Roland Perry wrote:
In message
-septe
mber.org, at 08:37:49 on Mon, 4 Jul 2016, Recliner
remarked:
In my view political people do not actually have a mandate to negotiate
any particular "settlement" with the rest of the EU as none was offered
for the electorate to vote on.

There were a whole set of so-called promises, most of which were
retracted the day after the referendum.

Perhaps we should have used a two-stage mechanism like New Zealand did for
choosing its flag? The first stage was a national vote to choose the
favourite one of five alternatives (whittled down from a very long list by
a committee). The second vote was to choose between the existing flag and
the most popular alternative one. The existing flag won.

So, with Brexit, the first vote should have been to choose between several
(legally possible, viable, rather than fantasy Boris-style) alternative
scenarios. There are at least three, and the population could have chosen
whether they preferred immigration control over the single market, etc.

In the second round, the most popular of these would then have been
compared with remaining an EU member. That way, everyone voting to leave
would know exactly which option they were mandating the government to seek.

Sounds like the Conservative leadership contest, except with a smaller
electorate (the paid up party members).

Yes, similar, though it's to choose whether to change from an existing to a
new something. With something as irreversible as Brexit, it's more
important to get it right than a general election, which is inherently
reversible. Also the New Zealand approach was really three stages (the
first was the committee stage to get down to a handful out of many possible
options, which is effectively the MPs' part of the Tory leadership
contest), with the public voting on both the latter stages.