Virgin’s Richard Branson calls for UK parliament “to take a second look at the EU referendum”
In a big piece published today on Virgin’s web portal, mega entrepreneur Richard Branson has called for Britain’s parliament to “take a second look at the EU referendum”.
Branson, a big supporter of the campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union (and why would anybody listen to Nigel Farage’s advice, rather than to Branson’s?), writes:
Elections and referenda don’t come with a two-week, open-box return policy. Maybe they should. Because as the results of the European Union referendum (which was technically an advisory non-binding referendum for MPs to consider) emerged early on Friday morning, Leave voters across the UK realised that they had opened a Pandora’s Box of negative consequences. And worst of all, they quickly learned that they’d been repeatedly misled to by the Leave campaign.
Branson himself finds that dissing of the “experts” crazily questionable. He continues:
The Leave campaign had advised concerned citizens not to listen to the ‘experts’ and ‘the scaremongers’ and that the economy would be just fine. And yet, in the first day of trading following the result, two trillion US dollars were wiped off the world’s share prices.
UK markets lost more money in one day than the country paid into the EU since we joined it many years ago (most of which came back in grants, anyway). These losses affect everyone’s pensions, jobs, salaries, and government income, and they will push Britain towards a recession that will make it even more difficult to deliver essential public services.
The pound dropped to a 31-year low, with serious impact on British imports and people’s holiday travel abroad. And the UK suffered the ignominy of having its credit outlook lowered to ‘negative’ by ratings agency Moody’s on the expectation that Brexit would deliver a serious blow to the UK economy.
Two years before Brexit will even become reality, according to EU rules, it is already having massive consequences on the UK economy, and on society. Brexit has fractured the country more than any other event in recent memory.
Based on the misrepresentation made by the Leave campaign, Parliament needs to take the petition of more than three million people to call for a new referendum seriously. The alternative is to watch a rapid decline of Britain’s health and wellbeing.
