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Not blaming Labour at all. Maybe they were guilty of a failure to prepare perhaps, but not really.
But my point is it's a myth to say the country was great until 2010. It wasn't.
It's actually a fairly daft strategy cos the Tories can point to the data of the end of the last Labour govt and say it was generally worse..which it was, even if it wasn't their fault.
Was more of a 'royal you' really Peter. If in fact you are open and balanced in your view on it, recognise pros and cons and look at the data holistically and have not endlessly been predicting disaster etc then I apologise if I have misrepresented you.
I've never said it will be a glorious success. On balance I think it will be better in the long run but not by much and not for all sectors. I've always said, give me 100 votes and I would have given 45 of them to Remain. My real passion comes from respecting the result and identifying and making the most of opportunities etc. I thought, and still think the failure to respect the vote was appalling and very damaging.
Again, if I have misrepresented your view, my apologies.
I think they should be used sparingly.
But the parliamentary democracy you speak of produced a winning party who had a manifesto promise and a policy of calling for a referendum on this topic. Parliament then voted for the referendum, so it was only ever a product of parliamentary democracy.
That was a cop out and it's ruining the country.
I don't think there are ever any good reasons for having a referendum. We have a Parliamentary Democracy for the simple reason most, if not all issues, are far too complex and difficult for ordinary people to decide upon. Brexit is a classic example and will go down in history as a catastrophic failure of government.
I wanted to overthrow the result because I thought the whole process was illegitimate. In another thread I've even mentioned Steve Baker who has misgivings now and thinks the referendum should have been on a 60/40 split. That would have been slightly more responsible in my opinion but I still believe the referendum was an utter debacle and should never have taken place in any circumstances.
I wrote to my M.P. on this very point at the time. I suggested a two thirds majority though (66.6%/33.3%). It was a huge mistake by David Cameron et al to allow a simple majority on such an important issue. Hopefully the SNP will learn from that if/when they ever get their referendum on independence.