> Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.
Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.
Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.