Catherine West M, April 2015. Wikicommons, Giuseppe Sollazzo. Some rights reserved.Rosemary Bechler and Alex Sakalis, openDemocracy ( oD): We run the Can Europe make it? section on openDemocracy, and post-Brexit, we are particularly interested in how UK citizens will cultivate relations with their fellow Europeans, so we thought it would be good to talk to you about this, since you have just become secretary and co-founder of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-EU Relations. The whole process of BREXIT, including very untransparent negotiations on the UK’s behalf, seems far from democratic – do you agree?
Catherine West MP (Catherine): Unfortunately, having promised this vote, I think David Cameron did have to go through with it once he had won the 2015 election. However, what’s clear is that it is not a very good way of making decisions, because on all referenda different people have very different views as to what that one very bald question means.
And as you know, in the Commons we debated trying to get 16 - 18 year olds the vote on this, because once this relationship changes, they will be the young adults having to cope with all the consequences of it. It would have been great to have younger people voting, and it might have helped to change that result.
