51.7% of the vote, 37% of the electorate - is it enough?

-
1979: Referendum on Scottish Devolution.
37% of the electorate voted for it. 51.6% of the votes were for it.
Nothing happened - because not *enough* of the electorate voted for it.
2016: Referendum on Brexit
37% of the electorate voted for it. 51.8% of the votes were for it.
"S'dah willow dah peeepow!"
In 1979, the people who felt short-changed licked their wounds, pulled together an alliance of multiple political parties and civil society and worked on putting together a persuasive case for Devolution (the Scottish Constitutional Convention).
18 years later they got Devolution.
If the Leave people are sure they have the persuasive case, let them lick their wounds, put together an alliance, create a persuasive case for actual Brexit (no fake unicorns) and persuade the rest of us.
But they are currently outnumbered, and their support seems to be waning by the week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Ah, but what about Belgium?"

-
Image
Belgium only produced a set of figures where all care home deaths were presumed to be Covid-related To compare like-for-like, this equates most closely to the UK Excess deaths figures. So I have added the "Belgium scale" to the comparison of Covid Deaths per million people across European nations  As before, the X-axis is not meaningful - the datapoints are spread out only to prevent the labels from overlapping
Read more

Extinction Rebellion on Tom Swarbrick's LBC show

-
Yesterday, one of the topics on Tom Swarbrick's show on LBC was the Extinction Rebellion protests in London. The Deputy Editor of Spiked spoke about them on the show. Tom also spoke about plastics. Both Tom and the Spiked correspondent’s view of Extinction Rebellion (ER) seemed to be that 1) ER don’t have policies (other than calling for a climate emergency), and also 2) ER have policies which are too extreme. Quite obviously, only one of those points can be true - they either have policies or they don’t. Their complaint really seemed to to be that their policies are not insignificant enough to be palatable. i.e. ER are focussed on changes which are significant enough to have an adequate effect. For the past 35 years[1], the West has gradually moved from climate change being a fringe concern, to climate change being an acknowledged political concern, to implementing changes small enough to be palatable.  We have not yet moved to making changes large enough to be adequate. And...
Read more

Climate Change - some comparisons

-
Ice Ages are bad - especially if you live in Europe. The Ice Sheet can reach all the way down to Africa. But the difference between an Ice Age and now? 4degC (7degF). It took 10,000 years to get from the last Ice Age to the 1950s, i.e. change the global temp by 4degC. It’s taken 70 years to change the climate by over 1degC. We’re changing the climate 2,750 faster than old Mother Nature does. So, if an Ice Age that coats all of Europe in ice is only 4degC away in one direction, then what sort of world is 4degC away in the other direction? Another way to think about it:  10degC (18degF) is the difference between Alaska and Florida. Another way to think about it: humans are used to thinking in terms of linear change. Make a little change, have a little effect. Tap the accelerator gently, the car moves a bit quicker. Floor it, and the car goes much faster. Same with tapping the brakes, and stomping on the brakes. But climate is a bit different. If we do a bit of climate...
Read more