Democracy hasn’t failed us. We have failed democracy.
by Pseud O'Nym
In the midst of everyone playing the blame game about the current Brexit fiasco, no-one has as yet properly identified the main culprits. Yes, proroguing parliament is a desperate throw of the dice by a Prime Minister increasingly out of options. But then we should properly ask ourselves who gave him such crap dice? I mean Boris Johnson had to work with what he inherited from Theresa May and she had a to try and make the best of a bad lot from the first day of premiership.
If, on the 29th June 2016, instead of this country being convulsed with the referendum result, had politicians from all sides pledged to come together in a spirit of common purpose to make Brexit work, then this whole sorry farrago might have been avoided. But then it is hardly fair to blame politicians for being politicians. After all, politicians are, in theory, servants of the people that elect them, and it is they – us – the electorate, that bear ultimate responsibility for the chaos we find ourselves in.
It is worth bearing in mind that 28.2% of the electorate didn’t vote. Mind you, having written that, it’s hard to know whether that is 28.2% of the adult population or 28.2% of the adult population who registered to vote. Regardless of that, given the slim majority of the Leave campaign, had those 28.2% been bothered enough to vote, then probably we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this chaos. Not only might there have been a clear and decisive mandate for one course of action, it would have also prevented the current turmoil being unleashed across the country and the very real risk of civil disobedience might have been negated. But clearly the 28.2% had other more important things to do that day. So if anyone is to blame for the current fiasco, it is them. You might think that some of them may well have assumed a vote to remain was a certainty, and therefore didn’t need to vote, but a certainty only becomes a certainty when it is made so. Possibly the remainers who didn’t vote are the one’s protesting the most vociferously now?
Although the 32.2% of us – well you, because I’ve always voted – who didn’t vote at the 2017 general election are marginally less contemptible. That was the election that saw a divided government weakened to the shambles it is today. That is why where we are where we are, it is wholly the fault of an apathetic electorate and quite why no politician dares speak this incontrovertible truth is beyond me. Far from being a failure of democracy, it is the electorate who have failed democracy.
So parliament is prorogued? It’s not as we voted for it, is it?
the brilliantly leaping gazelle 
very well said, very pertinent, those extra votes may well have decided the issue outright, however I still marvel at the inanity that some people peddle regarding the closeness of the result, this is and will remain utterly redundant, remain…lost, no amount of postulating on that very close result makes a blind jot of difference, I repeat again, remain LOST, if there had been a tacit acceptance of this by the losers then again, we may be in a very different place now, but the losers needed to accept their loss graciously but never have, it’s a shame that their outrage (demonstrated consistently since the result) has never manifested itself for the towns in the north laid waste by thatcher thirty years ago, or outside parliament for those poor sods on Universal Credit, or to understand that in towns where immigration is so catastrophically high that the local population no longer recognise their own communities and that for them immigration is not the great white hope they are constantly told it is, but of course they don’t do that, they expound on and on about their incredulity at the result, twist the democratic argument to such an extent that Jo Swinson can with a straight face say she is serving democracy by happily being prepared to overturn the result and revoke Article 50, with their self interest writ large whilst no doubt thinking all the while they are the liberal, logical ones, the open minded ones, the superior ones…the irony (and sadness) is that they are anything but
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…and there was me thinking I wrote long sentences…
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