Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
I think the debate is around the tension between delegated democracy ie Parliament and the Lords and direct democracy ie the referendum. The latter is an integral part of democracies like Switzerland but the UK does not have a long tradition in this area.
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Which, no doubt, is why we made such a mess of it. The Austrians, who are also referendum experts, warned us against a binary referendum. They told us that this would lead the leave side attempting to be all things to all people. dangling less radical forms of Brexit in front of the voter. By golly we certainly saw that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kgAPwqhoHo
The referendum was a travesty of democracy for the reason I gave above, but also for the way the Leave campaign deployed untruths to catch the wavering voter. The £350 million per week lie was one of many. Cummings has acknowledged that the lie on a bus won the referendum. Even today, 30% of Leavers believe the lie is true. The way the Remain campaign deployed expert analysis of the full range of possible outcomes of the full range of possible Brexit styles cannot be compared with the Leave campaign's distortion of reality appealing to our natural xenophobia with its declaration that we were being ruled by a bunch of foreigners in Brussels. Remain campaigners didn't deliver a dangerous appeal to racists and Islamaphobes. Farage was happy to tell us that our membership of the EU would lead to 70 million Turks and male Muslim refugees coming over here, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and raping our women and girls. Farage told us how Norway's rape incidents were far higher than ours and blamed Norway's acceptance of large numbers of refugees for it. He completely ignored the fact that Norway was a much broader definition of rape, as Assange learned to his cost.
Here we see Farage's photoshopped image of refugees, which wasn't even taken in the place he said it was.
https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...mgZr4VoXzHxmjM
Democracy only works if the people have all the facts in front of them. We failed to provide them that. The way the referendum was conceived and deployed failed to deliver a democratic process up to the day of the binary referendum vote, leaving Parliament an angrily divided nation and no clue as to what kind of Brexit voters wanted. The following three years reflected that impossible conundrum. Parliamentary democracy didn't fail. Direct democracy failed.
NB delegated democracy? Representative democracy surely.