Leave 17,410,742 51.89% Remain 16,141,241 48.11%
I think you're right, you see this sometimes where the powers that be are extremely over-confident in themselves and think "sure, let's put this thing up for referendum and show those stupid right-wingers how unpopular they really are." Which works until it doesn't.
A US example was Proposition 8 in California (banning same-sex marriage) in 2008. I have zero doubt the thinking was "sure, let's put it up for a vote and show those morons how behind the times they really are." When it passed, in _California_ no less, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and accusations of all sorts of treachery. Anything but doing a little self-reflection and considering that maybe it wasn't as popular an idea as they thought. Didn't matter in the end, courts said "yeah well too bad, you can't ban it anyway, sorry" (kind of funny those legal arguments never came up BEFORE it could even be put up for a vote, again showing the level of confidence on display).
What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
There was an attempt.
A campaigner managed to get the courts to issue a verdict that the referendum was not binding, and Parliament would need to vote on whether or not to implement the result. Remain-voters rejoiced.
Parliament then duly voted to implement the result.
All that happened was that Britain exchanged limited Eastern Euro immigration for unlimited non-EU immigration.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-05-07/seven-ou...
Perhaps that they're wonderfully trusting people who believe whatever politicians that Gary down the pub thinks are the best ?
Before you get ranty at me - I voted remain. But your comment is revisionist. The pro-Brexit shysters were not in power. After the referendum, whichever way it went, the pro-Brexit people were not going to be given power, it was not an election.
They had no mandate to implement anything. Any plan they promised would have been irrelevant to the UK government and had no more force than you or I scribbling on a pub napkin.
You know who was in power, who was in a position to make a plan, arguably whose duty it was to make a contingency plan if the referendum went south?
The very pro-EU faction at the head of the Tory government. But they didn’t. They told the public they weren’t making a plan so that it didn’t look like a low-risk option that the country could go for and be OK. The lack of plan was no accident, it was a Remain-side tactic.
The Brexiteers were/are wrong, hateful, shysters in so many ways. But your ire in this specific case should be aimed squarely at David Cameron. The Brexit shysters just didn’t have any power, and Brexit voters voted without a plan because it was the choice they were given.
In the days after the Brexit vote, it turned out that a significant minority of 'leave' voters had been convinced that their vote would be an ineffectual protest with no actual influence on Britain's membership of the EU. Lazy and cynical anti-democratic rhetoric just feeds into that cycle of ignorance and stupidity.
They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship.
- Education is not "elite", it's open to all.
- Informed is not "educated".
Forcing political speech to be truthful (or at least have a reasonable expectation of being truthful) with serious consequences (jail time) for knowingly lying would go a long way to counter the misinformation that caused Brexit.
That sacrifice didn't see fruit for two decades until the Reform Act 1832 opened the franchise to allow more the right to vote.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre