I live in Canada so I am somewhat removed from this, but we are part of the British Commonwealth and the Queen is our head of state and I have British ancestry (my father's large family) so I take an interest. Personally, I believe the UK has made a terrible error of judgement (if leaving the UK goes forward) and for the very wrong reasons.
I don't know the precise rules under which your referendum was established, but here in British Columbia we have had two referenda in the past decade and neither was necessarily binding on the government and we knew that before voting. In our parliamentary democracy we elect members of parliament to make these sort of decisions for us. If we lose faith in parliament, we have elections to hopefully deal with that. As I understand things, PM Cameron agreed to holding a referendum to bring together two factions in the Conservative Party. If true, that was a big mistake. But politicians want to be in power, and too often will do anything to maintain power. I suspect that in hindsight the PM deeply regrets the action he took, since he clearly never imagined this would actually come about. Emotions, not reason, got stirred up, and as often happens in referenda, people use them to "slap" the government; this is exactly what happened in both our referenda in BC. In your referendum, there is too much at stake for this sort of behaviour.
A referendum is a tool to assess the opinion of the public. The statistics I have seen tell us that just over 70% of those eligible to vote took the time to do so. That is sad in itself, that a quarter of the citizens don't care--and if they did care, they would have voted, period, so clearly they do not care. The remaining three-quarters are split down the middle. Common sense tells me that no government should consider this result binding when the issue is so critical. That intelligence may or may not prevail, time will tell.
Here in Canada, in the Province of Quebec, there have been two referenda on the issue of sovereignty, meaning if Quebec should separate from Canada. Both lost, very narrowly. But if the separation side had won, you can be certain it would have taken a larger majority. The governments of the day said as much after the fact.
The problem is, that personal feelings get stirred up, and cool heads do not prevail. Just look at what is possibly going to happen to the UK if everyone ends up accepting this decision. Scotland will likely separate from England. Northern Ireland will likely unite with the Republic of Ireland. Spain has already asked Gibralter to join it. These are not insignificant issues. Then there is the economic side, which is bound to be detrimental for England, and so involved I cannot possibly even fathom it.
Someone mentioned lives lost in the great wars to preserve democracy and freedom...that is precisely what the EU is all about, preventing something like that happening again. It has a much greater chance of success when nations work together, not going their own hard-headed way just to maintain so-called "independence." Independence from what, exactly?
US Rebublican candidate (to be, likely) Donald Trump was happy with the result. Why wouldn't he be? He is a racist, a bigot, self-centred, arrogant--God help the world if he should get elected to the position that has the power to start a nuclear holocaust with the push of a button. But his underlying policies mirror Brexit quite disturbingly so. The jubilation from the Brexit side that I saw in the news reports was very scary; the rhetoric from the leaders even more-so. It reminded me of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930's. And before you jump down my throat, understand what I am really saying here: there is a very obvious similarity in how these ends were achieved. Mr. Trump is using the same tactics. So did Stephen Harper, our Canadian PM that held power for a decade until we finally got rid of him. The methods work, but the results can be risky at best, and catastrophic at worst.
Be careful what you wish for.
Byron.
