A petition calling for a second EU referendum has reached three million signatures, attracting the biggest surge of support Parliament’s website has ever seen.

The author of the petition, William Oliver Healey, says the Government should re-stage the referendum because the winning vote for Leave was less than 60 per cent and was based on a turnout of less than 75 per cent.

For comparison, US turnout in 2012 was just under %55

A petition calling for a second EU referendum has reached three million signatures, attracting the biggest surge of support Parliament’s website has ever seen.

The author of the petition, William Oliver Healey, says the Government should re-stage the referendum because the winning vote for Leave was less than 60 per cent and was based on a turnout of less than 75 per cent.
Professor John Curtice, whose exit poll was the only one to predict the Conservatives would win last year’s general election, said the subject was so divisive within mainstream political parties and their supporters that it would be unlikely to form a campaigning issue for some time – let alone spark another public vote.

Thursday’s referendum saw 17.4 million (51.9%) votes cast to leave the EU, compared with 16.1 million (48.1%) for remaining part of the bloc, with a turnout of 72.2%, according to the Electoral Commission.

And then there is this…

Scotland could veto Brexit laws to ‘protect its interests’

Scotland’s parliament would consider blocking legislation on Britain’s exit from the European Union if that were necessary to protect Scottish interests, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Sunday.

Scotland, a nation of five million people, voted to stay in the EU by 62 to 38 percent in a referendum on Thursday, putting it at odds with the United Kingdom as a whole, which voted 52 to 48 percent in favour of an exit from the bloc, or Brexit.

Under the United Kingdom’s complex arrangements to devolve some powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, legislation generated in London to give effect to the vote to leave the EU would have to gain consent from the three devolved parliaments.

The sudden flourishing of neo-fascist movements and philosophy in the USA, Europe, Russia, China, Japan and the ANZAC countries (BTW, is Canada getting any of this, is there a growing right wing movement there too?) seems to suggest that there are fundamental changes going on that are driving events. The world is starting to look and feel a lot like it did almost a century ago, when authoritarian right wing regimes started flexing their muscles all over Europe, Japan and the Americas.

The middle classes in modern industrial societies seem to have a tendency to react this way to economic distress that challenges the hope they have for an ever-rising wave of prosperity. The boom of the 1920s led to the Depression, and soon to World War as the economic malaise sweeping the world threatened to become a permanent fixture. We’re seeing what looks a lot like a replay of that old movie, about 80-90 years later.

Its a fool’s errand to look for repetitive patterns in history, but it certainly isn’t unreasonable to expect that similar conditions produce similar results.

Personally though, I’m not sure how journalists in Northern Ireland reported this without throwing up in their mouths: “The poor, downtrodden English finally throw off the yoke of foreign subjugation. ”

The “Leave” vote has kicked open the doors, and now they’ve got to welcome everyone who walks through.

LONDON — For evidence that the Brexit debate is normalizing British racism, look no further than the country’s most enduring national treasure: the pub.

Last weekend at a pub in London’s Soho neighborhood, I got talking to a middle-aged couple. The conversation soon moved to the senseless slaughter of MP Jo Cox at the hands of a terrorist. Killer Thomas Mair was homegrown: a white working-class man from the Scottish “burgh” of Kilmarnock.

Why Cox, asked the bloke. Why couldn’t he have killed a foreigner? Then he gave me the once over and asked, “Where are you really from?”

Six months ago, I would have found his comments shocking. But the Brexit debate has not just challenged the way we conceive of sovereignty. It has legitimized the poisonous campaign vocabulary of U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage and his “breaking point” propaganda.

Farage is the same leader who once said his party would “never win the n—-r vote”, and defended using a racist word for Chinese people in live radio broadcasts. In March, he fueled antagonism toward foreigners when he claimed that mass male-on-female sex attacks were a “nuclear bomb” waiting to explode because of the United Kingdom’s “high” immigration levels. (Police records show that sexual assaults have decreased by half since 2006.) Last week, Farage linked the upcoming Brexit vote to the refugee crisis explicitly, and unveiled a poster featuring a queue of Syrian refugees captioned “Breaking point: the EU has failed us.”

more:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/brexit-campaign-devolves-into-racism-and-xenophobia-2016-06-15
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-25/racism-on-rise-in-u-k-after-brexit-campaign-labour-warns

Education:
The LEAVE voters as a group were less educated.

The EU bureaucracy is an unelected and self-appointed bunch of corrupt careerist paper shufflers answerable to no one but themselves, who craft rules and regulations without the consultation and consideration of the member states. Any doubt about this should be erased by the latest pronouncements of the EU leadership on how to deal with the UK revolt. Instead of trying to understand why and how this happened, and to perhaps suggest that Brussels should spend more time attempting to understand the concerns and criticisms of their members, they are already devising ways to punish the UK for its action, in an admitted attempt to discourage other states from following suit–through intimidation and threat. In other words, they’re talking stick, not carrot.

But as you point out, the fascist support (here, in Britain, and in Europe) for the potential breakup of the EU seems to be gravitating primarily about nativist and racist concerns, extreme populism and nationalism. Whatever problems may exist with the EU (and I believe there are plenty) the motivation to make this break, and certainly the most vocal reactions to it) are all coming from the usual suspects for the usual reasons. Its no wonder they sound so hauntingly familiar.

Its not surprising that the bulk of the motivation for this action is from the English, with only lukewarm support from Wales, and even less from Scotland. Northern Ireland, of course, voted with England, they are more English than the English, and terrified of the Catholic Irish in their midst and across the border. And it is no surprise the vote for separation was strongest among rural, small-town and lower-educated Britons.

At the risk of being accused of racism myself, I can’t help that notice that Anglo-Saxon England, with its long history of Empire and and its often brutal subjugation of the other (Celtic) nations of the British Isles led this effort. And it is little coincidence that many of the so-called “white” and “conservative” sector of the American population identifies with Anglo-Saxon England. Of course, this has nothing to do with “race”, no genetic test can be used to differentiate amongst the peoples of the British Isles, but there are vast cultural and ethnic differences between them. Not only have the English always had a profound contempt for the “wogs” in their Empire, and the Frogs and Dagoes in Europe, but that contempt has been carried on to the Scots, Irish and Welsh. And of course, the English have historically been divided profoundly in other ways as well, regionally, linguistically, by wealth, and by class. Especially by class.

No, I’m not blaming Brexit on racism, if I were a British subject I might have well voted for leaving the EU myself, for the reasons I detailed above. But as a close reading of the essay Rob linked us to reveals, racism and bigotry certainly played a part in that decision.