In Parliament yesterday, Theresa May repeated Philip Hammond’s fallacious argument that because the Brexit referendum result was 52:48, the form of Brexit should be a compromise between leaving the EU and remaining in it. This argument completely distorts the notion of democracy.
Firstly, no such argument was ever deployed when it was a question of accepting the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties. Secondly, the referendum was not subject to any threshold level of support for one position or the other. And David Cameron and George Osborne stated very explicitly that a victory for “Leave” – even by a single vote – would mean leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union. It is only those on the losing side, including May and Hammond, who now seek to re-interpret the implications of the referendum result. Somewhat more subtly, but still rather straightforwardly apparent, the argument put forward by May would also imply that no Government constituted by a single party should ever pursue its election programme, however unambiguous its election manifesto had been and however uncontested its majority in Parliament, as long as a significant minority disagreed with it.
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