Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
Goos to see you here, Lar. Lot of points there.



Yes, I am not a fan of FPTP because it renders many voters' decisions utterly meaningless, and a party can have 20-25% of the vote and have close to zero seats in parliament. The advantage of FPTP is that it gets government majorities and then at least someone is in charge and can get on with it. So I completely disagree with you that our GE is like a referenum because in the latter very vote actually counts. If you lose, too bad, but how many points do you get losing a football match 5-4?



What people meant by Leave was to leave the EU. Not stay in it and pretend to leave. They wanted some or all of:

1) Return of legislative power to an democratically accountable government in Westminster, rather than an unelected and unnacountable Commission in Brussels and Luxumbourg.

2) Control of Britain's borders. Optimisation of immigration levels.

3) End to the huge net contribution to the EU.

Soft Brexit (which was never mentioned before the referendum) is unlikely to allow any of these, as the single maket prohibits the first two, and the countries that benefit from the third do not wish to give that up.



'Easily' assuming that peoples' votes were for some spurious reason that should be discounted is not very democratic. One might just as 'easily' argue that many people who voted remain did so because all their friends were and because they were being told to do so by almost the entire political establishment. Should we subtract those votes too?



And if Remain had won by a narrow margin? Would you be arguing in favour of some kind of Brexit to represent all the leavers who would have narrowly been disenfranchised? I suspect not.

Remainers have ben very well represented, I think. They have been represented by basically the entire ruling class. Campaigning before the referendum for remain were: The leaderships of the three main parties. 80% of MPs. All the heavyweight newspapers (and both of the free tabloids available in London). All of the capitalist and financial class - the IMF, World Bank, CBI. The EU. The POTUS of the day threatened Britain. The academic class. The celebrity and luvvie classes.




The Irish border is a tricky one, yes. Unionist parties have done deals with governments before, including Callaghan and Major.

And finally, Mr Corbyn seems to want to be PM, though I would not welcome a coalition with the SNP and Lib Dems. Oddly enough, Corbyn has spent two years being savaged by many of the same people who have been savaging the Leave decision and the voters who made it. And now Corbyn's gains are being used as an excuse to cancel the referendum result, by attempting to deploy the fake Brexit known as Soft Brexit.
Lot's there to reply to Ash.

Not sure I accept your differentiating between every vote counting in a Referendum and not in a GE. Ask any MP in a marginal constituency and they will say that every vote counts. If the Brexit vote had been 65-35 either way then the same principle applies. The losing voter's vote is largely meaningless. You'll forgive me if I ignore your football match analogy.

You have very kindly outlined what your understanding of what voting 'leave' meant. I have no doubt that many agree with that point of view. But I also have no doubt that there are people who voted leave who thought differently. I may have phrased it poorly when I said no one really understood what leave meant. It would have been better to say it meant different things to different people.

I completely accept that it is irrelevant why people may have voted the way they did and whatever the reason does not make their vote less valid. I was saying that some referenda, and indeed elections are decided by what might be described as protest votes.

If Remain had won surely none of this debate would be happening. If it had been a narrow victory it would have been hailed by Europe as a resounding victory for the 'European Project' but people like Farage (if not the man himself) would be arguing that you cannot ignore the votes of 48% or so that voted to leave and that these voters are being disenfranchised if their views are not at least taken on board such that the EU would require some serious introspection as to whether it needed reform etc. [I suspect incidentally that UKIP would have won more than 1.8% of the vote in the recent GE too.]

My point regarding the DUP was that it was them who will cause Brexit to be as 'soft' as it now appears may be the case. This is just an accident of the numbers not because the DUP or the Tories have any particular political affinity. [I accept that official name of the Tories may contain the word Unionist in some shape but if they even had any even tenuous link with any party in the North it was with the UUP who have now been obliterated. I may remind you that it was the Rev Ian Paisley who established the DUP in NI only in the 1960s and they have probably never really seen eye to eye with the Tories politically].

Fun Fact: Rev Ian Paisley is an anagram for "VILE IRA PANSY"