Exercise 2: Why Referendums Specifically Triggered the Real Collective Responsibility Suspensions — Possible Solution ============================================================================================================================ The chapter's own real, verified account of collective responsibility establishes that it exists to make Cabinet present a single, unified public position on government decisions, with confidentiality protecting the frank private debate that happens beforehand. This convention makes real sense for the kind of decisions a Cabinet normally makes - ordinary government policy and legislation, where the government itself is the actor proposing a specific course of action and needs a coherent public position to defend it. A referendum, verified in the chapter's own real named examples (the 1975 EEC referendum, the 2016 EU referendum), is a genuinely different kind of real political event. Rather than the government proposing and defending its own single policy choice, a referendum specifically asks the electorate directly to decide between two real, opposing options - the very structure of the vote assumes and requires two genuine sides to exist and be represented. If collective responsibility had been strictly enforced in these cases, every Cabinet minister would have been required to publicly support only one side of a question the public itself was being asked to decide, even though real, deep disagreement existed within the governing party itself on both real occasions. This is why suspending the convention specifically for referendums, rather than for ordinary legislation, makes real structural sense: referendums are precisely the kind of decision where genuine, legitimate division of opinion needs to be visibly represented rather than artificially suppressed behind a single government line, since the whole real point of holding a referendum in the first place is to let the electorate choose between real, competing options - not to have the government dictate in advance which option its own ministers are permitted to publicly support. ANSWER: Referendums specifically triggered the real suspensions because they ask the electorate to choose between two genuine, opposing options, unlike ordinary legislation where the government proposes and defends one single policy - enforcing collective responsibility on a referendum would have artificially suppressed real, legitimate internal disagreement on a question the public itself was being asked to decide, which is exactly why the convention was set aside for both the 1975 and 2016 votes specifically. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This identifies the specific structural difference between a referendum and ordinary legislation (two genuine options requiring representation vs. one government position to defend) that explains why this particular kind of vote, rather than any other, prompted the real suspensions.