The Referendum.

[Tizer]

Good analysis back there from Panbiker and he's expressed much of my own thinking this morning. His comment: "Sad thing is a lot of the Brexiters are now saying they used their vote as a protest and didn't think they would trigger an exit!" raises a very significant issue. My district council area voted 62% for Leave but since Friday morning there's been a deathly hush out there, the roads are empty, the town was very quiet yesterday. Nobody is celebrating, everything is subdued. That's when I realised what had happened, many people have voted Leave thinking that it was just an opportunity to make a point about the EU without having grasped that Leave really meant `leave the EU' and they also hadn't understood the terrible consequences of such a result. They are now shocked at what is happening and wondering `what I have done?' No wonder it's quiet out there. There is even a word for it now...`Bregret'...and many reports on the news web pages about people saying they didn't realise what it really meant and others finally recognising they've been misled.

About 75% of MPs want us to remain in the EU so it's going to be interesting to see what happens this coming week in Parliament. Some of us have said all along there shouldn't have been a referendum, we have democracy by representation in the UK, not democracy by delegation. We elect representatives to make decisions for us, based on the best evidence and analysis, not to turn around to us and say "OK guys, what do you want us to do?"

[Big Kev]

The way things are going we won't have anyone left in the House of Commons take the Leave decision forward.

The BBC are reporting Boris as the favourite for PM.

No confidence in Corbyn.

Up to half the shadow cabinet set to resign.

Over 2.6 million (as of midnight) have signed a petition for a 2nd referendum.

BBC reporting the UK will be responsible for its own borders and they won't be stopping anyone attempting to cross the channel.

The BBC broadcasting reports of leave voters regretting their decision, apparently a protest vote against the government and they didn't expect that outcome.

It's all going well then

Personal opinion is they've shot themselves in the foot but I would like to be proved wrong.

[Tizer]

Sorry Kev but you're right! And the petition is a smidgeon under 3 million now. It has to be raised and discussed in Parliament by 500 MPs who want to remain and 150 who want to leave.

Boris for PM? As Paddy Ashdown tweeted when he heard the referendum result, "God help us!"

How about a new political party? We could call it Liberal Democrats.

Bruff has gone quiet - has he emigrated?

[plaques]

And if Boris is selected as the new Prime Minister and if we have a second referendum where the 'remain' vote leaves win, will Boris resign?
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

[Tripps]

"Bruff has gone quiet - has he emigrated?"

As he was the only one to correctly predict the result - perhaps he left early.



"

[PanBiker]

It looks like it's the last throws of the Blairites in the Labor Party that are trying to force Corbyn out. Stanley is right, he should have sacked them all on day one. Never no mind, Jeremy has said he won't resign but is perfectly happy to go to the membership again for a new mandate as leader, can't really say fairer than that. He's the only one in this whole sorry tale that is not dragging the slime of the lies offered to the electorate.

[chinatyke]

Never no mind, Jeremy has said he won't resign but is perfectly happy to go to the membership again for a new mandate as leader, can't really say fairer than that. He's the only one in this whole sorry tale that is not dragging the slime of the lies offered to the electorate.

Here! Here!

Next few days should be interesting.

[PanBiker]

The next few years will be interesting.

[Tripps]

It is said that 3 million have signed the petition to re-run the referendum. Make of this what you will.

From The Breitbart website -

As of Sunday afternoon, (26 June 2016), around 41,118 signatories have come from Vatican City, 11,717 from the United States, and curiously, 24,855 from North Korea. At least 19,000 signatures have come from France, and 2,735 from British Antarctic Territory, which has a population of just 250 people.

And even UK-based signatories are raising questions, with the petition attracting a curiously high number of signatures from constituencies with small populations. Turnout in the 2015 General Election was 36,185 in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency. Yet over 40,000 are claimed to have signed the Remain petition from that constituency in the past few days. That would mean that more than every single person that voted in 2015 has signed the petition, including all voters from the UK Independence Party and the Conservative Party, the former of which is overwhelmingly Eurosceptic, and the latter of which is split in half over the issue.

PS. It now 'emerges that the petition was set up weeks ago by a 'leaver' who thought they were going to lose. He says it has been hijacked by the remainiacs.

[PanBiker]

Nigel Farage is one of the main contributors to the London Office I believe. I wonder if the bots that they claim are generating the signatures are also generating the email addresses and then replying to the confirmation links sent out?

I would also add turnout of the electorate is not the same as the population of a given area.

Referendum had 45 million registered electors but only 33 million turned out, 64.1 million in the general population.

[Sue]

I signed, my sister signed and I know many others . We are legitimate. How else can we protest. A statement has to be made just how many are totally dissatisfied and our needs should be considered in any negotiations. I have also written to my (pathetic) MP expressing my views and asking for support for the 42% who are distraught.

[Tizer]

Right, we're in a mess, there's no sign of a credible government either right or left, so here's the plan. We make Nicola Sturgeon PM. She'll sort it all, bang heads together and keep us in the EU, and it means that Scotland won't need to become independent from the UK.

Failing that I suggest the younger generation that wants to remain in the EU and has the most to lose should announce that it will withhold its labour until confirmation comes that we will stay in the EU.

[Big Kev]

Interesting news story has emerged, the petition for a second referendum was set up over a month ago by a 'leave' voter just in case the vote was to stay Sky News story here

[Marilyn]

We have compulsory voting here. If you don't vote, you get fined.
I'd suggest that those that didn't vote couldn't care enough one way or the other about the outcome, so they can't complain now...

[PanBiker]

With our turnouts Maz I would like to see compulsory voting over here. We elect governments on 40% turnouts which is pathetic for such important elections. Was it not low turnouts that prompted your government to introduce compulsory voting? Interested to know how much you get fined for not voting and how its collected.

When I was heavily involved in politics we used to get the marked up registers and often found the most vociferous were the ones that never voted.

[Marilyn]

I live in South Australia and women got the right to vote in 1895.
I've always known it to be compulsory in my adult lifetime, so I don't know how or when that began.
To be eligible to vote you need to be 18 years of age, and an Australian Citizen.
The onus is on yourself to keep your details at the Electoral Commission up to date, so every time you move house it's on your "must notify" list. If you delay, they send a nasty letter to you after about a fortnight. ( I know that because my notification crossed in the post with their nasty letter one time, and they do threaten a fine but I can't recall the amount because I knew I had sorted it).
If you do not vote, the Electoral Commission sends a fine for approx £10. If you do not pay the fine or cannot provide a justifiable reason for neglecting to vote, a £90 is issued and they will take you to court.

Somehow I think your moving house is all crossed linked to things like vehicle registration and Medicare (via Govt. computers)...and I am sure that's why I got my nasty letter because I had changed all the major stuff, had filled out my changed details for Electoral Commission but they had hung about in my handbag for a week before I posted them.

From what I have read, you can also be fined if you have turned 18 and not presented your details to get on the voting register.
Aboriginals all finally got the right to vote by 1962 ( one wonders why these things take so darn long!) and it is compulsory for them also.
If you can't get to a polling booth on voting day ( having a baby/operation etc) you can postal vote...and all hospitals/nursing homes etc have staff visit to take votes. There is no excuse really ( unless you are on life support or suffering dementia).

Voting is not compulsory for local council elections...

[Stanley]

Don't worry about Richard, I suspect he has been surveying the rubble like I did and trying to make sense of the prospect.
First of all, my reading of the Labour situation. I agree with P and Ian, what we are looking at here is a bunch of people who are either Corbyn haters on principle or old Blairites hankering for the good old days when the Party swung to the Right to get votes from the middle ground. They were visible right from the start and have been plotting and waiting ever since. I said then and repeat now, he should have culled them then and told the Party to either get behind him or get out. Labour has a far more democratic leader selection and election process and the members gave him a mandate. I also said at the time that instead of concentrating on regaining power by winning the next General Election they should first sort out the principles of the party and its aims and objectives. The reclaiming of a modern version of Clause Four would have been a good start.
The problem was that Jeremy is not a career politician steeped in confrontation and the use of dirty tricks if necessary, he hoped that his mandate plus reasonable attitudes to his opponents would win the day. I forecast then that he was in for a rude awakening and that sooner or later he would have to introduce some steel into his methods and have a confrontation with his opponents. That time has come and he has responded in what I think is a reasonable manner, his sacking of Hilary Benn was absolutely correct, the man was openly organising a coup. His strategy of saying that he is happy with the normal practice of accepting a leadership challenge and going through the process of asking the membership to decide is perfectly correct and if this happens I will reactivate my membership of the Party and vote for him. If re-elected he will have to modify his approach and learn that in the fight against extremes of opinion, be they Right or Left he will have to become more proactive and give clear and unequivocal leadership. I hope he does and look forward to a resurgence of principled politics in at least one party!
Now then, how about the Tories.... Kev is quite right, they have shot themselves in the foot, trouble is they shot the rest of us at the same time! I have said for a long time that this was inevitable, government based on self-interest and antediluvian 19th century principles based on laisser faire and the crushing of the lower classes was always going to be self-defeating but even I didn't expect them to demonstrate this so spectacularly. Remember that the genesis of all this was an attempt by Cameron to get an accommodation with his more rabid back-benchers and it has gone spectacularly wrong. The problem being of course that Cameron is a rubbish politician with no principles to guide him and whose main objective since 2010 has been to shed government responsibility in all the difficult areas, like supporting the poor, taking control of major policy areas like the commanding heights of the economy and ultimately in deciding the UK position in Europe. A strong leader would have initiated proper debate in Parliament and had a vote ratified by the two Houses, that's how our system is supposed to function. He took the coward's way out and found himself stood outside the casino in the snow with a gun in his hand. That's why he has initiated a quick exit.
As for the Brexiteers.... They had a Cunning Plan which was to keep Cameron as leader and force him to take them back into Cabinet where they would send him to Europe to do the dirty work of managing the exit in the face of the expected hostility of the EU. At the moment, until we actually have a vote and press the exit button, the UK has control, once that button is pressed we are powerless and the EU will take full advantage.
If the Brexiteers had been principled politicians pursuing a legitimate aspiration to exit the EU they would have signalled this and called for a full examination of the ramifications of such a move to be debated in Parliament and even more important, for the Civil Service to help them by assessing the move and constructing an exit strategy. Guided as they were by self-interest, knee-jerk politics and ignorance they did not do this and consequently have no plan in place to manage the situation. Cameron has called their bluff by resigning and they are going to have to carry the can. The dangers embedded in this situation are obvious, my assessment of their prospects is that they are going to go for it with no plan, make a complete mess of it and suffer the consequences of the backlash from the electorate, half of whom are opposed to exit and the other half have been sold a pup. Brilliant politics!
So where are we now? We have a PM and Chancellor who are powerless and on notice of dismissal in three months so 'normal' governance is on hold. We have an electorate which is gradually realising they have been conned. We have a fragile economy which is now an open target for global financial interests who will take every advantage of profit and will attack the oft-vaunted position of the City as a centre of world finance. In 'normal' circumstances this would trigger a vote in the House of No Confidence in the Tory government followed by a General Election and rejection of the referendum vote which is after all, only advisory. There is little doubt that any 'normal' party standing on this ticket would have enormous approval ratings. Worth noting that this is definitely a possibility.
That's as far as I want to go this morning. Note that I have said nothing about the popularity ratings of the protagonists. I'd guess that the most hated men in Britain at the moment are Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Gove. A thought for you.... if Jeremy Corbyn was to run for leadership of the Labour Party on this ticket and demand an immediate election he would win hands down with the Labour voters and quite likely win a subsequent General Election. Pie in the Sky? Stranger things have happened in the last week....... An after thought for Jeremy, the new motto should be 'No More Mr Nice Guy!'

[plaques]

I've heard that they have found Lord Lucan. George Osborne has made a 'pound in your pocket' speech. Keep calm, carry on as normal, nothing has changed, you won't notice the difference. Let's hope the rest of the world sees it like that but I suspect they will screw us for all we are worth.

[Tizer]

Interesting news story has emerged, the petition for a second referendum was set up over a month ago by a 'leave' voter just in case the vote was to stay Sky News story here

The interesting bit is not `the news story' but the fact that it is being presented as news. Yes, it was set up a month or so ago but it wasn't a secret, it didn't make the headlines then, but it was there for anyone who looked. Now there are cries of foul because the petition includes false names and names from non-UK residents. This happens because there is a flaw in Parliament's online petition system and they have to clean out the invalid names afterwards. It makes you wonder how many preceding petitions have been affected in this way and whether or not they were cleaned up.

There's a lot of talk about whether a second referendum is possible but the real issue is that it shouldn't have happened in the first place. The government failed in its duty of democratic representation to take advice from the experts and make the decision itself and instead abandoned it to public opinion instead.

[Tripps]

Nice example here of running the vote again if you don't like the result.

Muirfield vote

[chinatyke]

Surely no government would run the referendum again, couldn't they merely ignore and not act on the first result? Was the referendum only advisory to judge the public view and can it be ignored? Of course, it would take a leader to do this, not a wimp who is spitting his dummy out because he didn't like the result.

As I see it the UK must give notice to the EU in order to quit membership, and they haven't done this yet.

[Bruff]

Oh no I’ve not emigrated (yet!); I’m still here. I’m just watching much of what I and many others warned manifest itself; no point my banging on about it. There was always the risk of market turbulence (scaremongering!); profit warnings (scaremongering!); jobs relocating (scaremongering!); the EU playing hardball (scaremongering!); Scotland leaving (scaremongering!); the border moving to Dover (scaremongering!). That these things are either happening or being discussed should come as no surprise as the risk they would was an entirely reasonable position. That some folk might now be in a state of Regrexit having voted the way they did is something they will have to deal with but if nothing else it might ram home the fact that life is complicated and complex and in the 21st century simple solutions to many of our problems are most likely just that: simple.

The country is in an absolute pickle, 30-odd years in gestation, and entirely of its own making. A quite spectacular and perhaps unique expression of economic self-harm as I simple cannot envisage any other mature, supposedly educated democracy doing anything like it. Everything that’s wrong with this country coalesced: too many self-serving politicians; a venal press; chronic inequality; post-industrial malaise; a woefully politically-unaware and engaged population.

Some time ago I think I mused on here about UKIP and Farage and the whole EU ‘debate’. I think I said I viewed it as a great big boil on the bum-crack of the nation and like any boil, the big worry is how far the puss flies when it eventually bursts. Well now we’re finding out.

Just on the post immediately above: all referendums in this country are advisory. It is for elected representatives in the Commons (and unelected in the Lords) to decide how to deliver, or not, the result of the referendum. It would be a brave Parliament that defied the will of the referendum, but it can. Parliament is sovereign after all despite what the Leave camp would have people believe. However, it was made crystal clear by the PM and the remain camp that this was anything but advisory so they have only themselves to blame if they weren’t paying attention. I would note though that the devolution settlement means that reserved legislative changes at Westminster impacting on the devolved administrations requires the administrations to give ‘legislative consent’. This is what Scotland’s First Minister was referring to when she mooted that the Scottish Assembly could block Brexit by not giving consent on the grounds that Scotland voted remain. My, aren’t things complicated these days?

Richard Broughton

[plaques]

And then there is the Labour Party, if they had held together and put on a united front in face of all their internal difficulties they would have walked away with the next general election. But no. Blair’s bunch of Tories had to be clever and when candidates were being chosen for the leaders position they threw in Corbyn’s name as a demeaning gesture. After he won a resounding victory they continued with their ‘we was robbed, it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this’ attitude and when finally they have a chance of getting into power they take their bat and ball home completely. Obviously this bunch of right wing Labour can’t see farther than their noses and perhaps it’s just as well they never formed a government on the previous election or else this country would have really been in a fix. Booze ups and breweries come to mind. They may have even out Cameroned Cameron.

[Tripps]

Good response Richard, thanks - a lot more restrained than I imagined would emerge.
I think 'venal' is a bit harsh - they're not all on the take, but I do sometimes think we need to press the 'factory reset' button, clear the lot of them out, and have a fresh start.

I voted 'leave', and was outnumbered in my constituency which vote in by 56 - 37 thousand, but my vote still counted in the total. I love the stories of those who voted 'leave' thinking it would be a protest, and have no effect on the outcome. That's the joy of a referendum - no dead rubbers. I see that Pendle was 28k - 16k for leave, and e.g. Rochdale was 62 - 41k in the same direction. Contradicting what I just wrote - on a constituency basis that's pretty decisive democratic decision.

I said before the vote that 'leave' would make them take us seriously, and put us in a better negotiating position. I still think that effectively that will be the case. It was never a simple binary choice, and odd that Cameron thought he could negotiate a deal by staying up all night.Remember he's the millionaire negotiator who paid the windscreen price for Samantha's second hand runabout. The fact that the mayhem has been worldwide emphasises that we are still an important factor in the world. The process will be slow to start - we choose when to fire the starting pistol - and it can be extended with agreement beyond the official two year deadline. I think we will probably have forgotten what it was all about by then.

I can't see Mr Corbyn lasting the week - it's only his lack of social skills and self awareness, that make him unable to see what is happening to him. We will see.

[PanBiker]

I watched Cameron's statement to the Commons today and the associated questions and answers. I have to say that I have never seen a happier guy at the dispatch box. He affirmed his commitment to the decision of the electorate and batted off with glee any questions regarding the financial promises made by members of his own party on the leaving side, saying that any future bonuses from leaving will be for the new leader and government to discuss and distribute as they felt fit. Cameron has actually worked a blinder, neatly forcing all the potential fallout from the Brexit onto the next incumbent. This increases the chance that whoever inherits the position may only hold it until the next election, (depending how the exit goes). This should make the leadership contest very interesting. They may have to appoint a sacrificial lamb with Boris biding his time until the flak dies down. No ratification of the referendum outcome as he says that is also for parliament when they come to trigger Article 50. This means of course that the result can still be challenged. Game, set and match from Dave.

This brings us neatly on to Jeremy Corbyn, in my view the least tainted of any of the leaders involved in the referendum campaign. He has steered clear of all the false promises made during the run up to the vote. With the right wing factions of the party leaving in droves (40 or so as I write) it puts him in a perfect position to complete the transformation of the party into what the Labour Party membership expect, one where socialist principles can come to the fore again. This may well be what the electorate of the country are crying out for and could well provide a proper alternative opposition. He just needs to hold fast, no resignation but go back to the membership for a further mandate.