Billionaire businessman Richard Branson is calling on Parliament to “reject” the “nonbinding” Brexit vote and is demanding a second referendum.
Mr. Branson has insisted the vote was “technically an advisory non-binding referendum for MPs to consider” which should be instantly reconsidered as the public had voted against big business and globalisation. He wrote on his blog:
“The vast majority of MPs voted in by the electorate want the UK to stay part of Europe. In light of the misrepresentations of the Leave campaign, Parliament should reject the results of this non-binding referendum as Nicola Sturgeon has announced she will do in Scotland’s Parliament.”
Adding: “Before the UK government invokes Article 50 of the European Treaty and does irreversible damage to the United Kingdom, the people’s elected representatives must decide whether the facts that have emerged really warrant abandoning the EU and whether a second referendum will be needed.”
Mr. Branson ran through the now familiar arguments to suggest that the referendum result was somehow invalid— as voters were lied to and are too stupid to assess the facts for themselves.
He said promises about immigration, the NHS and financial markets made by Leave campaigners were untrue and argued that Scotland could break away from the UK.
He also urged people to sign a petition calling for a second referendum, which is now being investigated by the Electoral Commission after a large number of its signatories were revealed to be fraudulent.
“Parliament needs to take the petition of more than three million people to call for a new referendum seriously. The alternative is to watch a rapid decline of Britain’s health and wellbeing,” he wrote.
Mr. Branson is far from the only anti-democratic Europhile to call for the vote to be ignored. This morning, the Guardian published a column entitled: “How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down”.
“It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force” it said. Claiming that “nothing” in the UK’s constitution “allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.”
Leaving the EU got a mandate of 17.410 million — the biggest democratic mandate this country has ever seen.
In 1997 Tony Blair got 13.5 million votes; John Major received 14 million in 1992; the Alternative Voting system was rejected by 16 million in 2011; the Common Market had 17.378 million in 1975, and David Cameron won 10.7 million votes in 2010 and 11.3 million in 2015.