in such polling and election data as we have.
The whole point of having a vote was to decide the matter one way or another, since the house was somewhat divided.
‘Sauce for the goose’ is a good argument. The idea that the europhiles, if they had won as narrowly as 50% plus one vote, would have allowed another vote two years later, is risible.
Nial K: “… not holding another vote is … exactly the opposite of that [EU] policy.”
Not really. There are obvious parallels between the EU approach of multiple votes until the right outcome is achieved and then allowing no further votes, and the Brexit approach of thankfully getting the right outcome the first time and then allowing no further votes.
In both cases, the proponents want to follow Erdogan’s approach of using the cover of democracy until they get the desired outcome and then stopping further voting. But I say that as an outside observer with no skin in this game, simply looking at matters logically.
And being logical about it, if there has been a massive change of heart among the people who voted to stay in the EU, then allowing the people to demonstrate that to the world with an 80% vote in favor of UK independence would be an ideal way of bringing your somewhat dysfunctional Political Class into line.
If the people are now really on your side, then there is nothing to be afraid of in holding further votes.
Gavin, they haven’t enacted the first vote yet. Allowing a second before enacting the first would be using a “cover of democracy” for nefarious purposes rather than its opposite.
Enact brexit, let it steep for a while. If the remainers are still whining, then we can talk about a second vote. Until then they can bugger off.
Mr. Longmuir is undoubtedly correct, to the extent to which he speaks. “Democracy” means more than which viewpoint won in the last vote. More exactly, it means what each and every person is thinking right now, and on each and every day. A formal voting structure is simply a workable way to survey everyone’s views.
If y’all could wear mood rings that showed your present feelings towards Brexit, you could gauge the current demos‘s stance on it by checking the hue emanating from society at any chosen time, but that’s not possible. So, instead, at specifically denominated times, everyone casts a ballot reflecting their stance at that moment.
Mr. Kilmartin is also undoubtedly correct, to the extent to which he speaks. Partisans of every stripe will always try to game whatever system we settle upon to determine what the people want, and so we have to agree on a specific and detailed rule set about surveying the people’s desires. We seem to have settled on the one-time survey of ballots instead of some mood-ring alternative, and so we need to accept the results of those surveys when they are performed.
Jaded: “Enact Brexit” — Enact what?
From a foreign perspective, one of the most cogent criticisms of the Scottish independence referendum was that significant issues had not been thought through, such as currency and Spain’s stated opposition to allowing newly-independent European nations to join the EU. When the topic switched to a referendum on UK independence from the EU, foreigners could be forgiven for having higher expectations: now real London professional politicians would show us how these things should be done.
Instead, it turns out that the situation with Brexit was just as bad, with multiple open issues. The Irish border question is only the most obvious issue, probably not the most important. Your UK Political Class seems to be just as worthless as our US Political Class
From a democratic perspective, there would be nothing odd about treating the 52/48 Brexit vote as a directive to the Political Class to strike a deal, and then holding a second vote on the acceptability of the final deal the politicians were able to cut. Especially if that second vote was overwhelmingly in favor of UK independence, it would prevent any future back-sliding. Since the view is that Brexit is increasingly popular, what are you afraid of? Demonstrating that big majority in favor of change would be an excellent foundation for a newly independent UK.
Gavin, I’m not sure if this is intended, but you’re coming across as a Concern Troll. If that’s not your intent, I apologise. If that is your intent, I’m not biting.
The UK voted to leave the EU. We’ve not left yet. Issues, complications and political vacillations are neither here nor there. Until we leave there is nothing further to discuss. You don’t get to keep voting till you get the result you want. You vote, act on that vote, then you can talk about voting again. Not before.
Or should Trump voters with buyers remorse in November get a second vote in December before he’s even taken office?
By the rules, they won. That doesn’t mean “on a technicality.” They were the rules agreed upon by everyone before the vote. “Open issues”, in this situation, usually means “damn, we should have argued A instead of B and C.”
Jaded — you are certainly at liberty to accuse anyone of being a troll, but it would be more productive to address the issue: In a democracy, does it make sense for big issues (maybe irreversible issues) to be decided by narrow majorities? You are not addressing that issue.
Back in the days when the Political Class in the US generally tried to follow the Constitution, they faced the big issue of whether alcohol should be banned. It took a Constitutional Amendment, with effective supermajorities, to accomplish that. Then when the people decided that was a mistake, it took another Constitutional Amendment (another supermajority) to reverse the earlier decision.
Personal view — that is the right approach for a society making major decisions; it avoids the tyranny of the narrow majority. Your view may differ.
Gavin.
I’m calling you out as a troll. I have suspected it since your Curved Banana’s party post and you have merely added to it since.
What has the tyranny of the narrow majority got to do with our being taken in to the European Union with no vote whatsoever? We, the Demos of the UK, were told that it was a mere economic arrangement, The Common Market. No loss of sovereignty whatsoever! It was a lie and our politicians of whatever affiliation knew it. We are now serfs of a Franco- German axis, used as a milch cow for their grand designs of a new Roman Empire and despised for our decision to leave their utopian fantasy and return to our own sovereignty. So we must be punished!
We may make the wrong decisions, but they will be ours and ours alone, not passed down to us from on high by bureaucrats in Brussels, with no hope of arguing against or for…
iDave.com allowed us a Referendum on being in or out of the EU, because he was sure that he would win for staying in and kick the question into the long grass for all time. In his arrogance that all the media, especially the BBC was behind him, with Project Fear at full strength, he didn’t even fiddle the postal vote like I expected him to, and he lost. He is out there now in the wilderness like his hero Blair, stacking hay in the barn of his own self interest. He and Blair never had the interests of this country in mind for a second, just their own and their fellow self elected elites.
So let us, the Demos, decide something for ourselves for a change without the “we know better brigade” sticking their oar in. We have survived far worse in our history.
Except for his idea that holding a single vote and then following it is somehow the same as holding one vote if the EU likes the outcome and two if they do not, Mr Longmuir is merely reproducing the standard PC elitist spiel. “Significant issues had not been thought through” is their way of expressing contempt for voters who did not think about those issues till they reached the elite’s conclusions (a sort of internalised variant of ‘vote till you get the right answer’). So, responding to the suspicions of JadedLibertarian on June 24, 2018 at 11:01 pm and RAB on June 25, 2018 at 2:09 am, one may argue that an elitist is not exactly a troll, irritating though the illogical arguments of either may be.
I also note that even a troll may help one elucidate a point. There have been two EU referenda:
– one (after we joined) which voted to stay in, held on 5th June 1975;
– one, which voted to leave, held on 23 June 2016, some 41 years later.
It is therefore clear that a period of 40 years or more may elapse between referenda on this subject. That seems sensible on Gavin’s own reasoning. After 40 years, we had much more experience of being in the EU than we did in 1976. 40 years hence, we will have four decades experience of being outside the EU (and aged voters will have a roughly equal experience of both situations). In 40 years, we will know much about the EU that we do not know now – whether it still exists, for example.
This fresh knowledge may eliminate any need for a referendum – or may mean a third UK referendum would make political sense, in which case it would (other things being equal) appear legitimate.
I hope to be still here in June 2057 and able to totter along to the polling booth if needed. I hope it will not be necessary, but if Mr Longmuir is prepared to be satisfied with this well-precedented theory of when any third vote should occur then I’m happy to grant the point.
RAB, Niall — so disappointed in you. It is so much easier to call someone a troll than to address the issue. But that is your choice — so be it.
Sometimes an outsider’s view is completely off point; sometimes, an outsider can help us see the forest for the trees. There is something that it might be useful to recognize — it was your own British Parliament which dragged you into the EU; it is your own elected British politicians who are dragging their feet on getting you out of the EU. And unless something serious happens, that kind of political animal is still going to be intruding into your lives after the separation.
I doubt that you want out of the EU so that you can still have a society where a man who defends himself from a burglar goes to jail, or where rescue services leave a man who has collapsed into a duck pond floating there until the appropriately certificated individual shows up to wade into the pond and pull him out. But that fault is in yourselves (and the politicians you elect), not in your stars … or even in the EU. To get the kind of society you want, you need to get the bulk of your fellow citizens onto your side. Good luck with that. Sincerely!
Gavin Longmuir (June 25, 2018 at 3:28 pm), if you had read my post with any attention, you would have seen that I was offering some reasons to question Jaded’s speculation and RAB’s statement that you were a troll. (They may of course be right and I wrong.) If you really want to diminish their suspicions, try answering the question I asked.
In answer to yours, use of the EU to justify the things you complain of is notorious. A description is in this Dominic Cummings article. We know only too well on this blog that removing EU obstacles to fixing them does not mean we will. But we are also well aware how intimately the forces that would prevent us fixing any of it overlap those that would love a second vote.