Going back to Jim's post on the Brexit Referendum

According to wiki the turnout for the 2016 referendum was 72.21 % of registered voters and 65.38 % of people of voting age

That does compare favourably with the last 6 general election turnouts of 59.4%, 61.4 %, 65.1 % , 66.1 %, 68/7 % and 67.3 %

Personally I am not in favour of referendums under our present set up. Even the referendum of 1975 was non-binding. I am not sure how it would have gone down if the government had ignored that result at the time.