No. I need 66% and a high youth vote support % and 3/4 of nations before I consider rule by referenda as absolute.

 

personally, I trust the electorate far more than I do the government - that's why I prefer referenda.

Plebiscite is an awful form of government, especially in a representative democracy.

Enjoyed getting a laugh out of the Marr Show this morning when the Remain female journalist who has exposed the shady dealings behind Cambridge Anal-ytica kept getting interrupted by another Brexit female journalist asking when she will spend a year out of her life probing into the Remain campaign. I may have missed her name but it was something like Is A Bell...? My memory is so poor.

 

Essentially she thought she was making some kind of point by suggesting the Remain campaign was probably just as corrupt. What she hadn't noticed was that she was also admitting what a crap journalist she must be as she needed someone else more talented to do that job for her, rather than spend some time doing it herself. Any Brexiteering journalists are perfectly free to make investigations on anything but the idea seems to escape the poor dears...

 

Either that or the journalist was indulging in Fake News Ya Boo Make Allegations That Vote Leave Might Have Been A Bit Suspect And I Will Make Insinuations (Totally Unsubstantiated) That Remain Were Just As Bad To Counter Any Inconvenient Facts Exposed.

Enjoyed getting a laugh out of the Marr Show this morning when the Remain female journalist who has exposed the shady dealings behind Cambridge Anal-ytica kept getting interrupted by another Brexit female journalist asking when she will spend a year out of her life probing into the Remain campaign. I may have missed her name but it was something like Is A Bell...? My memory is so poor.

 

Essentially she thought she was making some kind of point by suggesting the Remain campaign was probably just as corrupt. What she hadn't noticed was that she was also admitting what a crap journalist she must be as she needed someone else more talented to do that job for her, rather than spend some time doing it herself. Any Brexiteering journalists are perfectly free to make investigations on anything but the idea seems to escape the poor dears...

 

Either that or the journalist was indulging in Fake News Ya Boo Make Allegations That Vote Leave Might Have Been A Bit Suspect And I Will Make Insinuations (Totally Unsubstantiated) That Remain Were Just As Bad To Counter Any Inconvenient Facts Exposed.

I would be surprised if no journalists have been looking for misdemeanours in the Remain campaign. However, for a newspaper to allow their staff to pursue a story for months on end requires strong evidence that the story is true. The days when a journalist could devote so much time pursuing something that might never result in publishing anything are long gone.

 

Meanwhile some self-styled newspapers think that the story that Mrs Dec is pregnant is far more important than a possibly fraudulent referendum result. Of course, part of the problem stems once again from the fact this the vote was advisory. Therefore, not only was there no threshold, there was no provision for a recount (even if the winning margin had been just handful of votes) and no provision for declaring the result invalid. It's almost as if the PM who oversaw the legislation was either a closet Leave supporter or just incredibly stupid.

I would be surprised if no journalists have been looking for misdemeanours in the Remain campaign. However, for a newspaper to allow their staff to pursue a story for months on end requires strong evidence that the story is true. The days when a journalist could devote so much time pursuing something that might never result in publishing anything are long gone.

 

Meanwhile some self-styled newspapers think that the story that Mrs Dec is pregnant is far more important than a possibly fraudulent referendum result. Of course, part of the problem stems once again from the fact this the vote was advisory. Therefore, not only was there no threshold, there was no provision for a recount (even if the winning margin had been just handful of votes) and no provision for declaring the result invalid. It's almost as if the PM who oversaw the legislation was either a closet Leave supporter or just incredibly stupid.

 

I think 'fraudulent' is a little strong - that conjures up images of ballot box stuffing, postal vote manipulation, etc. Even if dodgy methods have been used to mine data, those still can't compel people to change their vote.

If the people responsible for the alleged wrongdoing had thought it would make no difference, they wouldn't have done it. The spending limits exist for a good reason - although they are arguably made to look pointless when the front pages of such a large part of the press were used as pro-Leave leaflets for most of the campaign. Any collaboration between two arms of either campaign should have meant that all expenses by both arms should have counted as one. It is alleged that the Leave campaign broke that law. In particular, an obscure pro-Leave movement suddenly found itself awash with cash (as I mentioned here months ago),

 

I shall ask this question again in the vague hope that I might get an answer this time. If serious breaches of the rules can be made with relative impunity, what is the point of having rules?

If the people responsible for the alleged wrongdoing had thought it would make no difference, they wouldn't have done it. The spending limits exist for a good reason - although they are arguably made to look pointless when the front pages of such a large part of the press were used as pro-Leave leaflets for most of the campaign. Any collaboration between two arms of either campaign should have meant that all expenses by both arms should have counted as one. It is alleged that the Leave campaign broke that law. In particular, an obscure pro-Leave movement suddenly found itself awash with cash (as I mentioned here months ago),

 

I shall ask this question again in the vague hope that I might get an answer this time. If serious breaches of the rules can be made with relative impunity, what is the point of having rules?

 

IMO, this simply smacks of yet another of the increasingly desperate attempts by the Remain side to stop Brexit by *any* means possible.

 

As for the other point, while breaches of the rules are certainly a bad thing, usually politicians don't press them because both sides generally don't want to risk opening that can of worms.

Isn't it terrible? People who think leaving the EU will be the stupidest thing this country has done in decades are trying to stop it. How dare they?

Isn't it terrible? People who think leaving the EU will be the stupidest thing this country has done in decades are trying to stop it. How dare they?

 

They had their chance on 23rd Jun 2016.

And under all rules of normal referenda, achieved it.

 

The press should be counted among Tory and Leave expenses imo.

And under all rules of normal referenda, achieved it.

 

Finishing second, you mean? Must try that one on the local bookmaker... :rolleyes:

They had their chance on 23rd Jun 2016.

Ya because the leave campaign was completely silent in the 40 years leading up to the 2016 referendum

Finishing second, you mean? Must try that one on the local bookmaker... :rolleyes:

 

2 nations, the small islands and only 600,000 votes less in a non-binding advisory referendum. We stopped Brexit with that showing. Or would have done in a SANE REALITY.

They had their chance on 23rd Jun 2016.

That's not how it works. That result doesn't change my opinion that leaving the EU will be seriously bad for my country. Simply to give up and let it go ahead would be an extremely unpatriotic thing for me to do. By your logic all opposition parties should refuse to oppose anything a government does.

They had their chance in the 70s to keep us out. Why they forced another vote just because the lost the first... And why the papers kept bleating on for 30 years I do not know, as they had their say on that one day in the 70s.

I think 'fraudulent' is a little strong - that conjures up images of ballot box stuffing, postal vote manipulation, etc. Even if dodgy methods have been used to mine data, those still can't compel people to change their vote.

 

 

 

I'm sorry?!

 

Either people miraculously come to an opinion out of thin air and have no information coming at them from any source that will sway their opinion, or else they absorb news, propaganda, facts and lies, and come to a conclusion based on what they read.

 

Fraudulently-targeted voters bombarded with emotional lies to make their blood boil is not what I call "not compelling people to change their vote". Bottom-line, if it wasn't effective why did they do it and why have they done it at great cost in many elections around the world claiming it has won those with the cash the elections because of the examples of dirty tricks that they run?

 

It either works or it doesn't. Clue: it totally works or else the rags wouldnt bombard people with daily propaganda and the likes of Rees-Mogg wouldnt be shitting themselves over allowing The People The Final Say because the campaign was corrupt. If it made no difference, and it still makes no difference, then a final say won't make any difference.

 

The problem with Brexit is their is no logic in any of the arguments, just basically "we won, don't care how, and we put our foot down on democracy ever again because we won, even if it was all a lie that we spun and we have been found out"

 

 

 

IMO, this simply smacks of yet another of the increasingly desperate attempts by the Remain side to stop Brexit by *any* means possible.

 

As for the other point, while breaches of the rules are certainly a bad thing, usually politicians don't press them because both sides generally don't want to risk opening that can of worms.

 

So corruption (guilty!) from the firm used in both the Referendum and The American Election is increasingly desperate? Funny how incovenient facts seem to scare campaigners used to dealing in lies and empty promises.

 

Feel free to find evidence of corruption in the Remain campaign and feel free to keep us informed on their lies and explain exactly what parts of the EU you specifically have problems with. Still waiting for specifics and I've asked many times. You had a go at one point, but it was largely refutable, though I applauded you for trying, and that was that.....

 

(By the way one leading Brexhead formerly of House Of May, till a crappy campaign did him in, has tweeted that it doesn't matter about corruption because the Remain campaign had all of the weight of the establishment behind it. In other words, facts. Justifying lying and corruption because they couldn't win on the argument!! What a tosser.)

Dominic Lawson in the Mail today :

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-...-come-next.html

 

DOMINIC LAWSON: So what demented (and doomed) ploy to stop Brexit will they come up with next!

 

Whenever it seems that those who refuse to accept the EU referendum result have scraped the bottom of the barrel of ruses and excuses, they somehow manage to go lower. Over the weekend the 'Remoaners' have done it again.

 

This time their argument is that a nefarious combination of mind-bending social media marketing and illicit expenditure 'bought' the result, and that therefore the British people's decision in June 2016 to leave the EU should be dismissed as illegitimate.

 

This concerted attempt to void the result of the biggest exercise in mass democracy ever undertaken by the British people began almost as soon as the votes had been counted and declared.

 

Days afterwards, Tony Blair's former spin-doctor supreme, Alastair Campbell, called (via Twitter) for the outcome to be rejected on the grounds that 'EU law allows customers to withdraw from contract if contract based on lies. Leave agenda riddled with them'.

 

Coming from the propaganda maestro who manufactured the 'dodgy dossier' on Iraq, this almost defied satire.

 

 

Then this gang argued that the referendum was not binding on Parliament and that it would be illegal for the Government to invoke the EU's Article 50 (which is required for a nation to secede) unless it was approved in a vote by all MPs.

 

The Supreme Court agreed with this legal claim, brought by that indefatigable anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller.

 

So then Parliament did vote. And by 498 votes to 114, it agreed that the referendum decision should be honoured. Thus, a year ago this week, Article 50 was invoked by Theresa May's Government.

 

End of story? Not a bit of it. Defeated both by the public and Parliament, those who don't want the result to stand are now calling for a second referendum.

 

According to Chuka Umunna, the London MP who chairs a political group that meets every Wednesday to discuss how to stop Brexit, this would be to 'let the people decide' whether to accept the terms of departure negotiated between the UK and the EU.

 

Last week Umunna came to the support of Owen Smith, after his fellow Labour MP was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by Jeremy Corbyn for demanding a second referendum on our relationship with the EU.

 

Umunna complained that Smith had been 'sacked for saying what Labour voters overwhelmingly support'. This, however, is not true.

 

Last Friday, the pollsters BMG revealed the result of asking the public to respond to the statement 'the Government should get on with implementing the result of the referendum to take Britain out of the EU and in so doing take back control of our borders, laws, money and trade'.

 

No less than 57 per cent agreed, and only 22 per cent disagreed (with the rest saying they did not have a view).

 

Even among Labour voters there were 10 per cent more agreeing than disagreeing with what amounts, in layman's language, to Theresa May's policy of leaving both the single market and the customs union.

 

Oh, that was the other ruse of the Remoaners: because Theresa May had, through an admittedly inept election campaign, lost her Commons majority, there was no mandate for what they invariably describe as 'hard Brexit'.

 

This argument, too, fails on the most cursory examination. Not just the Conservatives but Labour and also Northern Ireland's biggest party, the Democratic Unionists, all pledged in the 2017 General Election not only that they would honour the result of the 2016 referendum but that the UK would no longer be a member of the single market.

 

Free movement is a fundamental rule of the single market, and all these parties accepted that the British people — including the majority of Labour voters as well as Conservative ones — were opposed to uncontrolled migration from the rest of the EU.

 

All along, however, the Brexit refuseniks have been motivated by the view that what differentiates them from the majority is that they know better: that ignorance and stupidity are what define their opponents.

 

In public, they try to hide this conceit, but it has always been there.

 

It was most clearly expressed in the days after the referendum in a reader's online comment at the foot of an article in The Independent (which itself called for the result to be rejected): 'Why should the pond life that dragged itself from the estates to the ballot box be allowed to ruin everything for the rest of us?'

 

Moronic

 

This idea — that the moronic masses have somehow been dragged or duped into voting for an outcome that defies both reason and their own interests — lies behind the latest attempt to thwart the Brexit vote.

 

It rests on two claims. First, that a company called Cambridge Analytica, controlled by a U.S. billionaire called Robert Mercer and using a sinister-sounding technique called 'psychographics', had played a decisive role in convincing the British to vote for Brexit.

 

And, second, that the official Leave campaign had broken Electoral Commission rules by funnelling £625,000 to a secretly linked group called BeLeave.

 

This second claim was exposed as meretricious only last week in the High Court. It determined that the Electoral Commission had approved, in writing, Vote Leave's decision to donate to other organisations campaigning for Brexit.

 

A youthful volunteer in that campaign, by the name of Shahmir Sanni, has now told Channel 4 that he still feels the way this was done was a form of 'cheating', and that 'almost two thirds of a million pounds makes all the difference'.

 

Really? Does anyone other than Mr Sanni and the self-deluding anti-Brexit last-ditchers believe this £625,000 of spending swung the result behind Leave, and that otherwise this outcome — a winning margin of over 4 per cent, let's remember — would not have occurred?

 

Let's also remember that not only did every mainstream political party organisation back Remain, but so did almost every institution in the land, including the Church of England.

 

Above all, we should recall that just before the official start of the campaign (thus sneakily evading the spending limits decreed by the Electoral Commission), the Government posted a leaflet to every household in the land — at a £9 million cost to taxpayers — warning of economic disaster if we did not vote to remain in the EU.

 

Those still campaigning to stop Brexit never mention that. Nor do they like to recall the final words of that leaflet addressed to voters: 'This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.'

 

Rejected

 

As for Cambridge Analytica and its allegedly spooky mind-bending techniques based on using information hoovered up from Facebook profiles: even if they were effective, this is completely irrelevant, and for one very good reason.

 

The company wanted to work for Vote Leave but was rejected by the campaign's mastermind, Dominic Cummings, who regarded them as nothing more than plausible charlatans. That's right: Cambridge Analytica played as big a role in the referendum as Scooby-Doo.

 

So the claim in the Observer newspaper that 'if the referendum result stands' it would mean we had consented to 'a result paid for by a U.S. billionaire using military-style technology' is a conspiracy theory lacking not just a conspiracy but even a credible theory.

 

Because no one has yet demonstrated that these techniques swing elections and I have seen no coherent explanation of how they have done so. Cambridge Analytica and Robert Mercer put CA's so-called 'micro-targeting' to work for Ted Cruz in his campaign to become the Republican candidate for the 2016 u.s. Presidential election. It was a disaster.

 

Perhaps those fighting to thwart Brexit need to believe that some sort of wicked brainwashing lay behind the referendum result. The people's verdict was, to them, so incredible and unbearable that they can never accept it happened fair and square: it must be a conspiracy.

 

So now their latest line to discredit the referendum result — gullible Britons were brainwashed by spooky Americans into voting Leave — has proved so obviously demented and doomed to fail, what will the stop Brexit crowd try next?

 

I don't know. But you can be sure it will be an insult to our intelligence.

 

That article is an insult to MY intelligence. It was an advisory poll. Having a 51+1% rule for it in a country of four nations of disproportionate size was undemocratic and mob rule. The referendum was poisoned by Murdoch before I even began. The people's verdict was 50\50. In NI and Scotland it was to Remain. The Remain vote would win today in Wales too. Little England colonialism is forcing us out, but don't worry about that! To the right wing, if you vote to stay in the Union you have voted to be ignored, pushed around and treated as lesser to England and its supermajority population. Colonialiam at its worst. The gutter right act like that 51% and 2 nations = a 90% Putin victory and repeat the 1930s authoritarian werrrl errf there perplerrrr mantra.

 

There was another her vote in the 70s. If a referendum is the be and end all, then that was it. Not more votes allowed. As it happens, with the leavers dying off and the Leave lies exposed and cheating exposed, this grubby little 51% vite is undemocratic and should be overturned. We don't even need another vote. Parliament just needs to reject the advice given by 51% and say it is not in the best interests if the country.

 

If the Brexiteers want out, give them blue passports with no rights and no EU protections at work. We will opt IN however. Watch how many Brexiteers would also opt in lmaooo

That article is an insult to MY intelligence. It was an advisory poll. Having a 51+1% rule for it in a country of four nations of disproportionate size was undemocratic and mob rule. The referendum was poisoned by Murdoch before I even began. The people's verdict was 50\50. In NI and Scotland it was to Remain. The Remain vote would win today in Wales too. Little England colonialism is forcing us out, but don't worry about that! To the right wing, if you vote to stay in the Union you have voted to be ignored, pushed around and treated as lesser to England and its supermajority population. Colonialiam at its worst. The gutter right act like that 51% and 2 nations = a 90% Putin victory and repeat the 1930s authoritarian werrrl errf there perplerrrr mantra.

 

You do realise that, not matter *how many times* you repeat the above, it won't change the result? :rolleyes:

 

There was another her vote in the 70s. If a referendum is the be and end all, then that was it. Not more votes allowed. As it happens, with the leavers dying off and the Leave lies exposed and cheating exposed, this grubby little 51% vite is undemocratic and should be overturned. We don't even need another vote. Parliament just needs to reject the advice given by 51% and say it is not in the best interests if the country.

It's ironic that you should 'lies & cheating' in context with the original referendum - the public were told we were just joining a trading bloc, and any suggestion that it would turn into a political/economic union were severely downplayed!

 

If the Brexiteers want out, give them blue passports with no rights and no EU protections at work. We will opt IN however. Watch how many Brexiteers would also opt in lmaooo

 

You are really showing your socialist credentials here - proposing to ignore a vote you don't like the result of, and suggesting punishment for those who voted the 'wrong' way. :rolleyes:

 

BTW, since the country flag on your profile says Spain, why do you seem to care so much about a referendum result for the UK? :unsure: