If there was another EU referendum...

Fennel: ^In fact I sometimes wonder, Ally, if you're an MP or member of the govt., posting here as a 'mole'. smile
Then I say to myself, but why would the govt. bother to do that^

Well all I can say to that is thank goodness your common sense comes into play. The alternative scenario you put in your post would be classed as paranoia!

As for what you think of me, I say the same as I said to MD. It matters not, this is GN. I switch off you disappear. You are not part of my life, and what you think about me is of no consequence to my life. Read, don't read, respond, don't respond...your choice. But I really get up your nose, don't I!

MaizieD
The Labour Party’s attempt to win the country’s 1983 election on a platform of withdrawing from the EEC resulted in failure, with the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher being re-elected by a considerable margin.

Fourteen years later, four years after the EEC became the E.U. through the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, the newly formed Referendum Party of Sir James Goldsmith contested the 1997 general elections with a promise to hold a referendum on U.K. membership to the union. However, it only managed to win about 2.6% of the vote and did not capture a single seat in parliament.

3. Cameron made a promise, and kept it

The current U.K. Prime Minister, David Cameron, rejected calls for a referendum on his country’s continued membership of the E.U. in 2012, but announced less than a year later that his Conservative government would hold one if re-elected in 2015.

Soon after he was voted in for a second term, the European Union Referendum Act 2015 was introduced in the British Parliament to kickstart the process.

Maizie wrote
"The one thing that has come over very clearly from your short time here on the forum is that you are a very controlling person. Some people might respond very well to that and some people might regard it as self important officiousness and ignore it altogether. That's how people work.."
Same here. In fact I sometimes wonder, Ally, if you're an MP or member of the govt., posting here as a 'mole'.
Then I say to myself, but why would the govt. bother to do that?

crystaltipps Of course the 17 million who voted Brexit will blame the EU for the poor outcome because they blame the EU for everything, however incompetent and undemocratic our own government are. A sizeable chunk of the 48 million who didn’t vote Brexit might actually blame those who thought Brexit a good idea in the first place.

This statement speaks volumes! What form of "blame" will your revenge take crystaltipps? If your statement is an insight into how you think, then I am truly glad you and I disagree on Brexit.

As for your comments about the Government, well! Thank goodness your in a minority.

Winterwhite. Very long cut and paste about the Brexit campaign overspend allegations, looking at both Campaign's:
The allegations
The cheating row centres around the links between Vote Leave and third-party campaign group BeLeave.
Under election laws, Vote Leave was only allowed to spend £7m on its campaign. But there were scores of other separate campaign groups who could each spend up to £700,000, if they registered as permitted participants.
However, spending by each of these groups had to remain truly independent, and not directed by, the main designated campaigns.
^Sanni tells Channel 4 News he was initially a Vote Leave outreach volunteer. But he claimed Stephen Parkinson then assigned him to another Brexit group called BeLeave, where he worked with the group’s founder, Darren Grimes.
BeLeave was based inside the Vote Leave headquarters and Grimes was photographed holding a Vote Leave poster on the day of the Referendum^.
Sanni says that he and Grimes always reported to Stephen Parkinson.
“There was no time where anything BeLeave did didn’t go through Stephen,” Sanni said. “Any sort of article that I posted or an article that I wrote, I would run it through Stephen. I would say ‘is this OK?’.”
“This was after we had become a separate organisation – I sent Stephen a draft of my speech, and said ‘Hey, what do you think?’ I sought advice, as did Darren.”
Together, they claim they worked hand in glove with Parkinson.
In the last ten days of the campaign, Vote Leave donated a total of £625,000 to Grimes, who was registered as a permitted participant. The donations went directly to Canadian data firm Aggregate IQ (AIQ).
^Sanni claims that Grimes was not truly independent of Vote Leave and was not in control of how the money was spent.
He claims Grimes and BeLeave were used by Vote Leave to get around limits on how much they could legally spend. If true, they could have overspent by almost ten per cent.
Documents seen by Channel 4 News show multiple links between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL^
Speaking about the donation, Sanni said: “When Darren told me that it was almost £700,000, the first thing I asked was ‘OK, so can I get my, you know, some of my travel expenses refunded, reimbursed?’,” he told Channel 4 News. “I didn’t have a job, I had just come out of graduation and I was volunteering.
^“So I asked for money and Darren said ‘No I don’t think we can… the only way for them to give it to us is if they give it to AIQ.’ And that’s where at first I was like oh that’s a bit odd…”
Asked whether they could have refused to spend the money on AIQ, Sanni said: “We didn’t ever feel like we had that level of control. That’s what I mean, we never felt like we had control over the or, over the organisation itself…^
“We were delegated responsibilities … but in terms of sort of money, we never had a say over that. We never had control over that.”
^He claimed: “In effect they used BeLeave to over-spend, and not just by a small amount… Almost two thirds of a million pounds makes all the difference and it wasn’t legal…”
“They say that it wasn’t coordinated, but it was. And so the idea that… the campaign was legitimate is false.”^

^The responses
Tonight, Stephen Parkinson issued a “personal statement” to Channel 4 News:^
“I have seen the statements issued by Shahmir and his lawyers, and am saddened by them. They are factually incorrect and misleading. My statement to Channel 4 News and The Observer was issued in my personal capacity and was solely a response to the serious and untrue allegations made against me by Shahmir, Chris Wylie, and others.
“It would be surprising if Shahmir, Mr Wylie, or those advising them thought I would be able to defend myself against those allegations without revealing my relationship with Shahmir. Sadly, the allegations they have chosen to make are so serious that I have been compelled to do so. I cannot see how our relationship, which was ongoing at the time of the referendum and which is a material fact in the allegations being made, could have remained private once Shahmir decided to publicise his false claims in this way.
“The matters raised in tonight’s Channel 4 News programme are already with the Electoral Commission.
“At the relevant time during the referendum period, the Commission advised Vote Leave that it was permissible to make a donation in the way it proposed to do to BeLeave.
“Twice since the referendum the Commission has investigated this matter, and twice it has found no evidence of wrongdoing. A third investigation into the same issue is currently taking place.
“The Electoral Commission has not contacted me in relation to any of these inquiries, but I will of course be happy to assist in them if they wish me to do so.
“I firmly deny the allegations in the programme. I had no responsibility for digital campaigning or donations on the Vote Leave campaign, and am confident that I stayed within the law and strict spending rules at all times.”
A solicitor for Vote Leave said: “Vote Leave has twice been cleared on this matter by the Electoral Commission. There are a number of new accusations and allegations being made in what you have sent us. While many of them seem irrelevant or trivial, some are serious and potentially damaging to the reputations of those caught up in those allegations. As has been the case throughout, Vote Leave is obligated to review – to the extent it can after this long elapsed period since the referendum – all such allegations, and is doing so. We will as appropriate share any relevant findings with the Electoral Commission, again as we have always done.”
Lawyers for AggregateIQ said: “AggregateIQ is a digital advertising, web and software development company based in Canada. It is and has always been 100% Canadian owned and operated. AggregateIQ has never entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates. It has never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity.
“All work AggregateIQ does for each client is kept separate. The services carried out by AggregateIQ for Vote Leave were in accordance with the instructions of Vote Leave. The services carried out for BeLeave were in accordance with the instructions of BeLeave. The accounts were kept separate at all times and there was no overlap or merging in any way.”
Darren Grimes denies all the allegations.^

^The Observer, The Guardian, Channel 4 News and Remain supporting MPs seem to believe that they have found a smoking gun that somehow invalidates the 2016 EU Referendum. Their claim is of collusion between the officially designated Vote Leave campaign and a then 23-year-old libertarian design student at Brighton called Darren Grimes, who ran a pro-Brexit campaign aimed at millennials, BeLeave.
The undisputed facts are as follows. Vote Leave had raised more money than the £7 million they were allowed to spend during the official campaign lasting from April 15 to the referendum itself on June 23. As a result, Vote Leave decided to make a series of donations to other registered leave campaigners who were each permitted to spend up to £700,000 during the campaign – and they confirmed the legitimacy of making such donations with the Electoral Commission. These donations were £100,000 to Veterans for Britain and £15,000 to Labour Leave during May and, much closer to the vote, £10,000 to Muslims for GB on June 20 and a series of donations totalling £625,315 to Grimes’s BeLeave between June 13 and 21.
The donations to Grimes were not approved by the Vote Leave board as a whole, but by a small subcommittee of it. They were initially wrongly declared as a cash donation but the record was subsequently corrected to show a series of non-cash donations – namely payments made directly by Vote Leave on behalf of Grimes to Aggregate IQ, a previously obscure Canadian-based digital advertising company who did the social media advertising campaigns for both Vote Leave and Grimes.
Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr and her whistle-blower Shahmir Sanni claim that the donations were simply a ruse to get around the spending limits and that in the case of Grimes and his BeLeave campaign the spending was still directed by those running Vote Leave, namely Dominic Cummings, Matthew Elliott and Stephen Parkinson, who is now Political Secretary to Theresa May. Such collusion would be a clear breach of Electoral Commission rules. Vote Leave and its staff strongly deny there was any collusion and there is no clear evidence of it – although, of course, they seem to have done everything possible to arouse suspicion.
That Grimes chose to use the same obscure digital advertising company as Vote Leave, that the donations were made so late in the day, that he was based in the Vote Leave offices for most of the time and that Vote Leave initially misdeclared the donations does nothing to allay suspicions. On top of that, Grimes messed up his registration with Electoral Commission, so instead of his BeLeave campaign he made himself the referendum participant.
Those who think they have found a smoking gun like to portray Vote Leave as genius manipulators of public opinion. The facts make them look rather more like a bunch of out-of-their-depth bodgers.
But as a thought experiment, let us presume that everything that the Guardian and Channel 4 have claimed is true: did it make any difference to the campaign or make the result in any way illegitimate? The legal answer is clear – unlike in parliamentary or local elections, overspending does not invalidate a referendum result under any circumstances. The courts cannot order a rerun. If the claims were to be proved Vote Leave could be fined – though since the organisation is not engaged in anything post-Referendum this does not have much consequence – and there could be personal legal consequences for those involved, but nothing else.
More importantly, the European referendum was not a case of one squeaky clean side against another up to all kinds of tricks.
The government produced a 16-page leaflet, “Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK”, which was delivered to 27 million households in April (and in Scotland and Wales in May) 2016 at a cost to the public purse of £9.3 million, which did not count towards referendum expenditure.
A study by Harry Pickard of Sheffield University has shown that the government’s 2016 leaflet did have a major impact on the referendum vote – those who read the leaflet were, the study shows, 3 per cent less likely to vote leave than those who had not. Among Conservative voters, exposure to the leaflet reduced the likelihood of voting leave by over 6 per cent. The government’s leaflet – and indeed the other public resources employed on behalf of a Remain vote – created a far from even playing field. Its impact was clearly very much greater than whatever BeLeave may have achieved.
There is also good reason to suspect collusion between the various Remain campaign: Sir Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s then Director of Communications, records in his book Unleashing Demons that there was a daily morning conference call between the different organisations campaigning for Remain.
What is certain is that many pro-Remain campaigns relied on one donor – former Labour science minister and supermarket heir Lord (David) Sainsbury. Not only did Sainsbury donate over £2.6 million to the official Remain campaign, he donated over £2 million pounds each to the Remain campaigns of both the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. Political parties had their own spending limits depending on the vote they achieved in the previous election – though it is itself a rather unusual move to make donations to two separate parties in one campaign. He also donated to other pro-Remain participants including the European Movement, Scientists for the EU, We are Europe, Better for Our Future, DDB UK Ltd and Michelle Ovens Ltd. Perhaps the oddest donation from Sainsbury was £210,000 to Virgin Media Ltd, which helped to pay for newspaper ads featuring a letter from Virgin supremo Sir Richard Branson calling for a Remain vote. There is no evidence that there was collusion between the different campaigns backed by Sainsbury – but it is clear that both sides of the referendum were looking for ways to spend as much on their cause without breaching the spending limits.
Even if all that is alleged against Vote Leave is true, it is clear that this did not create an unfair playing field. Both sides in the Referendum exploited loopholes to maximise how much they could spend. The Remain side had the advantage of having the government machine – and £9.3 million of public funds on clear campaign literature – on its side. If the referendum was unbalanced, the advantage was with Remain – and yet it still lost.
Michael Mosbacher is Managing Editor of Standpoint and the co-author of 'Brexit Revolt: How the UK Voted to Leave the EU'.
capx.co/remain-not-leave-had-an-unfair-advantage-in-the-eu-referendum/

Spot on Joelsnan!

Winter white. Re how I think this thread might advance, perhaps more reaction to the events of the day. Maybe separate ‘Brexit - week beginning 30 July’ threads, with posters agreeing to try not to go over the old ground over and over again. And to try harder to stick to the point.

Winterwhite. My first reaction was that's a great idea. But then when I thought a bit more about it I realised that so much has been said about Brexit, with associated threads that run back into Brexit, that there is every chance that we could not avoid repeating ourselves. I don't know about you but I get sick of seeing the same old red herrings being put up, and unsubstantiated statements, that even though I say I am not going to go through that one again, I feel compelled to put up some stats, or information that provide fact's rather than unsubstantiated statements.

As for long posts, I am as I am sure you are aware, a long post, poster. Sorry if that is a challenge, but I cannot promise not to post either my own words, a synopsis, summary or cut and paste, of the length that gives what I believe to be enough information to balance the post I am responding to.

Just ignore my post's if they are too much for you. As I have said before, it won't offend, we are on line, and when we all go off line, the Gransnet world ceases to exist. So no harm done.

You did ask a question about the leave vote campaign overspend though. I will come back on that, it will start an interesting discussion I am sure. But having taken a good look at the facts, it does seem that there is a lovers fall out involved and as they say 'a lover scorned" might be a fact in the varacity and the motivation of the 'whistleblower'. However an interesting topic, which we can all fall out about. I do wonder why we all feel the need to do this...a psychologist would have a field day analysing that one.

MaizieD
The European Communities were formed in the 1950s—the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952, and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) and European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957.[1] The EEC, the more ambitious of the three, came to be known as the "Common Market". The UK first applied to join them in 1961, but this was vetoed by France.[1] A later application was successful, and the UK joined in 1973; two years later, the first ever national referendum on continuing membership resulted in 67.2% approval.[1] Political integration gained greater focus when the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union (EU) in 1993, which incorporated (and after the Treaty of Lisbon, succeeded) the European Communities.[1][2]

Growing pressure for a referendumEdit
Prior to the 2010 general election, the then Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron had given a "cast iron" promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which he backtracked on after all EU countries had ratified the treaty before the election.

MaizieD do you have a link to your chart?

MaizeD You are doing it again! That is your view of me fine. My view of you must go unwritten because it would not be polite, nice, nor necessary, because we are only on line and it's Gransnet!!! It makes not one jot of difference to either of our lives what we think of each other, particularly as those views are formed on such narrow and anonymous contact. . Just do as you suggest and ignore me. Makes no difference to my life if you do or don't.

As for Winterwhite she has a view of how she would like this thread to go. Please don't tell her or me what we should ask, or say to each other. Stick to the topic and stop bossing me about.

Sometime I find your post's really worth reading and then you throw in some nasties and it diminishes what your saying, even though I might not agree with you 98.9% of the time.

Re my Qu about what difference the revelation of the Leave campaign’s electoral expenses has made to their perception of their narrow victory, it’s up there somewhere, or may have been on one of the other Brexit threads. I expect the answer is None

MaizieD
Of course interest was only demonstrated when the call to referendum was given, thats when the statisticians awoke, but you search back and you will find that a call for EU referendum has been called and rejected by parliament since the Maastricht treaty when the common market effectively became the EU.
If there was no interest, why in 2013 did DC state that if they were re -elected and he didnt get the changes necessary from the EU, he would ask for a referendum?

Very illuminating chart, MaizieD. It confirms what many of us have felt that generally speaking people haven't been particularly interested in the EU. I don't think this laissez-faire attitude is unique to the UK, but the sudden jump around 2015 in British people's opinion is interesting.

How would you like the thread to advance?

It really doesn't matter how anyone would like any thread to advance, Ally because nobody is in control of it. Posters post just what they want to post and respond to points that they want to respond to. That's the way threads work.

The one thing that has come over very clearly from your short time here on the forum is that you are a very controlling person. Some people might respond very well to that and some people might regard it as self important officiousness and ignore it altogether. That's how people work..

The vast majority had been waiting years for this referendum so their opinions could be heard based on years of evidence based facts

Well, that's odd, Joelsnan because this chart of 'attitudes to the EU, shows us that very few people thought the EU was at all important until 2015:

And your evidence (as opposed to 'assertion') to the contrary is...?

Allygran I was just reacting to what I took to be an implication that some people’s thinking was more joined up than others. Sorry if I read too quickly.
Re how I think this thread might advance, perhaps more reaction to the events of the day. Maybe separate ‘Brexit - week beginning 30 July’ threads, with posters agreeing to try not to go over the old ground over and over again. And to try harder to stick to the point. Of course that idea would make more sense come September, but these very long threads get repetitive and many excellent points get swamped.
I personally dislike very long posts - on any topic - because they can read like sermons and deter others from joining in.

The whole thing is a mess. Most are agreed that the referendum should never have been called, but it was!

Relatively few voters have changed their minds. However there should be a "People's Vote" with the option to REMAIN whatever the outcome of the negotiations. The Brexiteers do not want this because it is likely the nation's choice would be to REMAIN. Though not many have changed their minds a significant number of older LEAVE voters have passed away, younger people who could not or did not vote last time are more likely to vote REMAIN.

The public was seriously misled mainly by VOTE LEAVE with outright lies though PROJECT FEAR was not entirely honest. The dust has now largely settled, the Irish Border issue is still not solved, the Pound has dropped in relative value and impact on jobs and travel have become much clearer.

Still the Government is not willing to even consider that the whole exercise is probably a huge mistake that has already damaged the country and will only damage it more if common sense is denied.

Please Theresa May and others bite the bullet and tell messrs. Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage and other like minded idealogues to face reality. Yes the Nation voted but by a small margin, many people were misled and few of us really understood the issue.

"Democracy ceases to be a democracy if it cannot change its mind"( quote from David Davis).

“We speak as one” - sounds like boasting, as is all the “we vote with our brains” nonsense.
Still no one of the moral high ground persuasion has yet to answer the main point - how do you think your marvellous Brexit dream is progressing? How are our esteemed planners doing? All I see is polishing of the turd and throwing brexcrement at the fan ( not my expression for those sensitive souls - one used by the Brexit idol B Johnson but rather apt)
What are going to be the tangible benefits of Brexit from the position we are in now?Most people ( 84% in the last poll ) think the government are doing a poor job of the negotiations. Of course the 17 million who voted Brexit will blame the EU for the poor outcome because they blame the EU for everything, however incompetent and undemocratic our own government are. A sizeable chunk of the 48 million who didn’t vote Brexit might actually blame those who thought Brexit a good idea in the first place.

winterwhite
I have not seen an answer on the question of whether or not the Brexiters think that the breach of regulations on electoral spending by the Leave campaign calls in question the validity of their narrow referendum win

Just as Remainers apparently voted with their hearts and Brains, so too did those who voted to Leave.
The vast majority had been waiting years for this referendum so their opinions could be heard based on years of evidence based facts.
No amount pre referendum advertising legal or not propagated by both sides would make any difference to the choices made by the majority of voters.
So all of this muck raking is irrelevant and not worthy of debate.

mcem it is all a matter of how you deal with other people's views.It is a matter of debate, rather than attack, it's a matter of agreeing to disagree, without stooping to name calling, nasty asides and general put downs. If you can have a different opinion, produce information to support the debate and develop the overall discussion without the lowest level of behaviour then it does equate to solidarity, with respect for the views of others. However, even good behaviour is not always reciprocated as many of us have found on GN News and Politics..

"Sharing the same views does not equate to boasting, it equates to solidarity".
(But if several posters share an opinion which doesn't agree with ours, that's different because then it's a clique or a gang of bullies).
Or perhaps I imagined that scenario!

Winterwhite it would help if you could say which post the question of real of regs on electoral spending was asked? I must have missed it.

It seems winterwhite that we are in agreement on your comment regarding what I think you meant to say that information being manipulated and presented as facts.

As for joined up thinking, how can saying " It does mean that based on the fact's, and being able to do some joined up thinking, we can come to a conclusion about the EU and Brexit, that is different than yours".
Are you implying that crystaltipps hasn't done that? I felt she had and simply come to a different conclusion which is what I said.

How would you like the thread to advance?

Your right Nfk. It's one of those words that needs practice NfkDumpling, and of course it needs to be in context! Perhaps I will use it more often.