It may be a relevant question to ask which mandate the government was given by the referendum? Is it a mandate to negotiate conditions for leaving the EU or a mandate to the leave the European Economic Area?
It’s worth pursuing, if we can, Erik’s question. As per the image below, the question put in the referendum was, “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”. There are implied, arguably, the prefatory words, “In your opinion,”.
So is there a ‘mandate’ for anything in the ensuing result? In Switzerland, there is, controversially, much political decision making by referendum. But there is at least a very serious, intensive education process beforehand, giving detailed, accurate expositions of the arguments for and against the proposal/s in question, distributed (at least to Swiss abroad) in printed form. There are at least the makings of informed consent or dissent.
Considering ‘informed consent’ in the UK health care environment, no intervention can be made without this, given in writing, at least in the case of operative procedures. It would probably be a criminal offence in most situations to make an intervention without such informed consent.
Leaving the EU would be a massive intervention in the lives of British citizens, altering the whole political, economic, cultural and social landscape. So why ought there not to have been a similarly stringent process of informed consent/dissent, if a ‘mandate’ of any sort was to be the outcome of the referendum process? Instead, we were exposed to a charlatan’s parade of misinformation, lies and emotive propaganda from snake oil salesmen posing as responsible politicians, driven by either the interests of their own political careers or those of a jingoistic and most unpleasant assortment of far right Conservatives - surely a travesty of any notion of informed consent, whose perpetrators in other contexts requiring informed consent could be liable to criminal proceedings. Perhaps the point about informed consent should be more prominently voiced.
Considering the result, 51.9% of the 72.2% turnout, or 37.48% (if my maths are right) of the electorate voted to ‘leave’. Without a validated process of preliminary informed consent, and with such a small margin in favour of ‘leave’, that doesn’t look like a mandate for anything at all. An appropriate and certainly interesting response could have been to map the regional demographics of ‘leave’ versus ‘remain’ against regional indices of ethnic diversity, deprivation, unemployment, health, educational attainment and maybe others. Provisional conclusions possibly with remedial strategies might then emerge, to the overall benefit of the UK.
If UK regional inequalities are at all relevant to this discussion, it’s interesting to note that France has a department dedicated to this very issue, the CGET (Commissariat général à l'égalité des territoires) - what used to be DATAR (Délégation à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'action régionale), of
Mission Photographique fame in the 1980s.