If you get consistent splits of that nature, you should really look into breaking into two countries.
This point in particular resounded with me:
> The referendum has underlined the social and cultural gap between London and provincial England.
This applies pretty much everywhere. You have the temperate / urban / high-immigrant liberal places, and the more desolate / isolated / sparsely populated / resource rich conservative places, and for some bizarre reason we still keept forcing them to operate under one government.
I have long advocated that in the era of NATO, the UN, and nuclear arms that massive states on the scale of the US or what the EU was designed to be (effectively, over the long term, another US) is counter to all notions of democracy. You only need an independent state so long as it can assert its own borders and have enough economic significance to have bargaining power in international negotiations.
The Northeast Corridor in the US, the West Coast from SF to SD, the Rust belt, and the Carolina's are examples of fairly homogeneous societies, that would make a lot of sense being their own countries, and are all fairly distinct, but would all have significant enough size and GDP to still function easily as first world countries.
Texas is an example of the opposite problem. It has 4 liberal cities surrounded by cowboys. You would almost just want to make 3 cities (Austin / San Antonio are close enough to form one) that are independent states that behave like Luxembourg by being landlocked around the Midwestern Confederacy of Rednecks that spans from the Carolina's to the Rockies.
No, politics is a process to resolve disputes without violence. There should be a supermajority required to decide something so fundamental, and absent that, there should be a compromise found that satisfies people 70/30 rather than splitting the country 51/49.
Thing is, you can't require a supermajority from both sides; if you say that 70% is needed to validate a "Leave" vote, you're essentially saying that 31% is enough for a "Remain" vote.
Requiring a supermajority is just privileging the side that prefers the status quo.
> "Requiring a supermajority is just privileging the side that prefers the status quo."
Rather, requiring a supermajority is to privilege the status quo, period. There are benefits to stability, no matter how it's constituted. These benefits are codified through mechanisms like supermajority votes.
A more rational referendum would have been a far more serious endeavor, perhaps one in which the population voted multiple times.
Big changes should, in general, not be easy to make.
It's going to take 2-3 years before the UK is out of the EU, that is in no way simple. The referendum was only called after decades of political squabbling over the issue and Cameron was extremely confident in putting the question to rest. You are zooming in on one night and ignoring everything that has happened before and what is to happen after.
US requires 3/4 of states to amend the Constitution. The thinking at the time of the Constitution's drafting is that transient majorities are the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.
Yes, and the same people who thought that dearly hoped the Senate would transform into a hereditary aristocracy with life-long terms and the Presidency would become a hereditary monarchy because of the same fears.
I don't think citing that line of thinking (by Hamilton and Adams and the others) says a whole lot. It is, perhaps, ironic, that this line of thought was driven by the belief the British system of government was the best in the world. (Incidentally, during that time period, the 'three branches of government' were considered to be the House, Senate, and Presidency, not the legislative, judicial, and executive.)
Politics is violence: 51% vs 49%