Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh
A Bill regarding Referendums is currently going through Parliament.
https://publications.parliament.uk/p...09/5801009.pdf
For comparison with European Referendum Act 2015 :-
In the House of Commons, it passed 316 votes to 53 on its third reading in the Commons (so would have met Section 2b)
In the actual Referendum vote, 35,577,342 out of 46,500,001 Registered Voters voted, which was 72.21% (so would have met Section 3)
17,410,742 out of the 35,577,342 voters voted to leave, which was 51.89% of those who voted (so would not have met Section 4)
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More interestingly for the immediate future, the quorum clause might allow opponents of Scottish independence to defeat a future referendum simply by failing to vote at all (I haven’t done the maths yet ... the 2014 referendum had a turnout of around 80%). It also makes it impossible for the SNP to edge it - they would need to increase their vote by more than 15 percentage points, rather than just a shade over 5. For this reason the Nats could be expected to become especially shrill in any Commons debate.
However, this is a private members bill that has been introduced in the Lords. Cormack is a Tory peer but AFAIK this isn’t government policy and I’ll be surprised if it passes its second reading, which would mean it wouldn’t appear in the Commons at all, unless el gov decided to directly introduce their own version of it at some stage.