Thursday, March 29, 2018

Thirteen very good reasons to have a #FinalSay on Brexit




Now is always a good time to take another look at the EU Referendum.

It was:

1) An Advisory Referendum


2) It was determined by a simple majority, which means that if 17,000,001 had voted Leave, and 13,000,999 had voted Remain, we would have left. Crazy. Normally, constitutional change is determined by a 2/3rds majority or similar.

3) It was a narrow 48:52 victory, precisely the margin that Farage proclaimed - before the vote - would be "unfinished business".

4) The majority was 1.3 million - only slightly more than those that voted Green in the General Election 2015. The Green vote was rewarded with one - albeit excellent - MP. The referendum majority was rewarded with wrecking the national economy and our standing in the world.

5) Victory was based on Lies on a Bus, and a

6) There was a major (41/27%) imbalance in Leave/Remain articles in the Press. This is just the articles: since right wing tabloids have greater readership, the influence is greater than 41/27.

7) There was a massive age skew, because of  the elderly votes, and 16 year olds not being allowed to vote 

8) Also about 3 million expatriates were not allowed to vote; most would have voted to stay.

9) Foreign money, of unknown origin, channeled via the DUP, put pro-Leave propaganda onto the Metro paper in London. a few days before the election.

10) Cambridge Analytica money broke election rules, and played a significant part in the Leave victory.

11) Swansea University with University of California research finds 150,000 Russian accounts used the #Brexit hashtag.

12) City University found an army of 13,500 bot Twitter accounts that issued 65,000 mainly pro-leave tweets in the 4 weeks prior to the June 15 vote. They disappeared soon after the vote.
Leave.eu first admitted, and then denied, using bots. If the admission is true (it looks sincere) that calls into question the use of robots in political campaigning. If we accept the denial, the question arises - to whom did the bots belong? Putin?

13) Aaron Banks is under investigation by the Electoral Commission for allegedly  breaching election spending rules



Thirteen very good reasons to have a #FinalSay re-run of the referendum prior to Brexit. 

[updated from here]

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