Loser's consent

This is a simple concept that has hitherto been taken for granted, that in democracies political parties can win and loose power. The loosing party gracefully hands power to the other without any qualms and heads into opposition waiting for the chance to win power agsun. In Britain we even have what is called the Salisbury convention, which was agreed in the 1940s, stating that the house of lords wouldn't try to bloc government legislation , providing it had been in the winning party's manifesto and thus been subjected to democratic approval. I am sure that the reader can see what would happen if this broke down , as the only way to regime change would be a coup or violence , rather than democracy. Losers consent is part of the mortar which holds democracy together.

Unfortunately in the EU referendum one side, the side that lost , simply refused to accept or consent to the result. In fact it was worse than this and they've carried on for three years testing and trying every single way to halt and stop brexit by any and every means necessary. They've simply ignored a result they don't like and give self serving reasons to ignore it , such as people didn't know what they were voting for or that people were lied to , as if a year long campaign hadn't happened, with a vast amount of debate and readily accessible information (Ireland and the back stop never being mentioned by the remain side).  What's even worse was that a general election was held in 2017  and all of the Labour and Conservative MPs were elected on manifesto commitments to uphold the referendum result. Yet as soon as they took their seats, half of them decided to ignore their own manifesto which they were elected on. Thus a double ignore of their own voters. The attitude seemed to be:

1). They're xenophobic, but stupid , so we can ignore them and in five years they'll still vote for us
2). In my safe seat we weigh the votes not count them. They're so tribal , a cat with a blue or red Rosetta would be elected. So we can ignore them.
3). I'm an MP, so self important I can do what I want.

So there isn't a constitutional crisis. It is a crisis of one side refusing to accept a vote and all of the issues of the past few years come from that .  One only hopes that this isn't infectious and starts to catch on to general elections. Then democracy is definitely dead. If it isn't already.