Brexit is less than six months away, and the British government is no closer to agreeing on an exit deal with the EU, despite another round of negotiations.
A no-deal Brexit could result in food and medicine shortages in the UK, warned the National Farmers’ Union and the National Health Service trust.
Are some of these stories exaggerated? Or was the Brexit vote in 2016 a total mistake? And if public opinion is changing, should there be a second referendum?
“A second referendum would be utterly illegitimate,” says Daniel Hannan, Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and a senior Vote Leave campaign committee member. He also added that he “would not vote in a second referendum”.
Lord Andrew Adonis, Labour peer and a supporter of remaining in the EU, asked Hannan to answer whether or not he was advocating that people boycott a second referendum: “Is [Hannan] calling for people who are in favour of leaving the EU to boycott a referendum, and therefore to try and make democracy inoperable in Britain? Is that what he’s saying?”
According to Hannan, “a second referendum wouldn’t solve anything because the majority of people would boycott it on the perfectly valid grounds that it invalidated all of the promises made in the first one.”
“We were told repeatedly by the government, by the opposition, by all of the people now demanding a second vote, that that was a final decision, that there’d never be another go. So, it would be absurd to legitimise people trying to undo the promise on which the first one was taken,” he added.
But Lord Adonis voiced his support for a second referendum, responding to Hannan: “that’s clearly an absurd proposition because the people can’t betray the people. The great majority of the public now agree, polls show, that they should take that decision on whether or not we go over this cliff-edge, or whether we stop it and stay in the EU.”
In this week’s UpFront, we debate Brexit and the prospects of both a suitable deal and a second referendum.
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Source: Al Jazeera News
