Why don't we have a second referendum? I’m sure it would be fun to watch the country eat itself alive

Campaigners for a second referendum love finding loopholes, such as ‘The referendum result was only advisory’ or ‘We can get the result annulled because Boris Johnson’s hair is illegal’

Mark Steel
Thursday 29 March 2018 20:18 BST
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Exclusive: Tony Blair puts forward his case for a second referendum on Brexit

In one year we’ll be free – FREE from the slavery of the EU, and we must celebrate every year on this day by holding a festival, in which we sing our new national anthem:

“Let tyrants be forgotten
Now we’ve struggled to be free
And may all our fruit go rotten
As no Pole picks it off our tree.”

Then we can create an annual game to rejoice in, in which everyone from the community writes promises they’ll never keep on the side of a bus, such as ‘”Now we’re out of the EU, I’m going to travel everywhere by llama”, or “I’m going to spend the money I save from leaving the EU on growing an extra head”.

But we’ll still accept immigrants. We’ll keep them in pens so that for each festival we can release one into the drains and all the kids can play “hunt the Romanian”, until an excited girl screams “found him, found him”, and splashes about in the sewer, which she’ll be allowed to do at last as we won’t have to abide by EU health and safety twaddle.

Then we can start working on becoming even more free, by leaving other restrictive bodies that force regulations on us, such as the international time zone. What right do these people have to tell us when we can have our afternoon?

If we want to start the day when it gets dark we bloody well can, and then we can put the clocks back eight hours when it gets light and start the day all over again, and go back like that every day until it’s 1975 and we bring back the Black and White Minstrels.

The problem is Britain is still hugely divided over the issue, and many people who wanted to remain in the EU are still searching for a way of staying. So every day there’s a desperate article by one of them, saying something like “Now that FIFA has accepted the Video Assisted Refereeing system for close football decisions, we should re-classify the referendum as a football match. Then the result will have to be passed to the video referee, who will watch the whole thing thousands of times, still unable to make his mind up, meaning we stay in the EU for at least another thirty years.”

Campaigners for a second referendum love finding loopholes, such as “The referendum result was only advisory”, or “We can get the result annulled because Boris Johnson’s hair is illegal.”

Their argument is the result shouldn’t stand, because the Leave campaign lied to the voters. They did lie spectacularly, but the trouble is, so did the Remain campaign. George Osborne told us if we voted to leave, there would have to be an emergency budget and taxes would have to go up.

This was in spite of the fact he’d spent five years telling us raising taxes doesn’t bring in any extra money, and causes your pets to catch fire.

Exclusive: Tony Blair puts forward his case for a second referendum on Brexit

Their point seems to be the result shouldn’t count, because the leave campaign was dishonest and cynical. And it is a puzzle why so many people in struggling areas were persuaded to vote against the trustworthy and reliable types who led the Remain campaign, people who were never dishonest or cynical and understood their everyday problems, such as David “pint of whelks” Cameron.

The problem with the campaign to overturn the result is many angry people voted to leave because “we don’t feel we’re being listened to”. So while I’m no psychologist, I wonder how someone like that might react, if you let them have a vote, and then said “thank you very much for your opinion, but I’m afraid you talk sh** so we’re ignoring it”. I expect they’d accept it with good grace, and make the most of staying in the EU after all, by recruiting some Bulgarians to work in a chain of experimental upmarket Weetabix restaurants across Stoke.

Disdain for the “elite” was a major factor in the Brexit vote. This must be why the campaign for a second referendum is currently led by Baron Adonis, whose “working-class touch” endears him to a wide layer of common barons.

One possible strategy that opponents of Brexit could try would be to engage with people who voted leave and work out how to address their worries. You can witness valiant attempts to open up discussions in this way across Facebook and Twitter, as people write messages such as “Brex-sh** moron idiots literally destroyed this country you slugs, I hope your stupid town in Lincolnshire is washed away in a flood and lands in Belgium!!!!!”

But the Brexit vote wasn’t on its own. Across the western world, millions of people feel disillusioned. So the traditional parties known as the “centre”, that would always win forever, have not just lost but been battered. In one country after another, spokespeople for the “Keep Everything Nice and Cosy As It Is” Party find themselves on television, explaining they’re disappointed at losing all their seats, “but we reject the accusation that we held the voters in contempt, it’s just we couldn’t get through to the dozy tw**s”.

So I fear a second referendum won’t solve anything. Instead we need a referendum every week, and the result announced on Saturday evenings after the lottery. Some weeks we’ll be in, and some weeks out, at Christmas we can make it interesting by voting to be part of Iceland, and at last the country will be at peace.

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