The surprise challenge for Truss on day one: delivering the REAL result of the 2016 Brexit referendum and getting Britain back in the EU

Over the last 36 hours, Team Truss have fundamentally changed our understanding of how constitutional referendums work.  Gone is the outdated concept of "the winner is the side which wins the most votes".  It turns out that instead the proponents of the status quo needn't turn out to vote at all, unless they just happen to fancy a stroll.  If you don't vote, you've in fact voted against change.  Might be news to you, but that's what you've done.

So far, most of the commentary on this startling new rule has focused on the potential impact on any Scottish independence referendum next year.  But in reality, a much more immediate concern is the fact that the result of the 2016 EU referendum has just been automatically reversed.  Here is the new result...

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?  (23rd June 2016)

Remain / Abstain: 62.5%

Leave: 37.5%

So, contrary to our previous erroneous belief, the UK in fact voted by a landslide margin to remain a member of the EU in 2016, and all the tortuous negotiations over withdrawal arrangements since then have just been a very, very silly misunderstanding.  Doh! Doubtless Liz Truss will waste little time in correcting the error and implementing the real result, although it's going to be a bit awkward for her given that a) she'll need Macron's permission to rejoin the EU and she's just insulted him, and b) many of her supporters have been labouring under the misapprehension that her "I accepted the result" comment referred to the previous false assumption that Leave had somehow "won".  But it's just got to be done - people have got to be given what they voted for, even if they didn't actually know they voted, and even if they didn't know how they voted.

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When Britain was going through its epic battles between capitalism and socialism, I doubt if anyone realised that what we'd actually end up with was an idiotocracy.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) September 4, 2022

Tomorrow afternoon, unless all the polls, bookies and pundits are completely wrong, Liz Truss will be declared the new leader of the Conservative party.  On Tuesday, much to the horror of the absurd Nicholas Witchell, she will have to travel to Scotland - bloody SCOTLAND - to be appointed Prime Minister by the Queen.

This is obviously a completely ludicrous situation.  We're talking about an individual who is hopelessly unsuited to high office, let alone the highest office in the land.  But if we can bring ourselves to temporarily take this development seriously, there are two interesting implications.  There's been very minimal mention of the fact that Truss will be Britain's third female Prime Minister, which in itself is a psychological breakthrough, because it means that having a woman in the role has been comprehensively normalised and is now deemed barely worthy of comment.  I'm just about old enough to remember Mrs Thatcher bequeathing an all-male Cabinet to John Major, which made the first female PM look like a freakish historical aberration that was very unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes.  For many years afterwards, when discussion turned to who might be the next leader of the two largest parties, women barely featured as possibilities, or if they did feature it always seemed like a bit of a long shot.  So we've come a long way in a very short space of time.  It must be hoped that from now on parties will always just choose the best leader available, rather than worrying about whether it "should be a woman this time" - although in Labour's case that's extremely unlikely.  They're going to be incredibly embarrassed about the Tories producing three female PMs before Labour have even managed to produce one.

Secondly, it does appear very likely that Truss will be an extremely unpopular leader, both in Scotland and south of the border.  That's obviously good for keeping support for independence high, but it could also lead to complications if the SNP end up using the next Westminster election as a de facto plebiscite.  If Labour appear on the brink of deposing Truss, could some independence supporters have their heads turned by Starmer?

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We've already seen since Nicola Sturgeon's announcement that the overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media are attempting a 'shock and awe' campaign to try to kill off independence - and the misuse of polling is playing a key part in that.  If you'd like to balance things out with polling commissioned by a pro-independence outlet and which asks the questions we want to see asked, one way of doing that would be to help Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive - see details below.

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