Northern Ireland 2125?

A referendum is a referendum, if it is open to everyone to vote and there is no cheating. Do you have a better way for a population to decide an issue? If there was a referendum on the Irish language on signs in east Belfast, it is unlikely you would get that controversial issue voted for in a referendum in N.Ireland IMHO, so perhaps a referendum would be the fairest on that issue.

Good to know that you’re such a fan of the Nazi referendums.

We’ve discussed the 1973 referendum in this thread not long ago. I’ll quote myself from post #3168:

The 1973 referendum was absurd because it was asking people to vote on a proposal which there was no mechanism to deliver, and which the government had no idea how to deliver. The British government had no plan at all for NI to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic of Ireland; they hadn't even spoken to the Irish government about how or on what terms this might be accomplished. There was no actual proposal for unity on which people could meaningfully vote.

So everyone knew then and everyone - except, apparently, you - knows now that people were not being invited to vote on a serious or deliverable proposal. This was nothing more than a particularly big opinion poll, and one that asked a particuarly stupid question. It was not taken seriously by the political establishment on either side of the divide in NI, or by Westminster, and for that reason it had zero impact on the course of events in NI.

The British, as we know from recent history, are not very good at referendums, and nobody who observed the Brexit process could possibly think that the British way of doing referendums is reliably a good way for "a population to decide an issue".

I made points about neutral countries tries being invaded by Germany in ww2. I do not think you know that happened.

I do know it happened; famously, it was the proximate cause of the UK's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939. But I’m pretty confident that you do not know that the Allies also invaded neutral countries in World War II. If you did know this, you’d hardly be banging on about the invasion of neutral countries as though it were some unique touchstone of evil.

The primary plan for a Nazi invasion of Ireland was called Operation Green (or Fall Grün), developed in 1940 to support the invasion of Britain. Itnever came about because Britain won the battle of Britain. Even if there was no official plan Germany would have taken over Ireland if it won the war, because it always invaded neutral countries when it was in its interests to do so. And we had no defence really.

That’s kind of my point, itsacoolday. The only reason the Nazis ever contemplated invading Ireland was in support of their invasion of the Britain. They never desired it for its own sake. And they only ever contemplated invading Britain because Britain was impeding its ambition to expand eastwards. So if you’re banging on about the threat of Nazi invasion of Ireland, you have to take account of the fact that that threat was a consequence of the UK’s policy.

Yes we all know the huge losses in Russia in ww2. The idea of war however is to lose as few people on your own side as possible. The UK learnt that the hard way after huge losses on the Somme etc in ww1. Incidentally Britain supplied a lot of arms and materials, boots etc to Russia via the arctic convoys. I know someone whose Dad was on one.

Your point being . . .?

The fact is there was a referendum in N.I. in the early seventies. Voting was open to all adults and was fair. You dismiss the result of the referendum which showed a large majority wanted to stay in the UK. If the poll had shown a majority of the people there wanted to leave the UK then further plans or polls could have been made and no doubt the British government would have left, same as they did everywhere else in the world they were not wanted.

Do you know a better or more democratic way for the public to decide issues rather than referendums? You get in a dig that the British are not good at referendums. What about a referendum here ( not the last 2 the gov. lost) before that on Europe that the gov. re-ran just to get the result it/ the EU wanted? Are we really any better / much different?

Yes, we're vastly different. Had you not noticed? In Ireland we don't have referendums on vague proposals that the government doesn't want to deliver, has no idea how to deliver, and won't say how they would deliver it. We have referendums on concrete, specific proposed laws. The planning and preparation is done before the referendum. We're allowed to know what we're voting on. The whole reason we were able to make an informed decision to reject the Nice Treaty in 2001 is that the Nice Treaty had already been negotiated and signed; we knew what was in it. And when we were asked to vote on the revised Nice Treaty the following year we knew what changes had been made in the Sevillle Declarations to address our concerns; we could compare the two texts, if we wanted, see the differences and make a decision about whether they satisfied our concerns.

So, yeah, we're hugely better at referendums than the British. We saw that in 1973, and we saw it again in 2016. No Irish electorate would put up with being treated like that.

You complain about allied countries invading neutral one during ww2 but there was no comparison between that and the far greater number of neutral countries invaded by the Axis. Also, when Iceland was invaded by Axis for example, nobody was hurt or killed. In Denmark and the other neutral countries invaded by the Germans, all Jews etc etc were rounded up where possible and sent to extermination camps. Other Danish were put to work working for the Germans. The Germans would have deported all Jews communists gays and disabled from Ireland had they won ww2, there is no doubt about that. And we had not the military means to resist them / stop them doing whatever was in their interests.

Ask The people of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg etc etc how they fared after Germany invaded them in ww2 even though they were neutral. What happened their minorities. If any of their civilians became slaves in German mines or factories.

Nobody is disputing that occupation by Nazi Germany was a ghastly experience, but that wasn't your point. The Germans treated their own population in a similarly ghastly way, and the populations of other Axis states, and the populations of belligerent countries that they occupied. Neutrality had nothing to do with it.

Your point wasn't about the treatment of civilian populations; it was about the invasion of neutral counties. And if all you can say, on discovering that the Allies invaded neutral countries too, is that they didn't treat the populations as badly as the Nazis did, that's pretty telling. And you're overlooking the fact that, outside of WWII, the UK invaded other countries, and treated their populations extremely badly — most notably, Australia, which only the other day you were holding up as a shining example of the benefits of being invaded and occupied by the British.

By adopting "not so bad as the Nazis" as your standard of merit, you're setting a pretty low bar. I'll cheerfully concede that the UK was nothing like as bad as the Nazis, not even close. But I'm not inclined to feel indebted to, or show gratitude to, or express support for, a foreign government simply on the grounds that they're not quite as bad as the Nazis; I look for a bit more than that.