Changing your mind with two weeks to go? If so you’re not the only one. News overnight was dominated by the Conservative MP Dr Sarah Wollaston’s defection from the Vote Leave campaign. We discuss your reaction to that and invite you to take a look at some other conversations we’re highlighting around the site, including those on Tony Blair and John Major in Northern Ireland and the latest in our Reality Check series.
Click on the links at the end of each section to get involved, or head over to our EU referendum live blog to follow the news and discussion as it happens.
Some readers we’ve spoken to have suggested there hasn’t been enough focus on getting people to register to vote. So here goes. You can still register to vote until 23.59 on Thursday 9 June. If you are eligible, click here to do so.
1. Sarah Wollaston defects to remain campaign and accuses Vote Leave of ‘post-truth politics’
Wollaston, a former GP, says she was prompted to defect by the claim emblazoned on the Vote Leave battlebus that Brexit would free up £350m a week for the NHS, something she says “simply isn’t true”.
Our morning briefing included early reaction: “David Cameron was certainly pleased and Brexiters were not, their views ranged from the critical to the dismissive to the conspiracy theorist.” Here we look at the conversations you’re having.
Good for Dr Wallaston. I am surprised there haven't been more who change their minds. Apparently it was a really, really hard decision for Boris. He wavered for both sides before finally deciding to go with leave. So if some kind of convincing argument or new piece of research came to light, such as over 80% of economists thinking Brexit would be disastrous for the UK economy might Boris revert, change his mind and back remain? Would anything persuade the Leave supporting politicians? No, because actually they don't really care. This is not, for them, about what's best for the UK or for the British people. This is about their careers. That's all. It's despicable.
Needless to say, it wasn’t all support though. Here’s a comment from one of her constituents:
Sarah is the mp for my area. She wrote a column in the local magazine on how she believed that leaving the EU was the right thing for Britain, and that is precisely why she WON the local elections here just last month. Another MP who cant be trusted and does not represent the people of her constituency who are majority for leave (Torbay, Totnes).
What an extraordinary lack of integrity.
She's quitting the Leave campaign because that campaign is being economical with the truth, and she is now to going back Remain? Presumably she thinks Cameron holds the flaming sword of Truth in his hand. Maybe she was so blinded by Cameron's own virtue and integrity she couldn't see straight.
An MP, who is supposed to do her own thinking, and reach her own conclusions, based on careful examination of the issues, is now going to vote Remain and back the campaign for Remain, because she might feel a little bit sad on June the 24th if we have voted for exit.
How much worse can this shiftfest get?
Difficult to see why she should decide so this late on, as the figure has been used for some time.
But she overlooks the main problem in the NHS: demand and treatment costs are going up faster than efficiency can be improved and additional resources provided, within the EU or without.
Finally on that topic, a question that provoked hundreds of reactions and perhaps the longest discussion thread so far today:
If she is genuinely concerned about the NHS, why is she a conservative MP?
2. Live: Major and Blair warn of Northern Ireland’s fate post-Brexit
There’s been quite a bit of chatter about how Brexit could have a destabilising effect on Northern Ireland. On Wednesday, our reporter Esther Addley wrote about the “Brexit threat causing alarm among Northern Irish border communities”. The former US president Bill Clinton has said that leaving the EU could put peace in Northern Ireland at risk, and now two former prime ministers, Tony Blair and John Major have appeared in front of students at Ulster University and declared Brexit would close the Irish border as we know it.
Here, at the same event, speaking on the same side, are the two politicians who respectively achieved the highest recent popular vote and largest Commons majority for the Tories and the highest recent popular vote and largest Commons majority for the Labour party.
Between them they might just know a little about what the British voter wants.
Of course the two are also pretty divisive figures among you.
Major has shown bad judgment in campaigning alongside Blair - one of the most unpopular politicians of all time. Of course this then brings Major's judgment in supporting 'Remain' into question. Bad move.
But after Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, said she did not accept the future Blair and Major set out, you went on to discuss the issue of Northern Ireland.
I'm from a border county in the Republic and am old enough to remember the towers and checkpoints. You can barely tell when you pass from the Republic into the North now. A lot of travel over and back it is sustaining lots of businesses etc. How does Leave propose to manage the border if Britain votes Out?
Leave campaign must be made to explain why 'taking control of our borders' doesn't need to include the only land border between UK and EU . Keeping that border free and open as the N Ireland Secretary insists it will remain makes a nonsense of their border claims.
You can click on any of these links to join the conversation.
When Eire won independence, Britain granted her citizens equal rights and privileges with British citizens. Irish Republic citizens didn't need passports to come to the UK before we joined the EEC and they won't need them after we leave the EU. Irish citizens can get a British passport virtually on demand, they can vote in all British elections and can (and have with distinction ) serve(d) in the British armed forces.
There will be no border between Eire and Northern Ireland. That's a fact, and if Blair and Major are claiming otherwise they're lying.
The elites are running scared. Don't give what they want. Vote leave.
If there is no border between the Republic and the North, then effectively you have to reply on the border controls of the Republic (for example, at Dublin or Shannon) to decide not only whether or not a particular person is welcome in their country, but whether or not they will be welcome in the UK.
You are delegating control over entry to the UK to another nation, unless you agree that the UK Border Force will be checking passports when someone flies into Ireland. And that doesn't sound much like taking back control of borders to me.
Now, how large the group of people "allowed into Ireland, but undesirable in the UK" may be, I don't know. But without some controls between the states, there's not much you can do, and surely once that lack of controls is known, it will become an even more attractive route for people.
You could check passports for people travelling from (any part of) Ireland to the UK mainland, but that is effectively a) breaking the CTA and b) really going to piss off the Unionists in the North.
3. Reality check: What is the European Union?
Many of you have been contributing to a form – see the bottom of the page – with stories you want us to report on. One was on the workings of the EU. You made the point that before considering whether Britain should leave, it’s important to understand what the EU is, and what it isn’t. Seems fair to us.
Many of you saw this article as a good place to debate not just what the EU is as an institution, but how democratic it is. Not all of you agreed with an analogy in the piece:
How dare you compare the European Commission with the British Civil Service??
European Commission has the power to overrule all EU decisions, inclusive those of individual countries' Civil Service. And in secret if needed when going against the grain.
And that includes all international trade deals, environmental decisions, agricultural policy, deals with mafia ruled countries to keep immigrants at bay.
Who is being fooled here?
The commission is responsible for ensuring member states act in accordance with European law and does, in fact, act like a civil service in the same way that the job centre polices benefits.
European law itself is passed jointly by the council of ministers (our own governments - missing from this piece as things stand for some reason) and the parliament.
In the UK treaties are negotiated in large part by delegates from various UK government departments - in other words, by the civil service.
The EU is about solving problems collectively, as a continent. I know that Britain likes to see itself as separate from Europe and not really part of it, but I still feel this stems from a frankly imperialistic viewpoint. Britain once had the largest empire in the world, and with it a historical sense of superiority. I believe some people still haven't lost this feeling that Britain is superior to other nations, and that our way of doing things is better. Thus, the compromise that must be achieved by being in the EU, by being part of a team and not always getting your way, is difficult to stomach.
Does the EU have problems? Yes. It's very bureaucratic and inefficient, including the ludicrousness of commuting between Strasbourg and Brussels, it could do with simplification and non-interference in certain national matters, but generally our membership has been of a benefit to the UK. I do dislike these arguments that the EU is undemocratic though. We vote for our MEPs regularly, and the EU Commission is just 28 people. Compare that to the 802 unelected House of Lords members, who have about the same amount of power as the Commission. The Commission cannot create laws; it only suggests them to Parliament.
As far as I see it, the elected MEPs act like the House of Lords. The unelected commission propose laws based on meetings by the elected (or not really as with the UK) representatives of the individual countries' governments. The MEPs/House of Lords then decides which laws go through. Seems like a very democratic and sensible system. The only problem being that countries like us a) don't have a proper democracy and b) we don't treat the European elections very seriously. The best thing that could happen would be for the EU to make it essential for countries that wanted preferential trade deals to have a decent level of democracy. This would exclude the UK and US though, so probably unlikely.
One exasperated reader provoked a discussion early on about whether the public should even be deciding whether to leave or remain in the first place.
Only 10 comments in and we can safely conclude that some people aren't even interested in what the European Union is - they'll vote against it regardless.
I need no further proof for my belief that no referendums should be held on any vital issues.
But all was not lost:
Articles like this should have been published months ago instead of all those horror stories. In fact articles like this should have been published ever since we were part of the EU.
The biggest problem we have in this country with regards to the EU is that few people seem to know how it works, where it's checks and balances are and how its democracy works. I've lost count of how many people have claimed that "we've tried to reform the EU and they told us to get stuffed", yet we've never tried to reform it, we've just tried to get special treatment.
If more people understood how it worked and how leverage can be applied, then there'd be a greater impetus for the government of the time to actually use those levers instead of making a half-hearted, piss poor go of it and then blaming the EU for it.
The other problem we have in this country is that we're given very little information about anything. Most of the media slants information to suit its own political agenda, and so we have popular outrage over absurd proposals as if they've just gone into law.
Regardless of how the referendum goes and regardless of what side any of us stand on it, this issue really has to be addressed. Until it is, the idea of an informed electorate is practically impossible to achieve.
And without an informed electorate, democracy isn't possible.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another roundup of what you’re talking about in the comment sections on the EU referendum. You can help inform what we report on by filling in the form below.
I admire her honesty. The BBC "reality check" on the £351m is worded as though there's some doubt. The media needs to expose the Brexit camp for the most outrageously flaunted political lie since the pack told by Better Together in the Scottish referendum. The BBC had no reality check for that referendum when the entire English media seemed to be taking lessons from their North Korean colleagues.