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Desperate efforts are being made by Farage, the Torygraph and the potty Express to persuade us that Catalan's rejection of Spain is a rejection of the EU.

It is nothing of the sort of course. Catalan would really love to be part of the EU as an independent nation, although this would be embarrassing to Spain. Should Catalan actually manage to secede, I imagine the EU will not recognise it for about 20 or 30 years when tempers will have cooled to the extent when it will admit Catalonia with Spain's agreement.

It is an internal Spanish dispute, and apart from having to remain on good terms with both sides, nothing to do with the EU. Spain, like all the other members of the EU, is a sovereign nation and will have to handle the dispute as best it can.

Madrid seems to have handled it very badly. They would have been wiser, I think, to allow a non-binding referendum in the region. According to the polls, the 'leavers' - although numerous, are not in the majority.

Difficult call on the result of a real referendum. It wouldn't be the first poll where people intentionally gave the wrong answer in order to manipulate the situation. If the polls all came back as a definite "no", the Spanish Government might have risked a real referendum.

Now which country did that happen in recently

Well, a government doesn't HAVE to follow the result of a referendum.

Cameron's mistake was not to call a referendum, but to promise that the government would follow it's conclusion. We have a parliament to make decisions and get things done, not to run referendums and let the people decide. Had Madrid made it clear that the result was non-binding, I suspect the problem would simply have gone away.

You mean the UK Government doesn't have to follow the result of a referendum, this is because we don't have a proper bill of rights so a referendum has no legal status whatsoever.

Many other countries have binding referendums because they are further advanced in democracy than we are. We don't even have the power to de-select an MP never mind how rogue he has become - there is absolutely nothing to stop a candidate pretending to be with one party but voting with another party all the time once he takes his seat.

Spanish law may be different to ours, I believe they do have binding referendums?

Not quite. We could have had a binding referendum, it's perfectly possible, we had one a few years ago for the alternative vote system.

The key is how the "enabling act" is set up. The for AV referendum it was very specific in the act as to what would happen as a result of more votes being cast in favour of AV than against (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/1/part/1/chapter/2). Clearly defining the winning line and the prize. This was a binding referendum.

The EU referendum was not set up in this way but it could have been. Instead it became advisory or consultative, no winning line, no prize, just advice.

I'd love to point you to the same section of the EU referendum act but it's not there which makes it non-binding.. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/36/contents

It is, the spanish constitution lays out the rules and as far as I understand it the catalans would need to get the rest of spain to agree to a referendum and then get a result across the whole of spain. So probably unlikely to get the result the catalan separatists want. (http://idpbarcelona.net/docs/blog/legality_referendum.pdf)

As with most legal things there are elements of interpretation which can be argued either way... or how else would lawyers make money...

We seem to be saying the roughly the same thing but not necessarily from the same angle.

The Government has the choice of what they do with referendums, the people have no say in it because we do not have a proper bill of rights.

While the Government can chose to have a binding referendum by an act of parliament, they also have the power to repeal.

ok. I can see that.

I'm not sure the government necessarily get to choose, they are only there at our whim and ultimately have to get anything through a vote which they don't necessarily win.

I'm not a fan of the whip system which means they can try to exert a lot of pressure on MPs to vote in line with their party when the MPs code of conduct specifically says that MPs should, with consideration for their constituents (which covers all of them not only those that voted for them or that are eligible to vote) should always act in the best interests of the country. (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmcode/1076/107602.htm#a3)

Nice exchanging views with you. I'm off to bed. Good night.