Canada’s Clarity Act. it implies that at least 50% of those ELIGIBLE to vote must vote to leave for the vote to be valid. staying at home is like voting stay. if the UK passed a similar vote, it would’ve been over before it started. since this act wasn’t in place, this IS a final act. the UK conservative party would be torn to pieces if they didn’t act as if the vote is entirely valid. you can’t set the rules and then take them back when it involves a population of over 60 million. it’d be chaos.
In the article atush posted it states that the parliment has no duty to pass the results of a referendum. However, even though this was always true, it was skipped over in all of the excitment. Voters would feel cheated at this point if parliment does the right thing and overturns the vote which obviously is not signigficant enought to call for such a large change. The Uk handled this very badly… should have defined better terms for the interpretation of the results.
it is the final act if you don’t warn the population that a certain threshold need be met in order for the leave vote to be carried out. too late now. politcal chaos would ensue if they tried to say “yeah, but what we were looking for was 2/3rds majority”. the UK as a country would look like a bunch of idiots if they did that. somebody was already murdered in the lead-up to this vote, can you imagine what the far right wingers would do if the government tried to take away their victory. many politicians would die.
What I don’t get, is that it was well understood the vote would be close. If so, why would people NOT go out and vote. If I lived in a swing state in the US, is definitely vote in November. If I lived in a dem or republican stronghold, then sure it wouldn’t matter
i find this funny as well. turnout for the 1995 Quebec referendum was over 93%. how do you have a Brexit referendum that also includes implied referendums on Scotland and Ireland, and only see 72% turnout? crazy. scottish turnout for the brexit vote was 67% while turnout for the 2014 scottish indy referendum was 85%. go figure.
Can we just all agree that the Bri’sh can finally all stop openly mocking American politics after this fiasco? The google search stats probably being the low point overall.
Unfortunately, requiring a supermajority for Leave would have been against Cameron’s PR goals. By declaring this referendum six months ago, the PM was gambling that Remain would win and thus, give him a mandate to do certain policy things. If Leave exceeded 50% but still lost due to not crossing a higher threshold, the public could say most people oppose Cameron’s policy, and this will hurt his public standing.
So now that Leave has won for real, it is a big humilation for Cameron himself, since it is his gamble that went bad. He must resign because of this, and not just to make way for a PM who is aligned with the Leave movement.
as much as that google search stat is fucking embarrassing and the whole saga is a mess, it doesn’t make American politics, with the mangled apricot hellbeast as a presedential candidate, any less of a farce. Both countries are living in a post factual political environment.
Both countries have issues, but for different reasons. Americans disagree on the way forward for their country, and they are so mad that politicians have no answer that fringe candidates like messers Sanders and Trump can arise.
UK citizens have abandoned their future and are regressing to their past, when Britain was the center of the world. Brexit is like saying “we don’t need our political partners” and they think they will be stronger by taking up some dream of what UK used to be. Now, they will only be smaller and weaker as a result.
i really like Cameron but he did a major f up with calling this referendum. Who is piling into the financials today? Its like a Macys discount shopping day in the markets.