Brexit

Felt for a long time now democracy doesn't work. The people are stupid and don't deserve a vote. Don't get me wrong I would have fought for my vote and one hundred years ago I would have fought for female suffrage. I thought it great when black South Africans were able to vote, when France ousted the Nazi's in 1945, when Germany unified in 1989 and the wall came down etc etc etc.

But mature democracies don't work. Give me a dictatorship anyday

I'm not sure how well playwrights on Twitter have handled it.

Politicians and Newspapers lie?

As you say about that £350m figure and what Kathryn so eloquently said earlier in this thread, it is a  where confirmation bias becomes overwhelming.

Looking at the news, it certainly is the day of the long knives.

But that information isnt readily available to everyone, as usual people are assuming the internet is the answer. I think thats also part of the reason the majority of exit votes were from the older generations who dont use the internet as much, or at all

For every bit of information given there was a counter argument and then facts get lost in opinions and headlines.

Why on earth they didnt put a minimum % majority on it to give a clear result (like the general election) god only knows. And why david cameron ignored nicola sturgeons request that every country in the uk would need to have the same majority result is a mystery. Its almost like he wanted this mess

Probably I am really slow and thick, but I've only just noticed that Referendum Day was chosen as the UK release date of Hollywood blockbuster movie Independence Day: Resurgence.

86% of adults in the UK had Internet access in 2015. 78% of adults accessed it every day or nearly every day. (Source: Office for National Statistics. I don't know what they mean by "nearly".) Some people may find it hard to verify information but 5 out of 6 have no real excuse for not trying.

The information is readily available. It's not like it was twenty years ago when most people weren't online, most documents weren't online, and if you wanted access to official government publications you had to put a cheque in the post and wait for your order to be processed, assuming you were able to put a name to what you wanted to find out in the first place. Now it's easy: most governments have done all the hard work of publishing their legislation, statistics and reports online and making them searchable, and all we need to do is go and look at them. The only reason people don't do it is because they don't want their precious opinions to be threatened by inconvenient facts.

I don't understand that attitude. I find it quite liberating when I've done my research and know what I'm saying is correct, even if it means altering my opinion, because then I don't have to worry about someone else being the person with the facts and using them to challenge me.

Actually, Steve's petition was started by a Leaver concerned about the vote going the other way. He’s been vocal about it – he believed Remain would win by a narrow margin so wanted a second referendum. Now Leave’s won by a narrow margin, his petition is our petition, and he sure as hell begrudges what his own petard is doing to him. I find that democratic.

Incidentally, Farage said that a narrow Remain win would warrant a second referendum. 48/52. He’s been quiet about that.

But this issue, this demand for a second referendum, is not anti-democracy.  Let's go back two or three years, to the approaching 2015 election.  Some years before, when I was at uni, my friend became very involved in our local food bank, something of which I’d been unforgivably oblivious. Seeing the number of people reliant on this go up, under Tory rule in the fifth largest economy, I was convinced that there was only one way to vote in 2015 – anti-austerity, anti-poverty, anti-this.  Our country was starving, still is. After five years of an austerity that worsened the economy, crippled the poor and benefited the rich, who wouldn’t vote against that? As it turns out, enough people. As a loser, that made me angry, but as a loser, I lost. Now, there are issues with First-Past-The-Post (I still maintain Proportional Representation is the way forwards, Alternative Vote was a joke and they knew it) and their majority may be tiny, but in our democracy the Tories clearly won fair and square. Democracy. That’s that.  Were there underhand tactics, press manipulation, and lies on either side?  Duh.  But fewer than now, more informed debate, more public truth-telling, and a clear victory.  It was a fair election, fairly won, and we losers had to concede defeat. What we wouldn’t do was take a lie lying down: had the Tories said “We will prioritise the NHS” and then not (ahem), we’d be on the streets making sure this didn’t happen. We’d cross the bridge of lies when we came to it; on May 8th, we’d lost fairly.

This too was won by a tiny mandate – if one in fifty Leavers voted Remain, we’d be in a different world (either way, the victory was too small to say “The public has spoken”, and how can anyone use a 50/50 split to judge a majority?). But the result came only two days ago and already the man who said “We’ll curb immigration” is maintaining levels of immigration (an issue that convinced well over 1 in 50 voters), all the people who stood behind that unambiguous £350,000,000 poster have redefined those terms like they redefined Child Poverty (an issue that convinced well over 1 in 50 voters), the economy has gone down sharper than promised (an issue that convinced well over 1 in 50 voters) and we’ll have to wait a few months in a leaderless country unsure what we’re doing, who’s doing it, under what terms and when (an issue that convinced well over 1 in 50 voters). As I say, voting Leave was not a mistake; voting Leave for these reasons WAS. This was not fairly lost by us Remainers, but unfairly won by the Leavers. There’s anger in the air. People were told to ignore experts, and lied to by those pied pipers. Those people deserve a second chance. If there’s a snap election, I do wonder how many Scotland-supporting NHS-loving cash-strapped Leavers would like the chance to show the lying Borises, Goves and Leave campaigners what’s for and turn to Remain, truth in their mind, new emotions in their heart. It’s not sour grapes for us losers; it’s sour grapes for the Pyrrhic victors who've lost it all.  Lied-to Leavers deserve the chance for their voice to represent their views – not Gove’s lies, not Boris’ stink, not Farage’s racism, but their love of the NHS, their reasonable concerns with immigration, their economic dissatisfaction with the EU’s issues. We are now, as we speak, on a bridge of lies; on June 25th, we’ve lost unfairly.

I’m not taking these lies lying down.

P.S. Matthew, I’m no economist, and whilst the facts are readily available, I frankly barely understood your articles.  Instead I trust experts to give me them in a way that speaks down to me. The single worst thing to come out of this farrago was Gove’s “I think we’ve had enough of experts”. Gove (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 2:1) has done more damage with that one line than anyone. He’s told us that your information is bogus, my emotions are political. Against that, there’s no counter-argument. That's terrifying. What an awful political world.

P.P.S. Steve, Boris won’t be the next PM. Boris has lost by winning. He’s made promises about more than policy, promises about emotion, and already those are broken. As Dylan sang, "Everything Is Broken", and as Dylan sang on the same album, "We live in a political world/Wisdom is thrown in jail/It rots in a cell/Is misguided as hell/Leaving no-one to pick up a trail" (but then again, the album after, Dylan sang "Wiggle til you wiggle right out of here", so perhaps that’s enough Dylan/Brexit quotes). But whoever leads, we can’t forget the stink. Cameron’s gone because of Boris’ stink. His successor, be they Boris or be they nobody we know, inherits that stink.  Whatever they say about Brexit, we have to reply with Boris.  He can go, but don't forget him; never forget him.

P.P.P.S.

Who are they, in your eyes? I ask out of genuine interest. My social circle is a socialist circle-jerk, and I find it pitifully myopic that people write articles in The Guardian, in the New Statesman, in the i100, then expect Mail, Sun and Express readers to take heart. If I wrote for the Guardian, I’d be embarrassed at how little I did to preach to the unconverted. Have you ever heard of Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, Polly Toynbee? Morons. These people need to know how little they’re doing, that their actual audience are theoretical houmus-eating champagne-socialists, whilst their target audience go reading rags that lie to them. Telling the middle class “The working class won this referendum, and they’ll lose the most from it” (as has been written, in the Grauniad) is such a backwards, nigh-on offensive way of dealing with the working class – turning them into a scapegoat, turning them into a theory, turning them into a ‘them’ – so nothing will change. That’s why there needs to be proper regulations, regulations which matter – at work someone had a Sun, and it was racist headlines and pretty pictures and emotional vitriol aimed at ‘the foreigner’, and the way to counter-act that isn’t to write a lengthy footnoted Comment Is Free in a left-wing rag’s online corner, but to take that Sun to task.

P.P.P.P.S.
Of course, been waiting to post this clip for months now.

I heard on the radio, this morning that 9/10 UKIP supporters voted for out.

I would love to meet the 1 UKIP member who voted remain!!

I don't know much about British politics so please correct me if I'm wrong.

If I understood it correctly, the referendum is not binding.

Cameron (or whomever his successor is) would have to have a vote in the parliament (the House of Commons, I suppose?) whether or not the UK should leave the EU. And then it's up to all the MPs. Labour and SNP will, I assume, vote remain, the one UKIP MP, of course, leave, so it's up to the Tories. Would they have to vote for leave, or is it everyone's own decision? So if there were several Tory MPs thinking "leaving the EU is bad for the UK, despite the referendum I can't vote for leave" and voting remain, Brexit would not happen.

Phew! Because after this appalling campaign from both sides, we all know that we can trust MPs to tell the truth.

Nice progression of what ifs.