In our electoral system your individual vote almost never matters. That is an absolute fact. So you can use it to protest, vote for an extreme party or even the official monster raving loony candidate with no consequences. None of that is stupid and I would never belittle people who do so in the way you just have.
But in this case it did. The vote wasn't split among wards, it was literally a one to one vote where every one was counted as a for or against.
I have never belittled anyone. You however think anyone who does a protest vote is stupid. The reason we have a representative democracy is that policy decisions are difficult so we put them in the hands of a group of people who seem more competent than the average elector. If they mislead us they can be voted out. That facility isn't available following a referendum, indeed the opposite is usually argued.
But changing any individual vote would have made no difference so a protest vote might have seemed safe.
What would you say are he 90% of things not related to the machinery of govt that were going to cause damage, that said machinery could not prevent even if their immortal souls depended on it ??? "OK...the Remainer conspiracy theory."" A theory is an attempt to qualitatively +/- quantitatively describe the reason for something that occurs in reality. So by definition for there to be a "conspiracy theory" there must be a conspiracy.
There is a reason for this that you have already touched on. In a GE then the winner is not nessesarily the party with the most votes, just the one with the most votes in the right areas. In a referendum the winner is the vote of the majority of the people (which should carry more weight than a selected few)
A further example of the lunacy of the referendum process....before we joined the EEC we were in EFTA. So if you wanted to revert to the previous position you would have voted to Leave. But the government decided that the Leave vote precluded us being in EFTA/EEA.
Did you see the majority? it was basically those who voted leave in Scotland (not purely obviously but a very similar number) so yes, individual votes counted for a lot and if people were stupid enough to vote against their own opinion then deserve all they get.
No, there has to be a set of circumstances that a party (in their own minds) cannot attribute a rational explanation for.
When deciding how to vote you need to work out the implications of how your vote might affect the outcome. If you believe that your preferred outcome is either very likely or very unlikely then you can safely cast your vote in a way designed to send a different message to the Government.
< chairman deedub > 1. Voting should have been mandatory (nigh 100% turnout needed for an issue of this magnitude) 2. there should have been an 'indifferent' box on the ballot
Please don't belittle people as stupid because they think differently to you. Referenda are anti democratic for the reasons I have already stated so there is no reason at all why people should vote in a particular way in an advisory referendum.
How so? It's totally relevant. A binary question was asked and answered. That result could have been honoured by a detailed process evaluation. That may have led to a decision to Remain or Leave with various options, but at least there would have been some quantifiable data to base the decision. That part never happened and lo....the UK is in a mess of its own unnecessary making!
What % of your acquaintances told you beforehand, that if the result was to leave the UK, they did not expect the govt to initiate exit action ?? Again, for me the answer is zero.
A better process would have been STV for the following options. 1) Leave 2) leave but remain in single market 3) leave but remain in customs union 4) both 2 and 3 5) Remain
