THIS CONTENT WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MY OLD SITE AND FORMS PART OF THIS SITE’S ARCHIVE

A general election could be fast approaching, and there will be many positionings on Brexit, and some will need to be finely balanced.

Assuming Theresa May’s 2.5 Brexit deal is rejected today (which looks entirely likely) then there are machinations for a General Election (primarily within the Conservative Party); again this may not go ahead – but the question will be how each party stands on Brexit. And we may not see much of a change from current positionings.

Now the Conservatives will have possibly three potential positions – that could totally rip the party apart, as could the Labour Party.

The first issue will be are we remain or leave. The logical conclusion, and the one answer to attracting the most voters will be to say: We will negotiate an entirely new deal for leaving and then an entire deal for future relationship, which we will then put to a public referendum. This should mean that if the public decide the deal is not in their interest they can vote to remain or vote to leave on that deal. Whilst there is proportion of voters who wish for a No Deal/WTO Terms Brexit, this is a small proportion; however, a preferential referendum should prevent dilution of results for both sides, one where you can use a cross (for a single vote) or !number your ballot 1 – 3 (we use a similar principle for voting in Scotland).

The options being:
Leave without any deal/WTO Terms
Leave with (newly) negotiated deal
Remain.

So if I’m strongly in support of a No Deal Brexit (and don’t want the other options I can select No Deal with either an X or a 1 and leave the less blank, but say my preference is for Brexit but not remain, but I would prefer a deal over no deal, but would accept no deal I can mark my paper thusly:

No Deal – 2
Deal – 1
Remain – (either blank or 3)

And so the first preference system (aka Single Transferable Vote) requires that the option that wins requires 50%+1 of the vote (So the first ‘option’ to that magic number is the will of the people) – however that is not simply based on first preference but also on second preference.
So if you have something like this for 1st preference:
No Deal – 40%
New Deal – 16%
Remain – 44%

You then take the second preference of papers whose first preference was ‘New Deal’ and divide those to the other options:

No Deal – 40%+ 67% of 16% of All the votes (10.72% of all votes) = 50.72%
New Deal – 16%
Remain – 44% + 33% of 16% of the votes (5.28% of all votes) = 49.28%

As No Deal has a 50.72% majority we can see that is 50% of all votes plus 1 vote above (not 1%) it would be the option the nation should pursue.

Anyway whilst I may disagree with the legality of the result for the 2016 referendum, many within the UK don’t have that issue, so instead of talking about “respecting the result” – I want to talk about “respecting” them as people. That means any new government would be duty bound to negotiate a new deal, but also to put it to a confirmatory referendum (with beefed up rules on campaigning), a confirmatory referendum is not about leave or remain so much as it is about if we’re sure we wish to (as a public) enact the result of the 2016 referendum and also how we enact that result, or do not.

It means everyone can feel their voice has been adaquatly heard and it’s not a re-run of the 2016 referendum.

Now that seems to me to be the only logical way to solve it for each party currently divided on the issue.

Brexiteers can claim their options are not being diluted and remainers can’t claim the same either.

Of course the way each party will explain their brexit position to the nation will depend on who the leader is of the party at the time; internal and external polling etc; their party members; their core votes base etc. But otherwise we may be seeing the collapse of the two party system. Which is both good and bad.

If the two party system it means single-issue right-wing/centre ground parties like DUP/SNP/UKIP will have more power to decide government power and will be kingmakers, despite recieving less votes than other parties.

Alternatively the three traditional parties (Con.; Lab.; Lib.) may have to follow the example of Churchill and form a multi-party “war government”, and then internal multi-party leadership elections may have to take place.

Of course this last element is purely subjective; Some turkeys (aka some voters) seem to like voting for their political Christmas. Though they may not realise or see it as that.