It would have been ambiguous if Remain won by 4% as well.
And we would never have heard the end of it about how Brexit wus robbed etc. Just as remainers are grumbling, leavers would be grumbling.
This was a badly designed referendum:
1. It should have been clearly stated that it was binding or non-binding. As the issue lies, as per the British constitution it is non-binding.
2. It should have clearly stated a % to leave - 60% would have made the situation unambiguous and would have also driven out more leave voters. A win of a few % either way was inevitably going to lead to bad blood.
3. OR they should have had it as a two-stage question
A. Do you wish to leave the EU or stay with the same status quo as today
B. If you vote leave then which option do you want
b.1. same status quo but more control over x y z
b.2. leave under WTO rules (no more following EU rules or payments or immigration or free movement of goods and services)
b.3. remain part of the customs union (free movement of goods, people, services and capital, and follow the rules)
b.4. rejoin the EFTA from the EU (all 4 freedoms + pay into the EU budget but no representation and no need to follow every rule)
This was a shoddily designed referendum and we see the result now.
Even if Remain had won we would have the same debates
The only unambiguous verdict was given by Scotland - 63% to stay.
The first was that a complex problem was reduced to a false binary – leave or remain. Subsequently the entire country was locked into that binary: everyone must be either a ‘leaver’ or a ‘remainer’. and the possibility of there being a wide range of legitimate intermediate positions was swept aside. (If you reply ‘neither’ when you’re asked if you’re a leaver or remainer, you’re classed as some kind of nutter.)
The second flaw follows from the first. All referendums are necessarily reductive (which is why direct democracy as a system of government never got much beyond Periclean Athens): but when a referendum is about a change to the constitutional status quo, that defect can be mitigated by working out the alternative to the status quo in great detail before it’s put to the vote. Thus, for instance
- the other recent UK-wide referendum, in 2011, on a change in the voting system to a form of proportional representation, you weren’t asked ‘do you want a proportional representation voting system, yes or no’: you were asked whether or not to accept a very specific form of PR which was worked out and published in the enabling Act.
- the referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on the Good Friday Agreement ending the Troubles didn’t ask for a vote on whether or not to introduce an unspecified system of power-sharing government for the province: you were asked to accept or not a meticulously detailed form of devolved government which had been thrashed out in years of negotiation between all the parties.
- countries introducing new constitutions don’t hold a referendum until a constitutional convention etc has done something similar, and the electorate is asked to approve or not the detailed result (and usually require a decisive 2/3 majority).
In all these examples there’s no ambiguity about the result, as there has been from the outset with the Brexit referendum.
More or less everything which has gone wrong with Brexit since can be traced to these original design problems. The errors of the May government have of course made matters worse, but are not the root cause.
Why was it so badly designed? Well, Cameron’s only motive in calling the referendum was to lance a running internal sore in the Conservative Party. Since the result was (he assumed) a foregone conclusion, thinking through the wider consequences didn’t matter.