Indeed it is happening because the political system is broken, but in the exact opposite way from how you have described.

"A small anti-EU, right wing party" - UKIP got nearly 13% of the vote and would probably be part of a coalition government with the Conservative party if we had a proportional representation system. Instead they have 1 MP. The SNP got only 8.6% of the vote and they have 56 MPs.

The referendum is happening because finally the grassroots of the Conservative party prevailed on the parliamentary Conservative party that we had to have one. Polling has historically shown that at least 40% of the country want to leave the EU. All of the traditional parties support the EU membership.

The UK joined an economic community that has somehow transformed into a superstate. You need to have democratic process if you want to make a change that big.

> The UK joined an economic community that has somehow transformed into a superstate

I've seen some variant of this claimed time and time again, but I don't really get it. The EU has always been supranational, always been pro-harmonisation and -integration. The scope of what it covers may have expanded somewhat over time (and that's been actively participated in by the UK anyway), but is it really a fundamentally different institution in 2016 from what there was in 1975? The main thing it did in 1975 and does in 2016 is set common rules for trade. Okay, it has nominal leaders now and some semblance of democratic process, but that's a feature of the UN, too, and nobody describes it as a superstate.

The EU simply did not exist in 1975. That's not just a technical comment: it really didn't exist until 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty. Since 1975 there is a currency (and monetary policy), there is a proper and separate legal system, there a real political process with a parliament and an executive and many other changes. Trade is now only a part of a much bigger story.

In 1975 there wasn't even a flag - the circle of yellow stars was a symbol used by different pan-national organisation (that still exists) with no relation at all to the EEC.

> The EU simply did not exist in 1975. That's not just a technical comment: it really didn't exist until 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty

Under its current name, yes, but the European Union we know today is really the successor to the European Communities of yesteryear.

> Since 1975 there is a currency (and monetary policy),

Which the UK doesn't participate in, mostly.

> there is a proper and separate legal system,

This isn't new. There has been EU law since before the UK joined. The European Communities Act 1972 specifically provides for the conversion of EU law into UK law, and its supremacy over UK law.

> there a real political process with a parliament and an executive and many other changes.

The European Parliament existed long before the UK joined, and has been named that since 1962. But in fairness, it only started having elections in 1979 (it was previously appointed).

The European Commission, the executive, also existed before the UK joined. It has been a single body since 1967 (and there were three executives before that - their merger is sometimes considered the beginning of the modern EU).

> Trade is now only a part of a much bigger story.

It's always been part of a bigger story. The European Economic Community, after all, was only one of the three European Communities we joined.

> In 1975 there wasn't even a flag - the circle of yellow stars was a symbol used by different pan-national organisation (that still exists) with no relation at all to the EEC.

So? Lots of international organisations have flags. The Commonwealth of Nations has its own flag, and it's never considered a superstate.

Most of these ultimately come down to a Ship of Theseus problem - how many changes can something be subject to until it becomes a different thing altogether? Is the European Parliament of today really the same as the unelected body of 1962? Is the judicial system really the same one?

Clearly you think that it is the same body. I hope you can also see how others could be cynical about this expanded scope and view it as surprising and undesirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Yeah, I can understand that. Undoubtedly the EU has changed over time, and many people might not like those changes. I'm just suspicious of the claim that the EU is very different from the EC voted on in 1975. In some respects it is, but I feel it is misleading to look back and say it was just something like a loose free trade agreement. It was much more than that even when we originally joined, though it could be argued that the general public weren't very aware of it.

On the other hand, I don't know if the general public understands the EU now, either.

In the UK, the EU is a topic like vaccines, evolution or climate change is in other countries. A decades long torrent of anti-EU propaganda has left people adrift from any bedrock of facts to begin a discussion.

The EU has 33,000[1] direct employees, I'd hardly call that a superstate.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/hr_key_figures_2016.p...

My definition is not about number of employees and is common usage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstate

Since labour would have won (by one seat) if it weren't for libdem voters coming back to Labour and thereby handing 12 threeway-split seats to the conservatives, not to mention the places that Labour to UKIP defections would have came back to them as second votes, a replay with the same votes but different rules wouldn't have been a con-ukip coalition government.

Though obviously, if the rules changed then everything would change, new parties, new alliances, less tactical vote buying, more democracy.

The British political and electoral systems are fundamentally broken, to be sure. That said, it's also worth noting that in this case by far the biggest loser at the last general election because of that broken system was UKIP, the "small anti-EU, right-wing party" you mentioned, which despite commanding 12.7% of the popular vote wound up with only 1 MP out of 650. Even the Lib Dems, who took probably the biggest political battering in a generation at that election, didn't lose out that badly.

Had we had anything resembling proportionate representation in the House of Commons after the election, it is not unlikely that UKIP would have held the balance of power in a hung parliament, and that as effectively a single-issue party they would then have demanded action on their main issue as the price of co-operation. Whether any of us would agree with them or not, the fact is that nearly 4 million people did vote for them, so it's hard to argue that the current situation is somehow unjustified.

My personal view is that one good way to bring more accountability into British politics would be to make more use of direct democracy on specific issues, moving away from the transparent fiction that whichever party wound up in power despite almost always receiving a minority of the popular vote somehow has a popular mandate to implement any policy that was in their manifesto on any issue. From that point of view I'm happy to see a referendum that splits party lines take place on such a controversial issue anyway, regardless of my personal preference for its outcome.

The Tories have been squabbling about this for years, well before UKIP came on the scene.

Yes, and as long as the squabble stayed internal, it didn't affect their first-past-the-post results.

Traditional political logic was that every vote for UKIP was a Tory vote wasted. In reality, they wasted quite a few Labour votes as well.