Betraying our elders: leaving Brexit to impressionable youth in 2nd referendum would be treason

A Second Vote on Brexit Won’t Enhance Democracy. It Will Undermine It.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018..../10/26/a-second-vote

The elitist proponents of a “people’s vote” don’t care about the popular will. They only care about getting the outcome they want.

BY TOM SLATER | OCTOBER 26, 2018, 1:15 PM
Demonstrators wave a British flag with European Union stars and European Union flags as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on Oct. 20.
Demonstrators wave a British flag with European Union stars and European Union flags as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on Oct. 20. (NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
The casual observer abroad could be forgiven for thinking that Britain is turning against Brexit. Last weekend, almost 700,000 people descended on London as part of the so-called People’s Vote march, demanding a second referendum on European Union membership to save Britain from what they regard as the “political chaos” the first vote has unleashed.

The Brexit negotiations have reached an impasse. Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May is at loggerheads with Brussels—and with much of her own party—over the issue of the Irish border, as well as post-Brexit customs arrangements and regulations. Whether or not a withdrawal agreement can be signed before the agreed mid-November deadline is an open question. Without it, talks about any future trade agreement with the EU cannot commence. And even so, May’s so-called Chequers proposal for trade, which makes major concessions to the EU, has already been rejected by Brussels, not to mention most Brexiteers in Parliament.

“No one voted for this mess,” has been the refrain of prominent media Remainers in response to this chaos. A second referendum, they insist, is the only democratic way out of the corner May seems to have boxed us into.

But this is just cheap, insincere spin from the forces in British politics who have been trying to stop Brexit ever since the people voted for it. Any real democrat—Leaver, Remainer, or neither—shouldn’t let them get away with wrapping their campaign against democracy in the banner of democracy. Any real democrat—Leaver, Remainer, or neither—shouldn’t let them get away with wrapping their campaign against democracy in the banner of democracy.
The People’s Vote campaign is not some grassroots organization that sprung up from a public dissatisfied with Brexit. It formed out of the official Remain campaign, with the same elite organizers, spokespeople, and media supporters at its core. These people advocated Remain at the last referendum, were (in some cases) physically sickened by the result, and have been doing everything in their power to stop it ever since.

Just look at the people pushing for it. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, has previously called on May to unilaterally reverse Brexit. In the wake of the Brexit vote, David Lammy, a prominent Labour member of Parliament and People’s Vote booster, called on his colleagues to “stop this madness through a vote in Parliament”—to use the power vested in them by their constituents to overturn the will of the majority. Patience Wheatcroft, a Tory member of the unelected House of Lords, also wants a people’s vote. But she hasn’t always. Immediately after the referendum, she called on the Lords to block Brexit in the upper house because, unlike MPs, they have “no constituents to fear.”

Of course, it is possible to separate the arguments for a second Brexit referendum from the intentions of the politicians currently making them. But even on their own terms, the so-called democratic arguments for a second referendum just don’t stack up. In fact, examining them closely reveals how cynical they are. So let’s deal with a few of them in turn.

Any referendum with Remain on the ballot is a rerun of the first one, and no one calling for a second referendum would countenance anything different.Any referendum with Remain on the ballot is a rerun of the first one, and no one calling for a second referendum would countenance anything different. At its recent conference, the Labour Party’s Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer, was met with applause when he announced that Labour would back a second referendum under certain circumstances and that “nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.”

The wording for any second referendum would have to be agreed by Parliament, and at the time of the referendum nearly 75 percent of MPs backed Remain.