Referendum was advisory

You took 38 Degrees’ money for an expensive wrap advertisement with your edition of August 29, so it is very disappointing that you sought to undermine it with a prominent editorial comment on your normal front page.

The advertisement was clearly labelled as an advertisement as you said yourself in your comment, so it was unnecessary for you to go out of your way to repeat that and disassociate the Observer from the advertisement.

It was just inaccurate for you to add that politicians ‘have a democratic duty to implement the will of the people whenever Parliament chooses to hold a referendum’.

The Supreme Court confirmed that the referendum was only advisory.

In our representative democracy, MPS’ duty is to exercise their own judgement in the best interests of the nation and their constituents, which may not be the way the majority of voters voted in an advisory referendum.

If voters are dissatisfied with how their MPS exercise their judgement, they should vote against them at the next election.

In any case, the advertisement was not about whether to ‘implement the will of the people’ to leave the EU; it was about whether to leave without a deal.

As that wasn’t asked in the referendum, it was presumably left to politicians to decide although, during the campaign, Leave politicians repeatedly told us it would be easy to get a good deal.

In his letter of August 29, Mr Hunnikin says that Swiss MPS ‘implement the result of referendums regardless of the percentage of the majority or the number that abstained’.

The difference is that referendums are written into Swiss law and carefully regulated.

Switzerland recently reran a referendum because of irregularities.

Our Supreme Court decided that, despite irregularities by the Leave side, it could not annul our referendum, because, as it was only advisory, there was nothing to annul, but politicians have power to ignore it.

ANTHONY TUFFIN

Solent Way, Selsey