Chris

... which has all the intellectual integrity of yelling “what’s the matter? Chicken?” in someone’s face.

We had a democratic vote, which all sides went into understanding that the government had pledged to implement the outcome. We then had a general election, in which both main parties pledged in their manifestos to implement the outcome.

At some point, it starts to be *un*democratic to keep going back to the country over the same question, because it looks very much like an attempt to over-ride multiple choices for one outcome with a single result for the other. And seeing as our system of government relies on legitimate elections whose outcomes are mutually respected by winners and losers alike, the supposed short-term gain of settling the Brexit question risks long-term damage to our democratic process

As it happens, I don’t believe that any outcome of any second referendum would settle the issue anyway, and even if it did settle it (for now), all that would be achieved would be a dangerous precedent encouraging the government to manipulate the political situation after a referendum so as to make the consequences look unpalatable and give them a chance to reverse an inconvenient result.

There are plenty who think (and I am one of them) that the EU has had every incentive to make Brexit look impossibly hard because it is so accustomed to member states re-running referendums when they deliver the “wrong” result, that it has found it nigh on impossible not to proceed on the assumption that the same thing would happen here.

---------- Post added at 16:56 ---------- Previous post was at 16:53 ----------

I have merged “Teresa May must resign” into the main Brexit thread, because there’s no way it was ever going to remain a distinctive topic of its own.