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Well, there you go, Anon. Self-opinionated irrationality in a lawyer; I wonder if it's worth replying.
There is nothing in what I wrote to justify your claim that I'm just another Remainer seeking to reverse the decision in this inherently irrational vote. I gave no indication of my preference, as I'm 77 and have cancer, so either way is likely to have little effect on me for very long. Even if I had a strong preference, I'd have made the comment anyway - it was a stupid choice (and, of course, merely self-serving) to offer, which the media immediately pointed out, and Cameron has probably admitted as much to himself and his wife, if not others.
800 000 citizens will have reached voting age this year and over 500 000 have died. It is not possible to state that this could not have changed the opinion of the current electorate. We owe nothing to the opinion of the dead, and the youngest electors have a right to declare their choice as loudly as those screaming that their own choice is cast in stone and that nobody has any right to 'snatch' it 'sneakily' from them.
I despair of the intellect of a lawyer who can aver that 'We honour democratic results all the time'. *The trouble is that we are sometimes misled by the word "democracy." We have not got democratic government in this country to-day; we never had it, and I venture to suggest that we shall never have it. What we have done, in all the progress of reform and evolution of politics, is to broaden the basis of our oligarchy. - Our system # is government of the people, for the people, with but not by , the people.
The essential hypocrisy of those who claim to run Britain as a democracy is borne out by this weaselly statement, ironically during the Referendum Act debate 1975, "Although one would not expect Hon Members to go against the wishes of the people, they will remain free to do so" - Ted Short, highly regarded Labour Leader of the HoC.
# is by Tory grandee Leo Amery: Thoughts on the Constitution, 1947. He was a fervent imperialist who also thought that Britain no longer had the ability to maintain its position as a great power. Unfortunately, this belief was not shared by the man who, the year after his death, took us, sneakily and disastrously, into the Suez disaster - Anthony Eden, the author of the words after *, in the Equal Franchise Bill of 1928. To do him justice he has been proved right in another part of that speech, "The democratic state is well-governed just in proportion as its citizens take an interest in that Government, and the less interest they take in it the worse it is governed." That proportion has been small over most of my lifetime, despite repeated public 'after the event' dissatisfaction with govt policies. That situation he also anticipated: "It is true to say that a proportion of those whom we enfranchise under this Bill will not make use of the vote. It is equally true that numbers of those who now have the vote, do not use it at all. That is not an argument against the Bill, unless we are prepared to say that the new electors whom it is proposed to create are, for some special reason, in a special category which makes them unfit to enjoy the franchise." That 'special category' seems now to have been applied by Mrs May, and all those screaming against them, to those who obtained the franchise after the referendum.
The famous quote of US Sec of State, Dean Acheson, a little after Suez, that 'Britain had lost an Empire and not yet found a role,' seems likely to have been turned back to front, since we are losing the, powerful, role that we, 'the sick man of Europe', felt obliged to take in the EU, but we seem unlikely to dominate the trade empire Mrs May insists she is taking us into.
I am a linguist, and have no qualifications in history or politics, so don't try to tell me I'm lecturing you. All I've written has accumulated in my head from living through the events and picking up the quotes while trying to put the events in context, something anyone educated at our level could do.

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