Britain is a democracy, and we voted to leave the EU. Any MP who votes against it will have to face the the 17 or so million who went out and casted a vote in the name of democracy. As I mentioned it can only be a legal formality.
I do not think this is half as obvious a conclusion as you suggest. The relevant legislation for this vote - because Parliament is the supreme source of legislation, Parliamentary sovereignty and all that - did not specify that a 'leave' referendum result would legally bind any government to invoke Article 50. If it had done so, there would have been no need to take this to the High Court. Then again, it seems highly likely that the leave camp would be doing its best to
challenge any electoral decision that would've gone the other way, so..
The four freedoms are the basis of the Single Market. It was made clear we would likely have to exit the single market to exit the EU. If you didn't know (or don't remember) that you were voting to either stay in or leave the single market, then you probably shouldn't have voted.
Oho, a would-be gaslighter. It may well have been about leaving the single market for the ideologically committed - and certainly that prospect was waved about as a spectre by Cameron and Osborne - but
I doubt very much that it was the topmost issue for most. Me, I voted to remain, fully aware that few politicians would have chosen to leave the Single Market.
I take it that you'd rather I hadn't voted. Very democratically minded of you.
The immigration issue in this country only arose with the large number of migrants coming in recently, especially from Eastern Europe. This is just my observation. I don't recall there being a public debate about it in the 90s or early 2000s, nor do I hear many people complaining about non-EU migrants.
The EDL and the like over the last decade fully acknowledged the indigenousness of Muslims in Britain. Sure.
I don't think many Brits have issues with curry shops importing workers or banks importing programmers from India. The government is smart enough to understand that by importing skilled labour we can strengthen our economy.
Once we are free from the burden of uncontrolled low-skilled migration and things calm down, we can get back to the migration policy that seemed work for us prior to 2005 or so.
Well, this government has had a stated goal of reducing immigration down to the tens of thousands per year
since 2010, but for some reason they refuse to exclude students from immigration figures (which would be a good way of slashing numbers at a stroke); not the sanest way to encourage skilled migration, I'd suggest, but then the party has migrant-hating constituencies that won't go away. The Tory pro-business wing overlaps quite significantly with the pro-EU wing, I'd say, so whatever backlash faces the latter will face the former, and they do not appear to have the upper hand.
Historically, long-term net migration has been on the rise since 1998, and so pre-2005 policy may not be much help; from 140,000 in 1998 to 268,000 in 2004, reaching 273,000 in 2007 (coincidentally, the year in which Polish immigration peaks in comparison to immigration from other countries). Compare this to gross migration: 391,000 in 1998, 589,000 in 2004, 574,000 in 2007. The years of peak gross migration in this data, incidentally, were 2010 and 2014 - 591,000 and 632,000 respectively; net migration for the same years: 256,000 and 313,000. The country providing the biggest contingent of (presumably skilled) immigrants in these peak years was India, but I somehow don't expect this to be acknowledged as an unalloyed good.
Poll
Topic: Brexit - yes or no?