No sooner had Sarah Olney swept to her dramatic victory in Richmond Park, than some panicking Brexiteers began peddling a ‘clever’ rhetorical question on social media. It went roughly like this: “With a candidate that didn’t win the popular vote on only a 53% turnout, shouldn’t Tim Farron be calling for a second by-election?!” The ‘joke’, of course, is an attempt to claim that Lib Dem attitudes towards the referendum are hypocritical, or self-undermining.
A moment’s thought, however, brings home that any alleged comparison between Richmond Park and the Brexit result is really rather silly. More interestingly, however, seeing why it is silly points us towards a striking fact about a now prominent wing of the Brexit position: how deeply undemocratic it has become.
We can see this by first stating a blindingly obvious truth: that there will be a second vote in the Richmond Park constituency. It will happen when the next general election is called. (And then after that, and after that, and after that again, whenever there is a parliamentary poll.) The Liberal Democrats are entirely prepared to have their victory contested, and potentially overturned. That’s just in the DNA of parliamentary democracy. No Lib Dem thinks of denying it.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
A radical agenda but can Burnham deliver?
Reg Calvert and his boarding school of rock
A shocking abuse of the legal system where the rich try to bully the weak and poor into submission
Alex Macfie 
Peter Davies 
Chloe 
Paul Holmes 