Hi Owen — many thanks for articulating the position, but I remain unconvinced.
First, I keep on having difficulties about why we should accept the result of a Referendum where the people who would be affected most (EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens over 15 years in the EU, many of whom are vulnerable pensioners who already now are hurting because of the drop in Sterling) were disenfranchised from. I still recall, as an EU citizen in the UK, how the Referendum was very much about us and what a burden we apparently are to the NHS, schools and housing, and yet we were not allowed to vote in it.
That you campaigned for our rights is the right thing to do, but it's not enough. It does not make the Referendum legitimate. Compare: if there was a Referendum in which women were disenfranchised, and where men massively voted for a raft of policies that would see women lose the right, potentially, to live and remain in the country, would you call it legitimate? Would you say, "As a man, I really campaigned against a yes on this Referendum. I think it's regrettable women weren't allowed to vote, but you know, it's a legitimate result, and I will tirelessly campaign for them to stay here now".
I refuse to accept the result of a gerrymandered vote, where Cameron et al went with the franchise proposed by hardcore Leave proponents in the Tories. I recall a website by those hardcore eurosceptics where they were celebrating that this franchise was adopted (this was before 23 June 2016 and I cannot find it back now), because they hoped (correctly it turns out) that this would give them an advantageous vote. Particularly, they hoped Commonwealth citizens would vote Leave on the false promise that the UK would now make its immigration laws for non-EU citizens more flexible (yeah, that turned out well for them…)
Second, that re-Leaver study is fundamentally flawed. Please read this analysis of mine. Just to re-iterate the main points there:
- the phrasing is terribly leading "but now the British people have voted to leave the government have a duty"… For real?
- asking compound questions is poor survey design
- why was the mirroring question for bregret not asked? “I supported Britain leaving the EU, but I now see what a mistake it is and I now think the government have a duty to stop Brexit from happening”? — again, a failure of basic survey design
I have no idea how many re-leavers there are (people who have a position similar to yours, not people who ticked the box in that poorly designed YouGov study), but quite frankly, mass opinion is irrelevant to whether or not I as an individual ought to "respect" the referendum result where I was deliberately disenfranchised from so that a bunch of hardcore Eurosceptics got the result they wanted.
