This is indeed astounding and unprecidented - the court ruling, that is, not proroging Parliament to avoid its scrutiny. (There was a much more clear-cut example of that at the end of the Major administration where he suddenly prorogued Parliament for the entire three-week period between his announcement and the general election, most likely to avoid scrutiny of a corruption scandal involving his party. He was one of the folks who submitted briefs in support of the claim that this prorogration was unprecidented and unlawful.)
> This is indeed astounding and unprecidented - the court ruling, that is
Not sure I'm convinced of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Civil_Service_Union... , the first case to hold that prerogative powers were subject to normal principles of judicial review, may have been that -- but that was 35 years ago, the principle's been accepted for a long time
The democratically elected representatives, who are the supreme law of the land under parliamentary supremacy, decided that they didn't want one. And the normal five year term has several years left to run.
It's very likely that we'll have one before Christmas, but obviously it has to be after cancelling or postponing Brexit.
We've had one, and we're not halfway to the next one. I'm amused to some degree that the idea of another referendum is anathema to some, but the idea of a third election in (almost) as many years is somehow a better idea. If there's another GE now or soon, it'll be the same hung parliament.
Because the problem is Parliament. We have a deal, it has been voted down four times. Johnson has a clear strategy for Brexit, that is being stymied too.
I think what is unclear to you is the fact that we are leaving the EU. That question is closed. The point of the GE (and Johnson's strategy) is to ensure that we leave with a deal (it is very possible that the EU rejects any extension).
It is entirely unclear whether or not the UK will be leaving the EU. There is currently no support for any particular next steps, it is entirely possible that there is now majority support in the country for remaining a member state, and there are obvious avenues by which Brexit may be avoided.
You are welcome to support or object to this process in whatever way you see fit, but please do not spread objective disinformation.
There is no Remain majority in Parliament. I don't know why you think there is, that is factually incorrect.
The Conservative policy is leave. The Labour conference just voted for leave (that is binding on the Executive, that will be their policy in the GE). Yes buddy, I am spreading "disinformation".
actually you are, unless you'd care to provide a reference for that Labour policy.
My understanding of the Labour position is that they would negotiate a deal with the EU (likely including a custom's union) and then hold a second referendum, in which the government would stay neutral.
> There was earlier another boost for Mr Corbyn, as members backed his Brexit strategy to remain neutral on a second referendum until after a general election.
> Mr Corbyn wants to strike a new deal with Brussels within three months of coming to power and then decide which side to back in an ensuing public vote at that point.
Johnson voted _against_ the withdrawal agreement twice, and then for it once. If Parliament is the problem, Johnson has been part of that problem. I'm also not sure what his clear strategy is. The current deal would involve going with a deal he has voted against twice and that his Leader of the House of Commons has recently described as "dreadful", and he has shown no indication that he is going to bring it back. The EU has accused him of "pretending to negotiate"[1], so I'm unclear where a new deal would come from.
Furthermore, unless I'm mistaken, I believe it has only been voted on three times.
Repeating a referendum on the same question is logically inconsistent. What do you do if you get the opposite result, why not just repeat it again, 2-out-of-3, 3-out-of-5? In addition, it casts doubt on and makes a joke out of every other future referendum question.
On the other hand, elections are meant to be repeated.
That's basically the idea of fixed-term elections.
The problem is that when the current government can choose the timing of the elections, it invariably chooses a date that holds some sort of advantage to it. Therefore, the date of the elections is set in advance and can only be changed by a super-majority, depriving the ruling party this advantage.
That's not how the Fixed Term Parliament Act has worked in practice, though. It let Theresa May schedule an early election because she liked the look of the polls and wanted to increase her majority just fine. What it has done is allowed the House of Commons to keep around a government which has genuinely lost the confidence of the House, to the point that they've lost every single vote since Boris took office, because kicking them out will lead to an election the government will likely win. This is not how Parliament is meant to work. The entire system is built around the idea that the government should have the confidence of the House and that the mechanism for holding them accountable is to kick them out if necessary. The FTPA wasn't meant to change this, but unfortunately I don't think anyone thought through the game-theoretical consequences of the mechanisms it created.
We've basically ended up with a situation where instead of the ruling party manipulating the timing of elections, we have a majority of MPs manipulating the timing of the next general election in order to ensure the current government - who they do not support - is at the maximum disadvantage. (As others have said, the next election will almost certainly happen long before its fixed schedule.)
Let's be honest here: If parliament had voted for an early election, a no-deal Brexit would have been inevitable.
Boris would have simply delayed dissolving parliament so the Oct 31 deadline passed while parliament was dissolved. To do so would have been legal and rational.
The opposition would have had to be dumb to fall for that.
That would've been both politically and legally risky. Folks would undoubtedly challenge it on a multitude of legal grounds, some of which could well succeed, and also the general consensus seems to be that Boris' best shot at winning the election is to schedule it before Oct 31 so he can turn it into a vote on no-deal Brexit and scoop up the Brexit Party voter base.
If Boris's main policy is the delivery of a no-deal brexit, and he had a choice to face an election without delivering it, or shortly after successfully delivering it, you think he'd prefer the former?
I mean, I'd prefer to face election as the victorious conquering hero. Unless I thought everything would go to shit the day after no deal.
Problem is that parliament is a. stalled and b. acting in defiance of a democratic vote and c. deliberately blocking the only logical resolution (i.e. a General Election) that does not represent an intentional subversion of democracy.
Voting for an election without an extension would almost certainly mean a no deal Brexit. _That_ is a subversion of democracy - the election is somewhat pointless if it happens after the major decision of the time has been taken.
You could argue that the referendum result is more democratic (elected by direct democracy) than MPs sitting in parliament (elected by first-past-the-post representative democracy).
If the referendum had been held on a level playing ground we could agree. But given that it wasn't and that MPs sitting in parliament trump an advisory referendum we probably won't.
The fact that it was unanimous really drives home how obviously illegal it was. I would love to see a direct criminal or civil consequence for this, as it negatively affected the rights of all UK citizens.
Neither does the Supreme Court[1]. Prorogation is different in that it is not a proceeding of Parliament, but imposed upon them by the usage of the prerogative powers.
[1] It is forbidden from doing so by the Bill of Rights 1688: That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament.
And another high court unanimously ruled it as inside the scope of the law. I think it’s obvious at this point that the English High Court got it wrong this time.
I don't think its fair to say the lower court got it wrong, the written and case law here is, sparse. TBH either way it was going to get appealed so the judges decision is moot. I certainly wouldn't be wanting to make the decision, and I'm sure he thought it was above his pay grade also.
> And another high court unanimously ruled it as inside the scope of the law.
Sure, but if high courts are disagreeing about whether it's even within the scope of the law at all, isn't it a bit much to call it 'obviously illegal', i.e. not only in 'obviously' in scope, but also with 'obvious' ruling?
One did, one didn't, then the mother of those two courts came and sorted it out. Now the court that was wrong understands why it was wrong. It doesn't resent the decision.
I understand that, I'm just highlighting that perhaps a HN commenter (and I include myself) doesn't trump a high court on what's 'obvious' when it comes to the law.
The funny thing is, prorogation was a democratically elected government trying to prevent a democratically elected parliament from democratically (by members of parliament) stopping a democratic (by the populace) decision to exit the EU.
I'm not exactly sure how UK government / prime minister elections work, but I'd expect that this government was elected on the exact same basis as previous governments. PM wants an election as well, which he's likely to win (well, according to polls... which are likely wrong!)
More importantly, the government isn't non-democratic by any definition.
At the last GE, the government wasn't elected with a majority. The people specifically voted to not give the government unfettered power to do whatever they like.
Specifically, Boris was elected prime minister by a very small number of people, and no-one voted for the cabinet.
> PM wants an election as well, which he's likely to win (well, according to polls... which are likely wrong!)
It's kind of irrelevant what the PM wants - general elections are held in accordance to the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 (which was passed when the tories were in government). If he wants an election, it has to be with the consent of Parliament (ie the people).
The lack of proportional representation means that the consent of Parliament is rather different from the consent of the people.
Not since 1931 has a UK party received a majority of votes cast. A quirk of the voting system has usually given a parliamentary majority to one party.
Voters didn't specifically vote for a minority government in 2017. In fact, a greater proportion of them voted for the Conservative party than in the previous election, at which it "won" a majority.
I'm a PR cheerleader as much as the next guy, but our FPTP system isn't exactly an obscure secret. You might not like the outcome that it gives you, but it's by definition what the voters voted for.
I take a different view of whether the results of elections are "by definition what the voters voted for". FPTP tends to produce results at odds with popular support. It has produced majorities in Parliament for parties that received a mere plurality of the votes. It has produced at least one Parliament in which a party without even a plurality of votes received a parliamentary majority.
FPTP can even deny a parliamentary majority to a party with a majority of votes. This is essentially what happened in the last pre-Apartheid election in South Africa, at which most voters voted for the anti-Apartheid coalition.
I'd even go as far as to partly disagree with your judgement that FPTP isn't a secret. Clearly many do know that the House of Commons is elected by FPTP, but even most political correspondents seem unaware of its far-reaching consequences. Among ordinary voters, many are unaware of FPTP. I've met UK voters who don't accept the UK doesn't already have PR for general elections.
(I've also met teachers who tell me their politics students believe we have PR until taught otherwise. I think it's a natural assumption that it necessarily takes more votes to win an election than to lose.)
I'd have to agree with you that I think a lot of voters don't understand FPTP.
I keep having arguments with UK voters that think that it takes a majority in a constituency to win a seat, for example. Many refuse to believe this isn't the case even when I give examples showing it takes just a plurality in each seat, because it just seems wrong to a lot of people, even when asking them how else you'd pick the winner in a single-seat constituency without any form of ranked voting.
FPTP just seems to seem totally counter-intuitive to people when you make them actually work through the implications.
As an immigrant, it's incredibly frustrating to come across "natives" that knows less about their own electoral system than I do.
> I'm not exactly sure how UK government / prime minister elections work, but I'd expect that this government was elected on the exact same basis as previous governments
Well, you're wrong, so why don't you go and do the basic reading first?
There is a definition of "democracy" by which the government (and indeed Parliament) is non-democratic. Admittedly, it's a narrow definition, but nevertheless it's one that most developed countries satisfy. That definition is one suggested by Ernest Neville:
"In a democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all."
The lack of proportional representation deprives UK voters of both majority rule and adequate minority representation. The consequences are usually subtle, but the February 1974 general election gave the most seats to a party without the most votes. The 1951 election gave a majority of seats to a party without the most votes.
It's almost as if the clock is ticking on a very important deadline, and parliament wants to make sure it is dealt with before it takes any other action that might delay that.
Opposition parties might be concerned about being absent from Parliament when the Brexit deadline passes.
There's another problem, too. The First Past the Post electoral system prevents the electorate from correcting the state of affairs (except perhaps by accident). Call me cynical, but calls for an early general election under the existing system look like a power grab rather than a sincere attempt to let the electorate decide.
Voters should have a say under proportional representation. Holding a general election under First Past the Post would likely hand the government to a faction with minority support. I don't mean this to be partisan or pro-/anti-Brexit, but FPTP typically doesn't settle issues and increasingly doesn't provide good government in the UK.
FPTP typically overrepresents some parties at the cost of others (and at the cost of voters). Politicians might want an election when they believe they will be more overrepresented afterwards than before. That's why it's no surprise for the opposition to suddenly stop wanting an election when the government begins to want one.
If parliament allows an election now, it presents an opportunity for Boris to weasel his way out of requesting an extension. Given past Boris performance, why on earth would they?
Prime ministers are not elected by parliament. I appreciate the difference you are trying to highlight, but the current prime minister took this role without any form of election in parliament, and almost certainly no longer has the ability to command confidence.
Alec Douglas-Home became PM while a member of the House of Lords in 1963, though he renounced his peerage on becoming PM and stood for a safe seat (Kinross and Western Perthshire). While waiting for the by-election, he was PM without being a member of either house.
It's unlikely this will happen again, but there's as far as I know still no law preventing it.
I think we can all agree the referendum was not “I want to leave the EU in the most chaotic and economically dangerous way possible, preferably with no plan for what to do next”
In fact it was. It was a simple vote between leaving and remaining, with the exact details of both options being left undefined. Certainly our remainer establishment would have wasted no time in interpreting a Remain vote as permission to rapidly speed up integration.
The pathologically EU-loyal British establishment is now trying to destroy the vote via the following simple trick:
1. Declare that there's no way to leave without a "deal"
2. Make it clear to the EU they can dictate any terms they want whatsoever because the UK will under no circumstances walk away from the table.
3. EU dictates terms that are essentially the same as not leaving, or actually even worse.
4. Establishment declares that this "deal" is the same thing as leaving and tries to ram it through, or failing that, to cancel the whole thing by claiming that the UK can't leave unless the EU agrees due to <generic chaos>. Both outcomes are fine by them because it establishes for good the principle that leaving the EU should be as impossible as an American State seceding from the Union, which is what they want.
What we see at the moment are people actually working in the real economy, like port operators, saying they're prepared for no deal and there'd be no disruption at all. The EU has also quietly agreed various unrelated agreements to e.g. keep planes flying and even granting London a financial passport, the thing they said they'd never actually do. The fact that "no deal" actually means already "a bunch of small continuity deals" has gone largely unnoticed in the UK.
But ultimately now it's gone far beyond port disruption, mobile roaming costs or other trivial things. The British people are receiving a message loud and clear that the entire ruling class simply will not let the UK leave unless the EU agrees, despite it being a theoretically self-governing nation. If the UK doesn't leave without the EU's agreement then many will conclude it's actually a dictatorship.
> Both outcomes are fine by them because it establishes for good the principle that leaving the EU should be as impossible as an American State seceding from the Union, which is what they want.
Leaving the EU is pretty easy. There's a raft of existing models to base the new relationship on - Norway, Switzerland etc. Pick one, maybe tweak it slightly to make sure you don't start a war in NI, done.
The problem is that the entire process is being run by isolationist extremists who see the UK's largest trading partner as Beelzebub and reject any form of broad agreement with the EU.
To be fair, the reason that the UK has not left the EU is because the Tory Eurosceptics refused to vote for Theresa May's deal. Not once, not twice, but three times.
I think that the real issue here is that there doesn't appear to be a majority in Parliament for anything (witness the indicative votes earlier this year, which found no majority for any form of deal).
I think that the reason many MP's are unwilling to let the UK leave without a deal are as follows:
1) It doesn't solve anything. You still need to agree what to do for a future relationship, from a much, much weaker position (only Council of Ministers agreeement for Article 50 deal, versus Council, EU Parliament and all national regional parliaments required for a future trade deal).
2) The EU will not allow any trade deals to happen unless the Irish border, the rights of EU citizens and the money issues are resolved.
3) The UK imports the majority of their food, and WTO tariffs are really high on food, leading to potential problems with food supply (remember that it's November, when not much grows in the UK).
Like, I don't doubt that some MP's want to remain in the EU, but for my money most of them have voted for some form of Brexit deal, with the exception of the rabidly fanatical members of the European Research Group.
Additionally, with respect to the terms offered by the EU:
Yes, they will be worse than staying in the EU. By definition, if you leave a club, you no longer have access to the facilities of the club. It would make zero sense for the EU to do a deal for the UK that was better or the same as membership, because no-one would remain in the EU then.
I think that the citizens of the UK have been let down by many of their political representatives, but i don't believe that their desire to remain in the EU is the cause.
> To be fair, the reason that the UK has not left the EU is because the Tory Eurosceptics refused to vote for Theresa May's deal. Not once, not twice, but three times.
If all the Eurosceptics had voted for May's deal, it still wouldn't have had the numbers to pass. I think its fairer to lay the blame on the opposition parties who voted against it largely to try to create chaos which they thought would lead them to an election they could win.
That is completely incorrect. If everyone supporting the UK government at the time had voted for the deal, it would have passed. The ERG and the DUP were the cause of it's failure (and I'm looking forward to the reckoning the DUP get in the next elections as a result of this)>
At least Guto Bebb, Phillip Lee, Dominic Grieve, Sam Gyimah, Jo Johnson, and Justine Greening (there may be others I’ve missed).
May’s majority including the DUP at the time was 7 (I think - this was after the defections to the Independent Group) so those 6 would have tipped it into a loss on their own.
Cool, fair point. I didn't think that they'd rebelled till later. I still stand by my contention that the withdrawal bill would have passed were it not for the trenchant opposition from the ERG and DUP, but accept that the numbers don't entirely suport my story.
I think to be fair, if the DUP had supported it then there’s a very good argument that that would have changed minds sufficiently elsewhere that it could have passed. Playing counter factuals on this type of thing is very difficult though because, for example, some MPs likely took a view that they wanted to be on the winning/losing side for reasons mostly unrelated to the contents of the deal itself.
It's not the job of opposition parties to vote for the policies of the government.
Otherwise you don't have an opposition, and then you don't have much of a democracy.
It's the job of the government to secure the votes it needs for its policies, and conversely to propose policies for which it can secure the necessary votes.
That's just not true. If the DUP and the conservatives had voted to pass Theresa May's deal they absolutely had the numbers to pass it, especially given that on each of the votes there were a small number of Labour MPs who voted with it.
No because of the most favoured nation principle. You have to have the same tax rate for everyone, hence if you set it 0% for EU imports, you need to do the same for everyone, and then no one will do a trade deal with you (as they already have no tariffs).
> I think we can all agree the referendum was not “I want to leave the EU in the most chaotic and economically dangerous way possible, preferably with no plan for what to do next”
> In fact it was. It was a simple vote between leaving and remaining
So... do you mean "In fact it was", or do you mean "It was a simple vote between leaving and remaining"?
The Withdrawal Agreement is worth studying in more detail. The EU is demanding terms that are infinitely worse than it has ever offered to any country. The UK is not being treated as a third country like a Japan or America. That would be fine. It's being treated as a special case, like no other country anywhere in the world.
> In fact it was. It was a simple vote between leaving and remaining, with the exact details of both options being left undefined. Certainly our remainer establishment would have wasted no time in interpreting a Remain vote as permission to rapidly speed up integration.
While the referendum was yes or no, the framing was radically different. The "leavers" ran on a platform of, essentially, we have a plan, the EU will co-operate and there will hundreds of millions of pounds of savings. Then, post-referendum, some of the leaders (including Boris) promptly resigned because they had no plan, others negotiated badly (and one could say, in bad faith), and it became clear there was not going to be millions of pounds in savings.
"Vote yes! There'll be ice cream, cake, and unicorns."
"I vote yes!"
"Thanks! Now, there's no ice cream, the cake is Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and unicorns don't exist you bloody git."
Indeed. Vote Leave, the campaign lead by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Dominic Cummings, three of the men now at the helm (PM, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and adviser, respectively) said (add at the time):
> The day after nothing changes legally. There is no legal obligation on the British Government to take Britain out of the EU immediately. There will be three stages of creating a new UK-EU deal - informal negotiations, formal negotiations, and implementation including both a new Treaty and domestic legal changes. There is no need to rush. We must take our time and get it right.
The government is not directly elected. It is, in a sense that's both very technical and actually constitutionally important at the moment, appointed by the Queen.
That's the major difference between Presidential systems and Parliamentary ones. In the first, the head of government is directly elected and the legislature separately, and in the latter the legislature chooses one of its own as head of government. Semi-Presidential systems (like France) are somewhere in between.
This is just a technical point of view, as from now on the Queen has always appointed a person that has been choosen by the parliament. Perhaps with Willam, thing will change, but sorry, with QEII , I can't see her saying I appoint Corbyn even if parliament decide it is Johnson ;)
Actually, the Queen was historically rather more involved than this in the era of Hume, Macmillan and Eden; and previous monarchs before her even more so.
I agree that in the current era though, she would only send for an alternate PM if they had demonstrated confidence of the House of Commons, which is very unlikely.
It wasn't obvious at all. Even ignoring the fact that traditionally this was outside the purview of the courts entirely, the Supreme Court had to take a very aggressive approach to the evidence to get this result. First, they decided that it didn't matter whether the Prime Minister had unlawful intent, only whether prorogation did in fact frustrate Parliament. Secondly, they decided that it was up to the Prime Minister to prove in detail that his prorogation didn't have this effect. (This was important because no-one has been able to come up with a convincing argument for how exactly this particular prorogation would stop Parliamentary scrutiny of Brexit. It was scheduled to avoid all the important dates where such scrutiny was likely, and the court had documents showing this was intentional.) Thirdly, they had to play up the fact that Parliament could theoretically sit or carry out other actions during the three-week party conference season if it was in the usual recess rather than prorogued in order to justify the claim that this prorogation was at all unusual in the first place. Which is technically true, but by convention no-one does this because using your control of parliament in ways that monkey with the other parties' annual conferences is pretty bad for democracy.
There was no reason to come up with an argument for how this would stop scrutiny of Brexit, as the only arbiter of what matters to parliament is parliament. Further this argument rings hollow when Boris has demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to try to sidestep the wishes of parliament in this respect, and so Parliament has every reason to want to be able to react quickly to any further attempts from the government to act in ways it has no support for.
As such, when a group of parliamentarians are among those who have sued arguing their ability to do their job is frustrated, then parliament is frustrated.
The recess issue is relatively irrelevant given that we're already in uncharted waters, with Parliament having sat unusually long due to Brexit. It's already established that the timeline relating to Brexit means other conventions are being sidelined because of the importance of getting this sorted. Since Boris didn't wait for votes over recess to happen, he can not say that there would not have been adjustments made. E.g. even if Parliament as a whole were not to sit, there'd have been nothing stopping Parliament from continuing certain committee work, for example.
> This was important because no-one has been able to come up with a convincing argument for how exactly this particular prorogation would stop Parliamentary scrutiny of Brexit.
I know that the judgment is very recent but I suggest that you read it in full when you get a chance. The court specifically noted that a substantial amount of delegated legislation related to Brexit was scheduled to be handled by parliamentary committees in the period (under provisions in the European Withdrawal Act), and that parliamentary committees continue to sit during recess. They specifically rejected the Government’s claim that a recess period is equivalent to a prorogation, noting that during a recess parliamentary questions can still be asked (and answered) and committees continue to sit.
The prorogation is unlawful not because it prevents debate on the floor of the houses, but because it shuts down all activity in parliament in way that recess does not, and that no reasonable explanation was given to do this.
I'd have to have a very close look at the exact details of that. It's certainly possible for parliamentary committees to continue to sit during recess, but it doesn't look like they generally have during the conference period before (presumably because the Commons committees are made up of MPs who are busy with the conferences), and the government was already quite visibly scraping the barrel to find even delegated legislation to occupy Parliament's time back in July. There were some quite rude remarks from opposition MPs about how inconsequential some of the Brexit-related legislation they were scrutinizing was!
Thank you for linking that. I was immediately arrested by the following line: "On 27th or 28th August, in a telephone call, he formally advised Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament between those dates".
Is this really implying that the government doesn't keep track of Prime Ministerial communication to the extent that we're not even sure what day he gave formal advice to the queen?! Surely at the very least there is a call log.
Or perhaps it could just show how elitist, political and pro-EU these Justices are? After the Referendum the established political elites have been trying everything in the book to deny the democratic vote of the people. This is another example of it.
So court is undemocratic? People voting on falsehood is democtratic though? But the prospect of changing their minds when the new information becomes available (aka the second referendum) is undemocratic again?
I have to disagree. Not only does it seem completely lawful to me, you'll notice that none of the justices could cite an actual law that was violated.
Their summary makes this a bit clearer - "...was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification."
They never actually indicate any law that has been violated. Just sort of a general assertion that it was an asshole, undemocratic move that they have now declared to be "illegal".
Furthermore, I remember when it was originally announced that he was considering doing this and every single lawyer, pundit, and news outlet that I read said very clearly that while it was "unthinkable" it was completely legal and he had every right to do so with the power of his position/office.
Interesting. Do you have extraordinary legal qualifications that make your opinion more valid than the unanimous judgment of the highest court in the land?
Ah yes, the old "you're not a lawyer so your opinion is worthless" argument. As I mentioned, every single thing I read by legal professionals leading up to this decision said it was entirely legal. I am not a UK citizen, let alone an expert in UK law. But I read up on it and I can follow my own path of logic based on what they described the law to be.
Also, let's not pretend like the courts get things right all the time. Even the "highest court in the land" fucks up all the time. Same here in the US. The judges are just as biased as everyone else. The law on this isn't even complicated. The Queen, not Boris Johnson, has the power to prorogue parliament. Therefore the request that she do so cannot be an illegal act by Boris Johnson. That's really simple logic to follow. And the Queen is immune from legal process so no act done by her can be deemed illegal which is why the court ruled that it was the advice/request that was illegal. This insane logic is just as outrageous as the actual request to prorogue parliament made by Johnson.
What a horrible, biased analysis. Please cite your legal resources that would contradict the highest court in the UK who unanimously agreed that this was, in fact, illegal.
I'm afraid your comments have been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Would you please look them over and stick to the rules when posting to HN? We'd be grateful.
And the courts always get things right, yeah? Especially when it's a rushed decision based on an urgent and time sensitive event? Also, I have no skin in the UK game at all. I'm not a citizen and don't give a shit who's in power over there. I'm just an outside observer with a tub of popcorn.
The court ruled that the advice given to the Queen was illegal and she was the one who actually has the power to prorogue parliament. The Queen is exempt from the legal process and as Queen everything she does within her powers is assumed to be legal. The courts know this, which is why they want the crazy route to declare Johnson's advice/request to be the thing that was illegal. It's absurd.
British law is not all statute; some of it is "common law", which is essentially judge-made caselaw. The prorogation does not contravene statute, and wasn't held to. There is a long line of caselaw going back to the 1600s about the relationship of the Crown to Parliament which have been held to limit executive power, though. The court today held that the constitutional rule limiting royal power works to prevent prorogation under the circumstances seen this year.
Although the result is novel, this isn't particularly unusual for how the British legal systems work. Similar in principle to DC v Heller in the US Supreme Court, I suspect: the second amendment is known, but what is means for a particular DC handgun law isn't obvious until SCOTUS rules. The same here: the principle that the Crown can't use the prerogative to frustrate Parliament is now well established (starting with the Case of Proclamations [1610] EWHC KB J22) but it hadn't been tested in court whether that applied to these circumstances. Now we know.
Well this is going to be fun, especially as it's the middle of party conference season as well. At what point do the remaining unsacked Conservatives admit they've lost? They're already a long way short of a majority. Are we going to have a no confidence vote soon, or are we going to continue with the weird governance by Parliament from the opposition benches?
Who threw it away? BJ wanted an election then for his own political purposes, it isn't the duty of parliament to just go along with that. Once an extension has been requested, then an election can be held, and BJ probably won't have much say in the timing.
What's particularly fun is that there seem to be some rumblings that this might be used to disrupt the Conservative annual conference by making the House of Commons sit during the period when it's held next week. Hopefully MPs won't be daft enough to do this; it would do immense damage to both British politics and trust in the judiciary.
Was plainly obvious why Boris went for the long shutdown, whatever he chose to say, because of the also-suspect behaviour of the multi-party opposition him wanting to see one law (Brexit Clause 10) implemented without conflicting laws being made up on the fly.
Stupid though, as much of that shutdown wouldn't have made any difference during the party conference season, which they strangely don't hold during their summer recess.
Not automatically, no. There should be an election, but holding one while the Brexit deadline is still ticking is obviously insane, so that needs to be cancelled or extended first.
> This is exactly what should have been called weeks ago, yet there is resistance from Labour.
Well Labour and other party members abstained from a proposal from the prime minster to hold an election and it required 2/3 of MPs, but that never happened.
Because they wanted BoJo to get the extension first, an election without the extension has the same effect as prorogation,that is no-one at the helm on the 31st October so default is no deal Brexit.
Nobody wants that throne. Theresa was no better. Jeremy is doing his best to stay away from the shitshow. A no-deal brexit seems like the sane thing to do.
The economist M.Blyth has said that best: Jeremy doesnt want an election , he wants to watch the tories tear down themselves to pieces.
> However, a different story emerges among Leave voters. The proportion who say that leaving without a deal would be a good outcome is 46%. This is well below the 73% who say they back leaving the EU without a deal, when offered a straight choice.
which is what matters if brexit is still the majority position.
The majority of people in many Labour supporting seats in the North of England are in favour of Brexit. The majority of people who actually voted Labour in those seats are not.
That's a subtle distinction, but it's hugely important to Labour's political decision-making.
Many Labour supporters in those areas and the far left currently in control of the party do support Brexit.
Even Corbyn is a life-long Brexiter.
This is the very reason Labour is struggling to set out a clear policy on this issue: It is impossible to satisfy their supporters in London and their supporters in the North at the same time but they need to in order to hope to win a general election.
A very telling example: Bolsover. 71% voted leave. MP is the infamous hard left Labour Dennis Skinner (MP there since 1970!), who is a Brexiter.
Some do, but not the majority (in the leadership or the party). And the party activists (even the leftwing ones) are overwhelmingly remain. That's one of the reasons the votes at the party conference yesterday were so interesting: it was simultaneously a vote on Brexit policy (where most of the members are more remain than the NEC position) and a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn (where most of the members are more supportive than the NEC!)
It's not so much that Labour is finding it difficult to satisfy their supporters in different parts of the country (though that's a small sub-game), it's that MPs in leave seats fear that not leaving will turn over large chunks of the anti-system vote to the Brexit party.
Both Bolsover and Skinner are hardcore leavers, though, that much is true. That doesn't change that the Labour membership is overwhelmingly remain, Labour voters are majority remain, and the majority of the leave vote was in Conservative parts of the south, not Labour parts of the North.
Yellowhammer documents did not say there would be a shortage of food overall. They said there may be shortages of certain foods. That’s very different.
Your point of view is interesting, but one I don't really share. Either way, what I don't really understand is that the government didn't really seem to try to get a deal for the first 2 years. EU officials have practically told off the UK government for "wasting time". Precisely because you have a different viewpoint that mine, I'm interested in your take on it. Do you think that a no-deal Brexit was the unspoken goal all along, or was there something else going on? Personally, I almost got the impression that May was actually torpedoing the process as it seemed pretty clear early on that a deal was never in the works. I've had a hard time making sense of it.
I dont have an opinion on that, i m not from the UK. But it's how things look from the EU. Perhaps the shock of a no-deal brexit will actually inspire some more unity in the UK.
I smelled grandstanding before her ranks of supporters, more than actually trying to make a deal of some sort. But what do I know, I only look from a few countries over.
What BoJo was trying to do was get no deal Brexit through a back door. Before an election the prime minister of the UK needs to request an extension to the deadline to allow the election to take place and a new party to take control and deal with the exit (or not) from the EU.
We did not vote for BRINO, which is what all these 'deals' are about - keep us tightly enough tied to the EU so that we can be forced back in in 5-10 years. Don't try and pretend this isn't the case, we all know it.
We're tied to the EU inherently through Ireland, which everyone keeps forgetting about. Sure, we can impose a border there, and perhaps people won't object that violently, but it won't go down well in the NI reunification referendum.
Just to note, when I was a child (actually almost until I was an adult) people were killing each other in Ireland, the UK and Northern Ireland every single week.
We all got together, and that's been over for almost twenty years, because we pretended there was/wasn't a border so the pro-UK people could pretend it was there, and the pro-Ireland people could pretend it wasn't.
Somewhat crazily, this actually worked. Unfortunately, Brexit (especially a hard one) necessitates a border. If there is a border in Northern Ireland, there will be violence, along with lots and lots of small businesses going to the wall, along with British troops back in Ireland and smuggling.
It's basically a disaster, and while the British people have the right to leave the EU, and rule the waves again, te Irish people also have a right to not start violence in Northern Ireland again.
Hence the backstop - it's not an attempt to trap the UK in the EU (although we are very, very sorry you're leaving), it's an attempt to prevent the return of violence on the island of Ireland.
> Unfortunately, Brexit (especially a hard one) necessitates a border.
Except that the UK and Ireland have both said they won’t build a hard border Under any circumstances , so who exactly is going to be installing this hard border?
> If there is a border in Northern Ireland,
There already is one (soft)
> along with British troops back in Ireland
There are British troops based in Northern Ireland right now just as there are elsewhere in the UK
> it's not an attempt to trap the UK in the EU
It just happens to have that effect, by being basically thr only treaty that it is impossible to unilaterally leave.
> it’s an attempt to prevent the return of violence on the island of Ireland.
It’s a political tool to ensure the UK doesn’t thrive outside the EU, given the sorry state of the rest of the Eurozone that would make the EU look bad.
Unfortunately EU negotiators have been far more effective than British negotiators hence why we have a deal that is unacceptable to anyone (On either side) in the British Parliament it is so bad.
>Except that the UK and Ireland have both said they won’t build a hard border Under any circumstances , so who exactly is going to be installing this hard border?
They are both lying for political purposes. Unless the UK stay in the CM/SU, there will be a customs border. The EU will require one from the Irish side, and the UK will require one in order to get any trade deals.
> If there is a border in Northern Ireland,
>There already is one (soft)
Have you been there lately? I pass the border a bunch when we travel north, and the only way I notice is the different signs and Google maps switching to miles instead of kilometers.
> along with British troops back in Ireland
>There are British troops based in Northern Ireland right now just as there are elsewhere in the UK
Fair enough, however there were a lot more back during the Troubles.
> it's not an attempt to trap the UK in the EU
>It just happens to have that effect, by being basically thr only treaty that it is impossible to unilaterally leave.
Like, it's impossible to leave unless the UK maintains the Good Friday Agreement, which essentially requires a mostly soft border. The border was a frequent target of republican terrorists and is likely to become so again, hence why you have US members of Congress saying that no trade deal with the UK is possible unless the GFA is maintained (are they also trying to trap the UK in the EU?).
> it’s an attempt to prevent the return of violence on the island of Ireland.
>It’s a political tool to ensure the UK doesn’t thrive outside the EU, given the sorry state of the rest of the Eurozone that would make the EU look bad.
I'm not sure if there is anything I can say to change your mind on this, but I strongly disagree with your assessment here.
>Unfortunately EU negotiators have been far more effective than British negotiators hence why we have a deal that is unacceptable to anyone (On either side) in the British Parliament it is so bad.
The British government have literally done everything wrong here. They had no idea what they wanted, check. They set ridiculous red lines and had to walk them back, check.
I completely agree that the UK negotiators have done a poor job, but it's been because there is no consensus even within Goevrnment as to what the UK should do (if anyone's interested in this, I strongly recommend checking out the speeches of Ivan Rogers).
> They are both lying for political purposes. Unless the UK stay in the CM/SU, there will be a customs border. The EU will require one from the Irish side, and the UK will require one in order to get any trade deals.
There will be a customs border, but that doesn't mean there has to be infrastructure on the border. Again, the idea of a hard border is a red herring, as nobody is going to build one.
> Have you been there lately? I pass the border a bunch when we travel north, and the only way I notice is the different signs and Google maps switching to miles instead of kilometers.
Sure, and there are already differences as you just pointed out.
> Fair enough, however there were a lot more back during the Troubles.
Sure, no body wants to go back to that.
> Like, it's impossible to leave unless the UK maintains the Good Friday Agreement, which essentially requires a mostly soft border. The border was a frequent target of republican terrorists and is likely to become so again, hence why you have US members of Congress saying that no trade deal with the UK is possible unless the GFA is maintained (are they also trying to trap the UK in the EU?).
Yes the UK has said it will maintain the Good Friday Agreement, but that doesn't mean we should have to stay in the single market/customs union.
> I'm not sure if there is anything I can say to change your mind on this, but I strongly disagree with your assessment here.
Which bit? The EU clearly doesn't want Brexit to be a success otherwise it might encourage other countries that are less than delighted with they EU, to leave. Far better if they can point to the UK and go "look how much better it was before they tried to leave".
The Eurozone economically is in a bit of a sorry state, not sure what there is to disagree with there. Ok it is slightly better than a few years ago in some parts of the south, but not much.
> The British government have literally done everything wrong here.
Well, I certainly can agree with you there. No doubt the EU has shown remarkable unity, and the UK has shown disunity and disorganisation.
And how does that change the result of the referendum? What's happened over the last 3 years is an utterly scandalous denial of democracy, and it's frightens me tbh to see so many people acting in support of something other than respecting a democratic vote simply because it didn't suit them.
If we had voted to remain and there was a movement attempting to force us to leave I would be manning the barricades in support of remain, despite the fact I voted leave and believe we should leave. And that's because the principle of freedom supercedes what I may or may not like. That's democracy: sometimes you lose, and you moan a bit, and then accept it and get on with things.
In the end, democracy is the only thing that the little man has to defend himself and fighting to keep us in the EU is taking even that little thing away. Why bother voting ever again when if the result is inconvenient for the powers that be, they will simply declare democracy invalid?
> If we had voted to remain and there was a movement attempting to force us to leave I would be manning the barricades in support of remain, despite the fact I voted leave and believe we should leave.
No you wouldn't.
The referendum was chaotic, with multiple leave campaigns, and people were constantly lied to about what the outcome would look like. If the debate had been much clearer about what the cost would be, especially of no deal, then it might have been acceptable. But the whole reason it's fallen apart is competing versions of "fantasy Brexit" that can't be delivered.
Democracy allows for the changing of minds. As long as there is a vote that gives a PM a mandate for a course of action it can be done. Its not anti democratic to have another vote.
People voted for 'leave'. At the time, what 'leave' looked like was deliberately left open, by both sides. It's now received wisdom that that 'leave' meant that people wanted no deal Brexit and they wanted it hard, but that simply isn't true.
As a separate issue, the windows of both sides on 'acceptable' Brexits have been diverging quickly, partly because everyone is now sick of it and partly because the hardcore on both sides are taking the opportunity to seize control of the narrative. As a consequence, anything short of WTO terms is now "BRINO" (which would actually describe the kind of Norway-plus exit fantasised by some on the Remain side after the defeat) and contrariwise anything short of revocation without a referendum is a betrayal of truth and justice.
Never mind. It's not like we wanted a functioning polity after this is resolved, in any case...
> At the time, what 'leave' looked like was deliberately left open, by both sides.
This is not true. There is a video with at least Cameron, Osborne, Hillary Benn, Andrew Adonis, John Major, Peter Mandelson and possibly others that compiles some of their statements during the referendum campaign. I cannot find this video as it is either hidden or not on YouTube, but it pops up on Twitter from time to time. Each of them makes categorically clear that leaving means leaving the institutions, single market etc. etc. in terms that very much describe what the Remain camp has termed (in a manner that would make Orwell proud) a 'hard Brexit' - indeed, the very point of their calamitous prognostications was aimed at striking fear into the electorate in order that they vote to remain.
There were voices in the Remain campaign clearly describing the hardest Brexit imaginable specifically in order to deter people from voting for it. To deny this in the face of overwhelming evidence is well, I'm not sure what to think of it but it's not honest argument.
And there are statements by the leave campaign saying that single market membership was on the table. Different parts of both campaigns saying different things to different audiences.
And please don't accuse people of dishonest argument here. We don't do that.
We didn't vote for no deal either. It was a simplistic question that wasn't thought through. You may have wanted it but it was not the question that was asked and voted on. I get it you wanted this outcome and you are therefore against anything that stymies it, but it's not all about you.
Because the currently legitimately elected parliament would like to be able to pass laws about an eminent major change to the UK’s status. If they have an election, there will be no parliament in session to act until there is a hard brexit.
Labour and other party members knew this was a trap. But the real reason they abstained is they wanted to truly rule out a no-deal brexit plan and also to further scrutinize the government.
Boris is now forced to ask Brussels for an extension due to parliament taking over the brexit process. Only then a general election can happen.
It's the fixed-term Parliament Act that got us into this mess. Under normal circumstances May's deal would have been put to a confidence vote then either accepted or yet another GE called in order to replace the government with a functioning one.
The government has a minority of something like -40. This cannot function for long.
I'm not sure that criticism is entirely valid. It isn't like the last election gave anyone a resounding mandate.
Plus do we want election after election fought on a single issue? It's torn the Tories apart, Labour isnt far behind, the Lib Dems aren't exactly endorsing a nuanced set of policies.
We're going to have a 2nd referendum at some point, personally I'd like it to come before an election so parliament can get back to some kind of normalcy, which I don't think will be helped by a parliament full of MPs selected purely on the basis of their views on one issue.
Because Labour may not do well at all. Certainly it is very doubtful that they would get an outright majority.
They are split on Brexit (London very pro-Remain, most Northern traditional Labour seats pro-Brexit) and they have been hijacked by effectively communists. This means is has been very hard for them to gather broad support.
This is very visible in the polls where they only get lukewarm numbers.
Wow, some common sense. Let's hope Boris Johnson gets run out of London tarred and feathered and we can get back to normality (as soon as we know what normality is anyway).
It would open the door ... to a form of judicial review that is widely accepted in the United States, which has a codified Constitution and a Supreme Court that actively interprets it.
Britain, by contrast, relies on an unwritten set of traditions and conventions that have treated a sovereign Parliament as the supreme law of the land. Once the courts venture into the political sphere and begin passing judgment on Parliament’s actions, legal analysts say, there is no going back.
We already have judicial review applying to governmental actions and ministerial decisions. This is not an application of judicial review to acts of Parliament. The prorogation was an act of the government, not Parliament.
OK, best I can figure is NYT is trying to make the point that if the UK Supreme Court is becoming willing to get involved with such highly political matters, there's no reason they wouldn't seek to extend that to Parliamentary matters. Does that comport with the facts and opinions here?
Oh, they did the usual thing of finding a quote from the other side to put in the article. That quote was of course wrong, but they probably felt the need to put it in for balance.
Technically, they've upheld the Scottish court's ruling. I'm sort of seeing the Scottish courts focused on it being illegal for Parliament not to be able to do its job. Two sides of a 2-dimensional object.
I think that since this is the English case the Scottish case now evaporates and doesn't get appealed separately, so we don't get to find out how that would have worked out.
They upheld the Scottish judgement, and overturned the English one. It was both cases.
They reached the same conclusion as the Scottish case, but with somewhat different reasons. They avoided the issue about the PM’s motivations/purpose that the Scottish judgement focused on. Instead, they said the impact of the prorogation on Parliament’s ability to do its job made it unlawful, so they didn’t have to consider the PM’s motivations.
As noted in the ruling, they are prohibited from ruling on exclusively Parliamentary matters, both by the Bill of Rights 1688 (Parliament of England and Wales):
> That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament.
And Claim of Right 1689 (Parliament of Scotland):
> That for redress of all greivances and for the amending strenthneing and preserveing of the lawes Parliaments ought to be frequently called and allowed to sit and the freedom of speech and debate secured to the members.
Whilst the Court determines the scope of Parliamentary privilege (i.e. determining what constitutes a proceeding of Parliament), there is a very clear reason they would not extend their purview to Parliamentary matters, and clearly they have no power to overrule Acts of Parliament.
Yes this was an important part of the ruling, that the prorogation was considered to be an act imposed from outside upon parliament and not of parliament itself.
The High Court ruled it non-justiciable as inherently political (a similar approach to the 'political question' doctrine in US federal courts).
The question the Supreme Court grappled with was whether the actual act of prorogation was a "proceeding in Parliament" or not. If it was, then the court can't overturn its effect despite the illegality they found in the earlier parts of the process (advice and Order-in-Council) as proceedings in Parliament are exempt from judicial scrutiny by the Act of Settlement 1688. They ruled that it wasn't (despite happening in Parliament) as prorogation is inherently an executive imposition from outside and therefore not a Parliamentary proceeding. Consequently they could rule the prorogation "void and of no effect" rather than merely making a declaration of unlawfulness or instructing the PM to have Parliament recalled.
Do you not find it ironic that you're comment says the court acted to ensure the government respects the sovereignty of parliament? Your own or quoted words say sovereign Parliament as the supreme law of the land which btw has always been subject to the courts and latterly the ECJ.
Government is not parliament. The UK supreme Court upheld the sovereignty of parliament over government within narrow limits: prorogation must be consensual and justified.
Ah but it was justified - by the need for a Queen's Speech, which hadn't happened for a very long time.
What the Supreme Court has said here is that they don't like or believe the justification. But who are they to decide that? There's no law or legal precedent here for a court simply deciding they don't like a justification for a prorogation. Constitutional tradition says it's actually the Queen's decision, which she makes based on advice from the Prime Minister. The very new Supreme Court has nothing to do with it.
At any rate, regardless of (pointless) arguments about a non-existent constitution, the realpolitik of this is that the UK is heading straight for civil war.
Parliament refuses to let the UK leave the EU by its own deadlines, an outcome it had itself voted for.
It refuses to trigger a general election.
The Speaker has given up the traditional role of political neutrality.
Many MPs have not only announced they will fight against the very policies they promised during the last election, but actually quit their parties and joined parties with opposing policies, whilst refusing to trigger a by-election so they can be judged.
One major political party is now openly saying if they get enough power, they will simply cancel Brexit entirely. Labour is not far behind.
At all levels British democracy is in outright collapse. This is not due to actions of Leave supporters or campaigners, but rather due to coordinated efforts by people who are ideologically committed to the EU and who are willing to destroy any institution, tradition or constitutional procedure whatsoever in their efforts to do so.
How can people respect their government when they see politicians so openly doing U-turns on their own position the moment they won an election, when they see those same politicians refusing to allow new votes except for those they've rigged so leaving can never win?
At some point the UK is going to cross into seriously extreme territory. If voting doesn't work to change those in power - and right now it clearly doesn't - then what's left but violence?
> Ah but it was justified - by the need for a Queen's Speech, which hadn't happened for a very long time.
The court unanimously seem to disagree with this as counting as a justification. You can't just throw whatever justification you want out there, it has to be tested as being valid. This was one of the government's arguments: there's no test that a court can apply for whether the justification is valid or not. The problem with that is that the logical conclusion is that the government can shut down parliament indefinitely for any reason it likes.
> What the Supreme Court has said here is that they don't like or believe the justification. But who are they to decide that?
They're called judges. It's literally their job.
> At any rate, regardless of (pointless) arguments about a non-existent constitution, the realpolitik of this is that the UK is heading straight for civil war.
Spare us the hysteria. The judicial branch ruling on the legality of an action taken by the executive is literally their primary function.
> Parliament refuses to let the UK leave the EU by its own deadlines, an outcome it had itself voted for.
Nice bit of omission there. What you actually mean is "Parliament refuses to let the UK leave the EU without any form of trade deal".
> It refuses to trigger a general election.
What problem would a GE solve? We already had one in 2017.
> The Speaker has given up the traditional role of political neutrality.
Well, in your opinion. Many people don't share that view, and those that do conveniently seem to hold it because he's making decisions they don't like.
> Many MPs have not only announced they will fight against the very policies they promised during the last election, but actually quit their parties and joined parties with opposing policies, whilst refusing to trigger a by-election so they can be judged.
There's no precedent or legality for by-elections being triggered when the whip is withdrawn, resigned or the MP leaves their party. People are elected to be representatives, not party-drones.
> One major political party is now openly saying if they get enough power, they will simply cancel Brexit entirely. Labour is not far behind.
I'm not sure what the problem is here. Parties campaigning for things is somehow... bad now?
> At all levels British democracy is in outright collapse. This is not due to actions of Leave supporters or campaigners, but rather due to coordinated efforts by people who are ideologically committed to the EU and who are willing to destroy any institution, tradition or constitutional procedure whatsoever in their efforts to do so.
More hysteria. There's plenty of people who support the idea of Brexit who are aghast at the recklessness of the government. Brexit is a red-herring - this whole issue is about where power should lie and to what extent the executive can just do whatever it likes with no form of check or balance.
There is not going to be a civil war, because the Brexit side is made of of delusional people led astray by Facebook and Farage and is predominantly elderly.
There is no clean, costless way out of the EU. There are "less damaging" ways, such as "Norway+", but those have been rejected. "No deal" is clearly going to be a disaster. The government commissioned its own planning which also found it would be a disaster. Job losses are ongoing and the currency has dived by about 25% since the start of the process. And for what?
> If voting doesn't work to change those in power - and right now it clearly doesn't - then what's left but violence?
Well, this has kind of been a problem of the UK for years with its non-preferential voting and unelected upper house. Maybe now we can fix it. But in the meantime I'm laughing at the idea that some sort of pensioner brigade is going to be out on the streets with the molotovs.
The system over there does seem to be terribly unrepresentative; NZ managed to switch away from a FPTP system a bit over 20 years ago, which was a huge improvement (and vastly better than the Aussie system I'm currently living in - which is still better than a traditional FPTP approach).
Hopefully this mess will provide some impetus to improve on it.
The reason why we have FPTP is to avoid these situations.
PR usually hands power to extremist minorities, it led to the far right gaining seats in govts in Europe in the past few years (Germany was PR in the 1920s too), and there is often massive uncertainty around the formation of govts (in 2010 Belgium took nearly two years to form a govt).
It is truly bizarre that this is always one of the things that people recommend when it is well understood it would have the opposite effect from intended. PR only "works" under a very limited number of conditions (which may apply in New Zealand but don't apply in most of Europe anymore and definitely do not apply in the UK).
That argument would apply equally well to discarding FPTP and retaining a monarch (or a dictator) at the top. A strong leader is definitely stable, so if that's the key metric an FPTP system is still not a winner.
PR certainly increases the power of minorities (but only in proportion to their support among voters) vs a FPTP system in which those voters are not represented at all; this can be both positive or negative (if NZ's system was implemented here in Australia, both the Greens and One Nation would have far more representation here, and the two major parties would be far weaker).
I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. Where there is no representation people may justifiably resort to other means and that's hardly stable either. NZ's experience with MMP has been largely positive.
> It is truly bizarre that this is always one of the things that people recommend when it is well understood it would have the opposite effect from intended.
It may be that it's often recommended because this is not necessarily the case at all; however, I don't know the specifics of the UK setup and so whether it would be helpful _now_.
I think it's hard to argue that a less representative system is not also less democratic, so hopefully whatever is holding you back over there can be sorted out somewhere down the line.
> That argument would apply equally well to discarding FPTP and retaining a monarch (or a dictator) at the top.
That is ridiculous argument. That is like saying you will cut your hair with a lawnmower if you can't find a pair of scissors.
The difference between democracy and monarchy is voting.
> NZ's experience with MMP
Yes, there is almost a century of experience here buddy. I did not say, in fact I said the opposite repeatedly, that it doesn't work in every case (I am seeing that nuance is something you struggle with).
It does work given certain conditions. The primary one being a homogeneous society (if you deign to crack open a book on this, this is taught in pretty much every politics class...even in high schools): that works in New Zealand, it works in Denmark...in Austria, it meant you had the far-right in govt. Not just people who were slightly to the right - it is common to call anyone on the center-right fascist these days - these were people who literally attended neo-Nazi meetings. Even in Denmark, a tremendously homogeneous society, you had people elected who called for mass deportation of Muslims...it is totally baffling that a society would actively choose to give oxygen to these people.
Politics isn't optimised only for representation. That is just totally wrong. Representation is only goal amongst many (and, again, one feels that you are just totally missing the point...FPTP provides representation).
Also, we understand PR perfectly. PR is used in some of our national elections. There is a very conscious understanding of FPTP though (ironically, the only time when we might have had PR was when an incumbent govt that had lost an election tried to make a deal with a smaller party to force through PR...democracy indeed).
Fair enough, that was very recent. Perhaps a vote between a more representative system than AV vs FPTP would have been different but it does seem too early to bring it up again.
Ah but it was justified - by the need for a Queen's Speech, which hadn't happened for a very long time.
As the ruling stated, preparing for this takes 4-6 days, not 5 weeks...
What the Supreme Court has said here is that they don't like or believe the justification.
Actually, they made no judgment on that, in fact they noted that the lawyers for the government put forward no justification for them to believe or disbelieve.
> There's no law or legal precedent here for a court simply deciding they don't like a justification for a prorogation
That's exactly what (higher) courts do, decide on cases not explicitly determined by law.
> but rather due to coordinated efforts by people who are ideologically committed to the EU and who are willing to destroy any institution
It's frankly amazing how almost all the pro-Brexit comments make explicitly clear they know crap all about what they're talking about and try to win the dialog by just repeating what they want, but louder.
>What the Supreme Court has said here is that they don't like or believe the justification
I think the point is that Parliament didn't like or believe the justification, and Parliament should not be prorogued against it's wishes. I don;t really buy the criticism of the Speaker either, he's standing up for Parliament's rights, which is his job.
I completely agree the way in which MPs have abandoned their stated opinions and policies, even deadlines and objectives they have legislated for, is appalling. The only real way out of that is another general election, but for the time being these are the people we voted for and this is the Parliament we've got.
It refuses to do so because the current PM has shown he can't be trusted to avoid dirty tricks, and if a general election is triggered, it the dissolution of parliament makes it impossible for parliament to exercise oversight of government.
Everyone is preparing for a GE, just not at the time that would play straight into Boris' hands.
> One major political party is now openly saying if they get enough power, they will simply cancel Brexit entirely. Labour is not far behind.
And if they do get into power, the voters will have given them a mandate to do so. A core pillar of democracy is the right of voters to change their minds, or we'd just have one single election and be done with it.
> The Speaker has given up the traditional role of political neutrality.
The speaker has kept trying to ensure parliament can exercise it's constitutional role despite government attempts to play games. His role is to ensure Parliament functions, not to protect government from scrutiny.
> At all levels British democracy is in outright collapse. This is not due to actions of Leave supporters or campaigners, but rather due to coordinated efforts by people who are ideologically committed to the EU and who are willing to destroy any institution, tradition or constitutional procedure whatsoever in their efforts to do so.
This is pure fantasy. It is in collapse thanks to a government attempting to use dictatorial methods to avoid parliamentary oversight by hoping that people would so blindly adhere to convention as to sleepwalk right into a massive abuse of power.
> How can people respect their government when they see politicians so openly doing U-turns on their own position the moment they won an election, when they see those same politicians refusing to allow new votes except for those they've rigged so leaving can never win?
None of them ran on no deal, so nobody should be surprised they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid a no deal that voters have not voted for.
The level of effort bei applied to essentially delegitimize the government and democratic self-governance is utterly stunning. It really rips the mask off the facade off democratic process and self-governance that this Brexit situation has clearly exposed as being a farce, at best. What do you call a system where you have Democratic self-governance unless it contradicts the desires of the failing ruling class? We used to call it dictatorship. Is there a term for dictatorship by the ruling class as a whole?
All the anti-democratic “remainders” who are trying to hack their nose off to spite their face while decrying “something something, democracy” as they try to utterly invalidate and crush Democratic will, have no idea what they are unleashing here.
I don’t think everyone realized that “by all means necessary” means shattering democracy into irreparable pieces; but that is precisely the era we are living in, the final stages of the democracy cycle ... initiated by the fools claiming they want democracy.
The difference in definition being that they want total authoritarian and tyrannical control over everyone and everything just like all other dictatorships where the “vote” results in 90% level voting for the dictatorial regime, just like happened in Washington DC during the last US Presidential election where 93% of the electorate voted for Hillary Clinton.
This wasn't an action taken by Parliament, it was an action taken by a private citizen and his assistants. It's just that the private citizen happened to be the Prime Minister. Individual members of parliament can still be subject to the law, without threatening the supremacy of parliament. After all, the laws these judges are adjudicating on are made by parliament.
> But it is quite clear that the prorogation is not a proceeding in Parliament. It takes place in the House of Lords chamber in the presence of members of both Houses, but it is not their decision. It is something which has been imposed upon them from outside. It is not something on which members can speak or vote. It is not the core or essential business of Parliament which the Bill of Rights protects. Quite the reverse: it brings that core or essential business to an end.
Instead it passed judgement on an action of the government which it has done for centuries.
From page 2 of the summary:
> The first question is whether the lawfulness of the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty is justiciable. This Court holds that it is. The courts have exercised a supervisory jurisdiction over the lawfulness of acts of the Government for centuries. As long ago as 1611, the court held that “the King [who was then the government] hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him”.
So... all of this was just a loud news cycle with no actual effect on anything other than "Parliament can continue doing what it does" ? (I actually can't tell, not trying to be a dick)
Well, there's now a hard (rather than implied) constitutional limit to the executive's power to prorogue Parliament. And the political calculus on the Brexit endgame has changed. And the Prime Minister has been publicly slapped down. And the 'what it does' is likely to be more unified and radical than it would have been had the PM let Parliament keep sitting. But otherwise, sure.
- The previous parliamentary session was the longest since the civil war (the English one if you're American).
- This prorogue was for an extra four days - which seems quite reasonable considering:
1. there are politicians, who previously campaigned on the losing side of the referendum, bent on hampering negotiations by making the UK accept any deal the EU offers, which is likely to result in a one-sided deal for the UK
2. the last few days of the negotiations are likely to be critical.
> The previous parliamentary session was the longest since the civil war
Yes, that in itself was exceptional for no good reason - I think the intent there was to avoid having another Queen's Speech before the deadline, back when the deadline was in May.
The negotiations have been carried out on a delusional basis. The EU is not going to cave at the last minute and there's never even been consistency on the UK side about what we want.
"there are politicians, who previously campaigned on the losing side of the referendum, bent on hampering negotiations by making the UK accept any deal the EU offers"
Yes, like May's deal that MPs rejected. One of the fundamental things you need to understand in order to make sense of what's going on in Parliament is that none of the Brexit-related options have the support of a majority of MPs and it's unlikely they ever will unless there's another general election. So the only way for anything to get a majority is for a bunch of MPs who disagree on what they want to ally with each other in order to vote against one of the other options. Also, a general election would most likely have given Boris Johnson the majority he needs to push through no-deal Brexit, which a majority of MPs oppose.
That's not true. The prorogation was for 5 weeks. This does include the planned recess of 3 weeks, but it's not a forced recess. Given the importance of what's going on, it could be adjusted/cancelled.
You can't say "it's 4 extra days, because I expected you'd do the usual even though the situation is extraordinary". There was clear opposition to that before the prorogation was officially announced.
As you mention, it's a vital time. The democratic mandate from the general public outweighs parliament's attempts to interfere in negotiations. Prorouging provides an excellent mechanism to allow the PM to focus on negotiations that deliver what people voted for.
> This morning I spoke to Her Majesty The Queen to request an end to the current parliamentary session in the second sitting week in September, before commencing the
second session of this Parliament with a Queen’s speech on Monday 14 October.
It's ~a month. Unless he can guarantee the recess would happen, I'm counting it as a month.
Oh no. Please. Can the UK please already exit the EU? By all means, rejoin us the day after Brexit, but this time with mandatory entering of the Schengen zone and the Euro...
Mostly it's because continental Europeans are utterly fed up with the chaos that is Brexit. Right now the uncertainity is extremely expensive for every company involved with UK trade, as precautions like capacity on ferries or in warehouses gobble up money and organization time.
For what it's worth the UK can also cancel Brexit, but that would not solve the problem that the "special deal" for the UK is a massive inequality against all other EU states and can be/is abused by EU-sceptics across the EU, and in addition canceling the Brexit would be a signal towards Hungary, Poland and the rest of Visegrad that they can drag the entire EU on the nose ring and then suddenly canceling everything, while all other parties have to pick up the tab.
all fair points except that as you said the price has already been paid, cancelling now wouldn't return the time nor money spent, companies that made the move to amsterdam, paris or frankfurt won't just go back, etc.
With a canceling of the brexit the time and money spent would be wasted, while with a brexit (no matter if deal or no deal scenario) there would be at least no waste plus the chance that a harsh Brexit will prevent Visegrad, Italy and Greece from further pursuing their dream of "becoming independent from the dictators in Brussels".
Important technical question: is Bercow still the Speaker? If not, who is? I thought he resigned at the end of the last term, which may or may not be reverted by this result.
I'm reminded of a psychologist's description of sociopaths, that they "leave a trail of destruction in life".
BJ seems to have the hallmarks of sociopathy, having known a few myself, and he's made a total mess here. And elsewhere - talk to anyone who's worked in TFL and they all (that I've met) will tell you about stupid plans that have come across their desk, done without any traffic analysis but pushed through nonetheless.
This all might force a written constitution, which is long overdue in the UK. Something good may come of this at least.
Seems unlikely. His best chance of doing that - of leaving the EU - is to get a majority of parliament to vote for whatever deal he presents. Proroguing parliament would appear to antagonise parliament and make that less likely.
He needs a new deal first (this parliament has rejected existing deal, like, 3 times already). His main negotiation tactics (and what May failed to do and was repeatedly criticised for) is to present a viable alternative, a credible No-Deal Brexit option. That can serve as a BATNA in any future negotiations with the EU. Proroguing the parliament might have to do with preventing them to stop BATNA, but it's unlikely to make them not vote for a good new deal.
The big problem here is that no-deal Brexit is much worse than the status quo. We're basically threatening to inflict job losses on ourselves in the hopes that the job losses on the other side of the channel will drive negotiations.
All negotiations must include the ability to walk away. If it's not on the table and we're not prepared to walk then the EU can (and has) offered us the worst deal.
The idea that we must accept any deal is why the general public shouldn't be involved in the negotiations.
Voters were deciding based on abject lies in the referendum campaign. Then the government carried on lying during whole process. This makes whole referendum mandate very weak.
Then let's ignore the fact that the UK is tearing itself apart over this and carry on, regardless of the possibility that people may have changed their mind and that brexit is looking more damaging than ever, and that BoJo's career has been built on opportunism (before the referendum was he for or against brexit?) and lies (£350 million?)
Yes, push on, let's. Let's not compromise, rethink, allow a possibly bad decision to be reconsidered. Push on, forward, forward!
Since neither side wish to compromise, the above was my suggestion of a way forwards, where I would support brexit if I lost a 2nd ref.
What's yours?
(Oh, one more thing - the world's ecosystem has possibly started to collapse, which may kill millions and cause wars killing more, perhaps many more. But, BREXIT!!!!)
If you think the Office of National Statistics lie, then I suggest you take it up with them.
The nation isn't tearing itself apart. A bunch of us who lost the vote have decided to attempt to thwart the result. May was a remainer and a weak negotiator, other remainers are weakening the UKs negotiating position by insisting we can't walk away from a bad deal.
We lost. It's over. The vote was to leave. Let's leave.
And yes then let's fix the environment, knife crime and everything else too.
You appear to have confused BoJo with the ONS. I did not.
> The nation isn't tearing itself apart
We'll have to disagree there. Granted it's not actual civil war but it's politically stressed badly.
> We lost. It's over. The vote was to leave. Let's leave.
What is so terrifying about having a 2nd (and final) vote to check we haven't changed our minds? Specifically, what is wrong with it? Are people not allowed to change view in the light of new information?
> You appear to have confused BoJo with the ONS. I did not.
Are you sure? BoJo quoted the ONS correctly the UK sends the EU 350M. That the EU returns 150 of it doesn't change that the EU is determining how the UK spend the UK's money and then takes half of it for the EU.
> What is so terrifying about having a 2nd (and final) vote to check we haven't changed our minds?
> Specifically, what is wrong with it?
> Are people not allowed to change view in the light of new information?
Just points me back to your earlier post which says "That sets a terrible precedent: lose a vote, use every resource you can to thwart implementing the outcome, get a second vote". That doesn't answer the question so let me try again, same question, please answer Yes or No.
"The ONS figures for 2015 suggest the UK’s gross contribution to the EU, before the cash rebate received by the UK, totalled £19.6 billion – or about £376 million a week. "
> Just points me back to your earlier post which says "That sets a terrible precedent: lose a vote, use every resource you can to thwart implementing the outcome, get a second vote".
Yes. You seem to not have either read or understood that point.
> That doesn't answer the question so let me try again, same question, please answer Yes or No.
Yes. However having a second referendum is spectacularly dangerous and undemocratic as you've already read, hopefully three times now. Maybe you can ingest that information, process it and even respond if you'd like to rebut it.
Yes, before the cash rebate it was ~£350M/week (or £376M/week according to this). Which boris used without accounting for the rebate which would have brought it down to considerably less.
He lied and you seem ok with it.
> Yes. However having a second referendum is spectacularly dangerous and undemocratic as you've already read
So Yes, people can change their mind, you allow, but no they shouldn't have a 2nd vote, you say, despite the fact they may have changed their mind.
So what am I supposed to conclude from that?
IMO it's problematic either way, but if we had a 2nd referendum at least "the will of the people" would be clearer. Which may give us a way forwards, which I proposed as a compromise, but you are trying to shut down.
I mentioned why the EU having control of our money is bad in a previous post you responded to and didn't read.
There is no compromise. We lost. Asking people to vote a second time before disrespects the first referendum. I have explained this a fourth time. I'm blocking you now. You'll say it's because you're making amazing points, but actually it's because you're talking to yourself.
> > "The ONS figures for 2015 suggest the UK’s gross contribution to the EU, before the cash rebate received by the UK, totalled £19.6 billion – or about £376 million a week. "
> "True but irrelevant. Boris lied".
I mentioned you were having a discussion with yourself earlier, but thanks for providing an example.
You say that while psychopaths are pushing the UK beyond the brink of legitimacy through the invalidation of Democratic self-governance in the hopes that people don’t realize the fraud and snap.… and you have the audacity to claim others are sociopaths (a term that has been retired btw, because it’s just a focus of psychopathy)
The only psychopaths, and even beyond that, they are the dark triad of personality disorders (narcissistic, psychopathic, and Machiavellian) are the “remainer” fools, who are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
What credibility does any vote of democratic principle have anymore when the oppressive ruling class simply negates the will of the people through trickery and manipulation of process. There is no legitimacy left after that; zero, and you’re only left with might makes right, which I can assure everyone you don’t want to happen. Spoiled brats can’t get what they want and therefore are going to burn down the house, pretty much sums up Brexit remainders.
> This court has already concluded that the prime minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect. This means that the order in council to which it led was also unlawful, void and of no effect and should be quashed. This means that when the royal commissioners walked into the House of Lords it was as if they walked in with a blank sheet of paper. The prorogation was also void and of no effect. Parliament has not been prorogued. This is the unanimous judgment of all 11 justices.
This is a very clear and damning verdict.
Suspending parliament for five weeks in a critical time would be heavily criticized by the West as a major anti-democratic and authoritarian move in any other country.
It's something that would have been unimaginable to happen in the UK a few years ago, and will probably burden the UKs political system for a long time.
It won't burden the system. This has happened before in recent memory and is totally fitting with the powers of the Executive (the only difference here is the subject).
And it is worth saying: to get that verdict, they had to take the leap of judgement in assuming they knew exactly why the PM did it. The key assumption in that is there is an alternative before the October 31, there isn't...so it doesn't matter if Parliament is sitting or not because there is nothing to scrutinise.
To explain: Johnson was not denying Parliament a voice at all because he wasn't suspending past October 31. He was suspending until a few days before the European Council meeting, where the final deal will be negotiated, and then Parliament would vote on it. 95% of articles on this topic do not make this clear. The timetable does not change whether or not Parliament is sitting. It only changes if you are someone deluded enough to believe that there is an alternative...there isn't (the EU has said this multiple times).
What is burdening the system is:
* UK voted to leave
* General election was called which Brexit parties won (somehow given May's ineffectiveness)
* MPs voted to leave
* MPs voted down the current deal 4 times but EU won't change that deal
* MPs refuse to re-negotiate the deal or do anything that makes a deal possible
* The "alternative" from Labour is to go to the EU, negotiate exactly the same deal that has been voted down 4 times then they will whip their MPs against that deal too.
It is utterly bizarre to take aim at the only person who actually has a definite idea about how to solve this situation (regardless of whether you agree with it or not).
Unfortunately, the "solution" you're referring to violates the Good Friday Agreement, so in fact Boris Johnson does not have a definite idea about how to solve anything whatsoever.
Its fair to say that whether it is in line with or 'breaks' the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is disputed - the UK courts recently ruled that imposing a border on a no deal exit would not breach it, and what the UK is proposing is less than that.
The Republic of Ireland (or at least their political leadership) seem to interpret the agreement differently, and insist that the Good Friday Agreement means that all laws relating to trade or commerce must be exactly the same in both NI and the RoI (they cite some provisions on the 'all island economy' in support of this).
Equally the unionists believe that the May Withdrawal Agreement breaches the GFA for different reasons - because the GFA acknowledges UK sovereignty over NI and says that this shouldn't be changed without a border poll (which the unionists would likely win still).
It is technically true to say the the GFA does not prohibit border controls. However the GFA was negotiated with joint EU membership as part of the existing political background, so it was taken for granted.
In practice anything which stops people crossing the border without let or hindrance will be treated by the Republicans as an abrogation of the intent of the GFA.
Border controls themselves aren't really the major item in dispute (and there are already forms of controls for contraband, alcohol/fuel duty, VAT, and movement of people which occur in a dedramatised way) - its alignment of law and regulation which is disputed much more heavily.
A soft border with an implicit tolerance of smuggling at a certain level (which in reality is what we have today vs the rest of the world - witness the amount of fake-certified and dangerous goods that come in from eg China with no real enforcement), together with cooperation on enforcement for the bigger offenders (eg the UK assisting in stopping goods before they reach the border if they are destined for RoI and known not to comply with EU standards) would seem to be the pragmatic solution. I don’t think the two sides are really all that far apart on this point.
As I mentioned, the much bigger issue is regulatory alignment more generally for reasons which are not related to border infrastructure (North-South cooperation and the all island economy), where there is a much bigger gap between the sides.
Yep, that is a common misunderstanding. The solution is not the deal, the solution is the strategy.
The reason we are in this situation is because the UK essentially agreed to everything the EU wanted, and MPs voted it down. That is democracy.
Johnson's approach is to say: we need to leave. The EU has red lines, that is fine, we will try to come to whatever agreement is possible but if no agreement is found then we will just get on with it.
Your argument is that Brexit cannot happen because it is impossible. That is fine. But the UK voted for Brexit, Parliament voted for Brexit, and Brexit parties won a general election (and there is no Remain majority). So the solution is equally not to ignore voters.
Basically there is a general agreement that pigs should fly, but nobody seem to agree on the mechanics (the option of shooting them from a cannon apparently is not liked by anybody).
I think it's pretty clear that in many western democracies it's getting increasingly easy to form majorities "against" stuff while it's getting harder to form majorities "for stuff".
There's a majority in the UK that wants to live the EU, but there's no majority agreeing on where to go from there. That's why this referendum was mindbogglingly stupid to begin with, you can't give the people a choice if you're not prepared to handle both outcomes. What's next, a referendum for "social security for all and basic income and no taxes, also free candy. Yes or no?" Of course the people is sovereign, but democracy can't trump reality. How can you live the UK without hard border with Ireland? This wasn't even a topic at the time of the referendum as I recall.
David Cameron made one of the biggest political errors in modern history here.
>David Cameron made one of the biggest political errors in modern history here.
By asking people to have a voice instead of deciding for them??
Direct democracy can work very well - just look at Switzerland, which is the envy of the world when it comes to governance. It may/may not be scalable, but important decisions like EU membership should be decided by the people, not the elite.
> By asking people to have a voice instead of deciding for them??
The question posed was simply "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
No implementation details, no specifics, no timeline, and not binding. In the Swiss model, you'd have subsequent direct votes on specific plans once decided upon. (Citizens need only garner 50k signatures to force a vote for/against the specific law implementing a deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_referendum)
Right now, they'd be voting on "given our inability to strike a deal, should we take a no-deal exit?", which I don't think anyone can really argue would get the same 52% the more general Brexit referendum did.
> In the Swiss model, you'd have subsequent direct votes on specific plans once decided upon.
This is a flawed assumption. The EU referendum absolutely was an exercise in direct democracy. Nowhere does it say that direct democracy requires a specific set of questions to be asked.
Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options. Politics does not work like that and neither does life.
> The EU referendum absolutely was an exercise in direct democracy.
Not in the slightest. It was explicitly non-binding on a legal level. It was fundamentally an opinion poll with a large sample size.
> Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options.
Perhaps, but that's why the people have elected representatives, who are very clearly saying the no-deal approach isn't acceptable.
Claiming the Brexit referendum gives the PM the right to do anything he wants is silly. It's like claiming "we should fund the NHS" is carte blanche to have the NHS euthanize everyone under 40 because "the people approved the funding".
> Not in the slightest. It was explicitly non-binding on a legal level. It was fundamentally an opinion poll with a large sample size.
The spirit of the referendum, legally binding or not, is direct democracy in action. Regardless of what you believe, it would be a travesty to ignore the will of the people, hard as it may be to carry out their command to leave the EU.
> Claiming the Brexit referendum gives the PM the right to do anything he wants is silly. It's like claiming "we should fund the NHS" is carte blanche to have the NHS euthanize everyone under 40 because "the people approved the funding".
Now if you believe the referendum was just 'an opinion poll', and no deal is also by far the most popular option right now[0]: Even if you disagree with it, Boris trying to push no deal is legitimate if you accept the referendum is legitimate.
The poll you cite indicates a 4 to 6% support for cancelling Brexit. It seems... unlikely... that 90% of Remain voters have now switched over to Leave.
A better set of polls appears to be here, with 77 polls instead of two, and across the entire populace instead of individual parties. Remain's beating Leave at the moment (and has been consistently). Since you're interested in the Will of the People, here you go:
> The poll you cite indicates a 4 to 6% support for cancelling Brexit. It seems... unlikely... that 90% of Remain voters have now switched over to Leave.
Why not? Losers consent is a part of democracy and life. However I will admit I cited a poor source, it was not my intention to be deceptive.
The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else. If it's changed, so be it, but the first result must be implemented first.
> If there was another referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, how would you vote?
The question is also extremely suspect. It's not asking what the current opinion is, it's saying if we do it all again. These are different. It'd be great if all votes could be done with the benefit of hindsight, but to my knowledge nobody has invented a time machine yet.
Oh, come on. When Labour wins an election the entire Tory party doesn't switch over to their side of things. Arguing that Remain has dropped to 4-6% of the populace is not reasonable.
> The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else.
What law established this? This is particularly disingenuous given the explicitly non-binding nature of the first referendum.
You were perfectly happy to cite current opinion polls when you thought they supported your will of the people argument.
> It'd be great if all votes could be done with the benefit of hindsight, but to my knowledge nobody has invented a time machine yet.
A second referendum can absolutely be done with hindsight. "Gee, that didn't go well."
> When Labour wins an election the entire Tory party doesn't switch over to their side of things.
Losers consent in the case you mentioned is that Labour accept the Tory government as legitimate. The difference is a referendum is supposed to be final (and it was indeed sold as so), but with an election the opposition will get elected again someday. The proper thing for Labour to do right now is push for the best deal they can to minimise what they believe is a bad decision. It should not be to try as hard as possible to do anything but Brexit.
> What law established this? This is particularly disingenuous given the explicitly non-binding nature of the first referendum.
No law established this, but given our unwritten constitution, can we really be certain that it's legal to ignore a referendum without court scrutiny (which has a divided opinion here btw)? The ballet paper literally said "The government will implement your decision" - I think it's fair to say if it has all the features/promises/legitimacy of a vote, it's a vote.
> You were perfectly happy to cite current opinion polls when you thought they supported your will of the people argument.
I was responding to your argument that a referendum is basically a poll (which I disagreed with anyway).
> A second referendum can absolutely be done with hindsight. "Gee, that didn't go well."
I'm not a fan of second referendum. I'm asking you honestly here, if it was remain won by 4%, and leavers were complaining for 3 years, would you call it legitimate to have another referendum so soon? Of course not, they'd be accused of being undemocratic and I believe they're right.
> The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else. If it's changed, so be it, but the first result must be implemented first.
Regardless of your intent, this specifically argues that we should implement a decision made by people who since have more information and have changed their minds. That is emphatically not a good position.
This is why we generally (mildly facetious) are governed by learned adults, and not children frozen in time. The ability to change opinions is what helps us and society to evolve.
>Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options.
You're making it sound as if deciding what to do with the Irish border is some super intricate detail that nobody could anticipate. Enforcing borders (for immigration) was probably the #1 talking point during the referendum campaign, yet it turns out that nobody knows how to actually implement it.
I agree that the referendum was, de facto, an exercise in direct democracy. Yet it's also pretty clear that it failed to capture exactly the will of the people because there doesn't seem to be a majority behind any concrete proposal for leaving the union.
Nobody cared about the Irish border. I remember talking to my boss a few days after (he's English, I'm Irish) and I mentioned the North. He assumed that I meant the North of England, rather than Northern Ireland, which just goes to show how little thought was given to Northern Ireland during the referendum.
Yup. Ireland is by far the biggest issue we've got to deal with. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that a soft border (with CCTV cameras only and no hard barriers) is our only option.
The problem is no govt. has the ability to set this all up within six weeks and is what they should've been doing these past three years rather than endlessly bike-shedding the little things and ignoring the biggest issues at hand...
Legitimate traffic which is the vast majority will have to go over official channels anyway, so it's feasible that moving goods across the border could be as simple as registering your vehicle and declaring the contents.
It's not perfect, but the alternatives are much worse.
That's why there are elections, the vast majority of the electorate really isn't equipped to deal with all the details and ramifications of what a big decision like this entails: therefore we choose representatives whose ideas we agree with so that they, along with experts of choice, can deep-dive into the consequences of each decision and make appropriate choices. For example: ask me about agricultural policy and you'll find out why I should have no business in making any sort of significant decisions about it.
It's the same reason we go to a doctor when we're sick or to an architect when we want to design a house: we go to someone whose job is to know how to do something properly.
In the Swiss model you'll never find single, completely vague and as wide-reaching questions like the one that lead to brexit.
You are right that Switzerland has a long history of direct democracy. But the reason it works at all is that people vote whether to accept specific proposals that have already been drawn up.
This was the biggest flaw in the Brexit referendum. As formulated, it was way too woolly and covered a wide range of possible plans.
At which point, some rabid Brexiteer chimes in and says "No, Brexit was very clearly defined as ... ", and then proceeds to reel off their pet opinions-as-facts. QED.
In general, Swiss referenda are fairly well-thought-out; the voter knows what they're voting for.
Interestingly, one recent case where it was _not_ well-specified or not well-thought-out caused a bit of a crisis, and in effect lead to the government fudging a non-solution. This case also involved the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initiat...
Very true (and might I say, a rare sensible comment on this topic). The end result is very much a function of the starting point.
But I would say that Johnson is the only one who has actually recognised the difficulty. His starting point, unfortunately three years down the line and after the deal was voted down four times, is to say that this is really difficult and the priority is to do what is possible, not constantly try to rework the fundamentally impossible.
I think it is worth going over the history leading up to Cameron calling the referendum. As always, as with austerity, people read back from the present and assume that all the information was available then. Cameron was facing down a pretty significant rebellion (as it turned out people really didn't like the EU), and he thought he could appease this group with a deal from the EU. The mistake wasn't the referendum but his delusion that the EU would him something useful (this isn't to blame the EU, merely to observe that is was politically impossible for them to do so).
>But I would say that Johnson is the only one who has actually recognised the difficulty
Boy, that's richer than mum's trifle, considering that Boris "£350 million for the NHS" Johnson threw his weight behind the whole sorry endeavour in the first place, while fully half the population voted against it. I think it's pretty fair to say that the difficulty has been obvious to vast swathes of people since the very beginning.
> I think it's pretty clear that in many western democracies it's getting increasingly easy to form majorities "against" stuff while it's getting harder to form majorities "for stuff".
What.
"I'm not anti EU, I'm pro independence"?
From this perspective the people who are against Brexit are inherently against change, or fear of the unknown, and pro Brexiteers are fighting to own their own laws.
I'm not saying this is or isn't my opinion, but your opening presumption is flawed.
You're putting words in my mouth. Clearly Brexit is a huge change so brexiteers are clearly not against it. I also don't know where you get the "fear of the unknown" from, you're building a strawman. Brexit is the unknown and Remainers seem to fear that a whole lot.
If you were to find something unifying the Brexit mindset, something that would unify Brexiteers as a whole, what would it be?
"Pro-independance" doesn't work because that's simply too vague. As we've seen over the past couple of years there's no agreement on what an independent UK would look like. What unifies the Brexiteers is the rejection of the European Union, they don't seem to adhere to any constructive project as a whole. And to be clear that's not to say that they're not individually constructive, just that there's no constructive consensus among this majority.
It isn't my intention to build a strawman, so sorry if that's how you interpreted it, but I'll try and rephrase.
We may live in different regions or have had different conversations, but the trend in conversations I've had in the North across all age groups seems to be rejection of the EU because they're holding us back. The last part is key, because it's not destructive, it's wanting to be constructive but not being able to. Some (most? I don't know) Brexiteers don't hate the EU, they just think we can be a better nation without them.
Either way, I just don't think you can break it down to constructive and destructive mindsets. My argument is that those are entirely subjective depending on your viewpoint (leave/remain) anyway.
"This has happened before in recent memory and is totally fitting with the powers of the Executive"
This is explicitly false, as the normal proroguing is 1 week, not 5 weeks, and such an oddly and unnecessarily long proroguing has never occured during a massive political crisis. No offense but the Supreme Court of the U.K. is more of an expert on the subject than commenters on Hacker News and it's their context and interpretation as subject matter experts we should be respecting.
This is not normal. It's not the new normal.
Good on the U.K. for standing up for the Parliament against an out-of-control Executive who really does appear to following in the footstep of the recent trend of western leaders fancying themselves fascist dictators who are above the laws and systems of their countries.
Happened in 1997. And the point is not the length of the prorogation (as the Supreme Court decision makes clear) but the justification.
In 1997, the justification was to stop a politically damaging report being published before an election.
Again, Johnson is not denying Parliament the opportunity to vote on the deal. Nothing will happen now that Parliament is sitting again. The negotiation will still happen at the European Council meeting at the end of the month, and Parliament will still get a vote on it.
It is important to really think through the logic here: if Johnson wanted to stop Parliament he would delayed until AFTER October 31. He didn't do this.
In 1997 the question was not brought before the court, so referencing it as some sort of precedent that his behavior should be acceptable is meaningless.
Secondly, the damage done was accordingly limited: If people saw the delay as questionable, people were given an opportunity to directly punish the government in an election rather than doing so indirectly via Parliament. If there was time to hold a general election with suitable margin ahead of October 31st, then this proroguing would not have been an issue, as we'd be going into an election instead.
> Again, Johnson is not denying Parliament the opportunity to vote on the deal.
It is not up to Johnson or the courts to decide what Parliament may or may not consider critical to do in the run-up to such a major constitutional change. His government serves with the consent of parliament; parliament is sovereign, not the government.
> It is important to really think through the logic here: if Johnson wanted to stop Parliament he would delayed until AFTER October 31. He didn't do this.
This does not follow. If he had announced he would prorogue until after October 31, then he would have to give up any pretense that he is negotiating a deal, because parliament would be unable to vote for it. It would instantly ensure a majority for removing him, as everyone opposed to no deal would have no other choice. His only option if his goal was to stop Parliament was to limit their ability to function as much as possible but still little enough to not push people into deciding removing him instantly was absolutely essential.
The government's own lawyers admitted that prorogation had a political purpose. the only logical conclusion is that the goverment intended to restrict parliament's ability to interfere with its brexit plans
> It is important to really think through the logic here: if Johnson wanted to stop Parliament he would delayed until AFTER October 31. He didn't do this.
That would've made the motivations too explicit. He'd presumably hoped to skate by with your argument - "oh, I left a week or two to tackle this minor issue". It didn't work.
> It is important to really think through the logic here: if Johnson wanted to stop Parliament he would delayed until AFTER October 31. He didn't do this.
I don't think the logic leads to this conclusion. His calculus may have been that the prorogation would be more likely to be successfully challenged if it _clearly_ cut parliament out of the process altogether. By leaving some time for them to sit ahead of his October 31st deadline he likely hoped that the prorogation would stand, he could negotiate a deal, downplay the possiblity of an extension, and then force a vote to approve the deal as the only alternative to a no-deal Brexit given the short timeline.
> For present purposes, the relevant limit on the power to prorogue is this: that a decision to prorogue (or advise the monarch to prorogue) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and as the body responsible for the supervision of the executive. In judging any justification which might be put forward, the court must of course be sensitive to the responsibilities and experience of the Prime Minister and proceed with appropriate caution.
> If the prorogation does have that effect, without reasonable justification, there is no need for the court to consider whether the Prime Minister’s motive or purpose was unlawful.
Also:
> * MPs voted down the current deal 4 times but EU won't change that deal
The EU is happy to change the deal if the UK government proposes something reasonable. But it will not back down from its red lines which is the integrity of the single market and solidarity with Ireland, which is a member state.
> They explicitly side-stepped the motive of why Johnson prorogued Parliament.
They did not. The part you quoting actually explains that this is the case. The court has to identify whether the justification is reasonable (if you followed the case in Scotland, the logic was exactly the same), and this means looking at motive (just to say, constitutional law in the UK does not work like the US...at all).
I did not imply that the EU should do anything. Again, this is a common misunderstanding of the govt's position. The point of their strategy isn't to force the EU into doing anything (although that is the effect). The point is to stop the delay (the effect on the economy has been huge).
Yes. You can see every time a pro-Brexit news event happens the pound falls and an anti-Brexit one happens it ticks up again, like today. The effect of no-deal will be even bigger, as a number of businesses which have been hanging on will be forced to close or relocate.
The default way out of this has to be to revoke, until such time as someone can get elected with a majority of MPs supporting a workable plan.
The UK has a phenomenally large number of low productivity businesses (the BoE has written tons on the productivity crisis). To suggest that businesses would go bust who wouldn't have gone bust otherwise is to confuse cause and effect.
For most businesses, it won't make a tremendous difference. Imports are becoming more expensive but this is something that likely would have occurred anyway because of weak competitiveness/low savings rate.
Exporters are probably going to come out even or ahead (the change in the £ has offset tariffs).
The situation at the border is somewhat concerning (although only worth 1-2% of GDP in most studies) but has also been distinctly complicated by the switch from CDS to CHIEF (which was supposed to happen years ago but didn't). We could get this right, unf we have got to the point where we are choosing not to.
The main concern for the UK economy is actually supply. The labour market is very tight, unemployment is the lowest it has been for four decades or so, wages are growing like crazy, and we have had deflationary effect due to the delay (which has crushed investment) but, at some point, this is going to come back and there is no spare capacity.
It would be a sweet relief for the marginal, low-productivity businesses that are suffocating the economy to fold (the reason we have low productivity and tight labour is because too many people do jobs that are unproductive, these businesses will not give up resources willingly).
Leaving aside Yellowhammer, Thomas Cook, and the various car manufacturers, the argument that low-productivity businesses are the ones holding the economy back and need to go bankrupt is really questionable. People are free to move jobs. You just have to pay them more. Evidently the wage growth has not yet caught up enough.
The other approach would be to encourage staff from overseas, which the government has spent years discouraging and has now specifically chosen to make harder for Europeans.
> We could get this right, unf we have got to the point where we are choosing not to.
>> They explicitly side-stepped the motive of why Johnson prorogued Parliament.
> They did not.
The way I read it is that they decided that the _effect_ (preventing parliament from performing its constitutional role) of prorogation was unlawful, and therefore Johnson's motive was irrelevant.
Yes, and they said "without reasonable justification". The implication of that being that if "reasonable justification" existed then it would be lawful regardless of effect.
Whilst I enjoy watching the mental gymnastics that other people go to on Brexit (I voted to Remain btw), it is utterly self-defeating. Just read something, try to stop your brain jumping in..."reasonable justification"...it doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
This would be more obvious if more people actually followed the primary sources rather than journalists btw. In Scotland, there was a whole thing about getting emails, etc. This has no other purpose than examining motive.
> which is the integrity of the single market and solidarity with Ireland, which is a member state.
It's a sad indictment on my country that the EU seems to care more about the Good Friday agreement than what seems like a majority of the current Johnson backing Conservative MPs (and I'm not even sure about Labour).
Isn't the possibility of direct rule still looming with no government formed at Stormont for two years now? Direct rule seems like it would essentially be an abandonment of the Good Friday Agreement.
Plenty of people have ideas on how to solve this situation, from straight up admit it's unworkable and revoke to having another referendum on "deal vs revoke".
I'm afraid I'd have to disagree with this analysis.
The government's originally stated aim of the prorogation, was that it was a standard mechanism prior to a queen's speech.
The court has taken the opinion that the real aim of this prorogation was instead to restrict parliamentary debate of the Brexit process and that this is unlawful.
Looking at historic prorogation lengths (https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...) we can see that "Between 1930 and 2017, the mean average was about 5 calendar days, a median average of about 4 calendar days.", so it's clear that this prorogation was considerably longer than usual.
Your suggestion then that there's nothing out of the ordinary, seems unlikely to hold and indeed the government's own lawyers didn't even try that line of argument during the case, as far as I'm aware.
'Lord Keen said previous prorogations of Parliament - including in 1930 and 1948 - had "clearly been employed" when governments wanted to "pursue a particular political objective", adding: "They are entitled to do so."'
so the government was arguing a) that the matter was not one for the courts and b) that even if it was, the government was entitled to use prorogation for political ends.
I'm actually mildly surprised that b) didn't hold. allowing a) would have set a very dangerous precedent.
> they had to take the leap of judgement in assuming they knew exactly why the PM did it
They explicitly didn't do this:
> We are not concerned with the Prime Minister’s motive in doing what he did. We are concerned with whether there was a reason for him to do it
> It is impossible for us to conclude, on the evidence which has been put before us, that there was any reason - let alone a good reason - to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament for five weeks, from 9th or 12th September until 14th October. We cannot speculate, in the absence of further evidence, upon what such reasons might have been. It follows that the decision was unlawful.
They didn't conclude anything specific about why the PM did it; they concluded that no reason was given.
"It's something that would have been unimaginable to happen in the UK a few years ago"
You say that but we had it happen in 1997 to prevent parliamentary discussion of the cash for questions scandal that ultimately toppled the Major Conservative government.
I believe that the Blair government considered it in the run up to the Iraq war too but didn't.
Yeah, though somehow the British press managed to omit that little fact from their regurgitations of John Major's claims about how dangerous and remarkable this action was. His prorogation seems much more clear-cut an example of frustrating Parliamentary scrutiny too; he completely blocked Parliament from sitting between the time he announced it and the election he was hoping to protect, unlike this case where Boris left windows for them to act both before and after the prorogation, and he didn't even have the justification that Boris did of doing it to end an over-long session and hold a Queen's Speech.
Not a few of Major's cabinet ended up in jail, for various reasons.
In fact there's a better precedent - Attlee's prorogation in 1948.
The difference is that both were done by a PM with a working majority, so it could be argued they were done with the consent of Parliament.
Johnson nuked his own majority from orbit, so there's absolutely no argument that he's acting with the confidence and approval of Parliament.
Which is part of the problem. Parliament will remove him with a No Confidence vote soon. But first it wants to make sure that he doesn't make any other attempt to game electoral or Parliamentary procedure to force through the mad Brexit agenda that his hedge-fund owning backers want to profit from.
The prorogation in 1948 was about creating a pro-forma session of Parliament just for the purpose of passing a law an extra time, so as to pass it over the objections of the Lords. It didn't actually prevent Parliament from having its say, which is the issue today.
Not only was that 1997 incident during a time and issue that was not nearly as critical to the existence of the country, it was not at all comparable because it did not fundamentally prevent parliament from taking meaningful action on the issue: when parliament reconvened it could take up the issue again at it's leisure. In this case, prorogueing parliament had the effect of preventing nearly any meaningful action from taking place before it was too late. It's the difference between delaying action and denying it out right. (Yes there would have been a couple of days, not nearly enough for meaningful review or careful legislative action.)
Also length is a strong distinguishing factor. A few days or even a week or two are different enough in this situation to elevate a difference of degree to a difference in kind.
Finally, it happened with a PM that had a majority. Arguably the PM is not overuling the purpose of parliament when parliament itself agrees with the action. That is not the case here, there is no majority for the PM, and to all available evidence there is a majority that oppose this move by Johnson.
> In this case, prorogueing parliament had the effect of preventing nearly any meaningful action from taking place before it was too late.
Did nobody tell parliament that Brexit was an issue? They've had 3 years to act. Why 2 more weeks is so critical isn't actually all that obvious in the big picture. If a 5-week break in parliament is the difference between outcomes in a 3 year process; it is too close to call and it is democratic enough whatever happens. The details are important but ultimately just politics.
On truly divisive 50-50 issues, either option is basically acceptable in a democratic country. Democracies are to avoid the 60-40 splits where countries barrel in to truly foolish ideas that nobody supports. Brexit or No Brexit by means fair and foul aren't going to be death blows; the public has been polled and the politicians have been given time to talk. Neither really expressed a clear direction. It falls to the executive to execute something.
Anyhow; courts made a good call. More talking makes for a happy parliament.
> They've had 3 years to act. Why 2 more weeks is so critical isn't actually all that obvious in the big picture.
When you dont have agreement on what to do and a deadline is looming, it seems obvious that, however much it should NOT have been needed, it is in fact critical.
You arent chopping 5 weeks off of a 3 year period, you're chopping 5 weeks off of an 8 week period.
They were adding 3 weeks to a 2 week suspension that was planned for party conferences. This is after the 5 week summer recess which they took as usual.
This is really about playing politics against Johnson and the government, not an actual outrage. Of course the government was doing the same by prorogating.
Yes parliament was stalling hard decisions. But this prorogation was not planned three years ago! Neither was the extension. How should they plan their sessions when they can be disabled at a whim?
They've had 3 years, but not to act in the current (very different) circumstances than were present for that 3 year period. Most of that time was spent in the actual substantive negotiations, but those fell apart in their ability to gain parliamentary support, precisely because Theresa May held her cards too close to her vest and away from parliamentary scrutiny & input, and that gave rise to the time crunch here.
Regardless of whether they could have acted sooner, Johnson's move was to prevent them from acting now when faced with a new administration and new course of action that had every appearance of going against both the will of parliament and (though less legally relevant) the will of the people in that most do not support crashing out without a deal.
You can't claim they had 3 years to act on the current situation when the current situation just arose in the form of a new PM that was attempting to side step any parliamentary review or legislation over his course of action.
Finally, they actually did act this past spring to vote that no deal wasn't an acceptable outcome. It was part of a series of non-binding votes that established governmental norms should have meant that it would be honored. When, after Johnson became PM, it was clear that it would not be honored, parliament quickly acted in the short time before being proroqued to actually enact in law the requirement to ask the EU for an extension in the face of no-deal. So, not only is 3 years not what they had to address the current situation, to they extent that they could address the current situation, they did so. Their desire to do more was prohibited by Johnson's (now illegal) actions.
Part of the problem in this case is that it's not 50-50. It's more like 33-33-33 for hard brexit, soft brexit, and no brexit, with varying second-choice preferences depending closely on precisely how you phrase the question. There's no option that doesn't leave most people angry. Especially since it's more like 25-25-49, such that the largest single group is outweighed by two other groups that are almost, but not quite, as sharply divided.
It's a pretty fundamental flaw that interferes with "near tossup means it could go either way" as a philosophy. It's a pathological case, but not uncommon.
Unlikely to happen straight away. Due to a quirk of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, a successful VoNC now would allow the Prime Minister to run out the clock by refusing to resign, waiting the maximum two weeks to attempt a superseding Vote of Confidence, then calling the latest legal election after he inevitably lost. And Parliament would then be dissolved for the election, leaving only Johnson at the controls over the critical period leading up to Brexit day.
There are other routes out of the situation after a VoNC, but they involve Parliament being able to agree on a new PM, which is tricky given that the Leader of the Opposition is cordially despised by much of the Commons and there are deep political problems with any of the other potential candidates. It also would require Boris to either resign or be sacked after losing the VoNC, which is by no means a done deal given that he's ignoring all the other conventions and there's no obvious mechanisms for a forcible dismissal (one hasn't been needed since the early 19th Century, as PMs have done the decent thing on losing the confidence of the House).
> It is worth just taking a breath and considering that a prime minister of the United Kingdom has been found by the highest court in the land to have acted unlawfully in shutting down the sovereign body in our constitution, Parliament, at a time of national crisis.
<shrug> It's the new normal. The press and the usual suspects will be out there yelling that down is up. They've put a lot of work into creating this crisis and don't want people to do things like resolve it, and certainly not in a sensible, constructive way.
Brexiters would argue he is fighting the remainer parliament to implement the will of the people as represented by the 2016 referendum result. It's all a bit of a mess.
Personally I think Blair's suggestion of another referendum on no deal vs remain would be the way forward as those are the most popular options with the voters. Everyone seems to hate the withdrawal agreement.
A second referendum would be a terrible idea. It might have been theoretically defendable some years ago, if events had worked out differently.
But what we've seen over the past 3.5 years is that there was already a referendum, and it's had no effect whatsoever because the ruling classes keep fighting it all the way. The UK is still a member of the EU, nearly four years after they voted last time!
Moreover, all the politicians in the two biggest political parties campaigned last time on respecting and implementing the vote. They're now not doing that.
If you voted leave last time, why would you bother doing it again? The head of the Liberal Democrats admitted on camera already that if she lost a second referendum she still wouldn't vote to implement leaving in Parliament, which surprised nobody at all.
The idea of a second referendum is proposed for exactly one reason only: so it can be rigged to give Remain a second chance. Simply re-running it would already give Remain a bigger chance than last time because so many of those who voted Leave before would be disillusioned, believe the new vote was just another lie and refuse to turn up at all.
But I doubt the establishment would take any chances. The Electoral Commission has been repeatedly found to have maliciously harassed and fined Leave supporters and campaigns, by the courts and police. For sure they'd try and bend the process significantly.
Parliament would also likely try to ensure a Remain victory. Probably by changing voting thresholds or by only offering remain/deal (i.e. remain/remain) and then campaigning on the basis that the Withdrawal Agreement is so bad it'd be better to give up entirely.
In the event that somehow a genuine no deal/remain referendum did take place, and the powers that be didn't interfere, and Leave won again, it'd be immediately challenged in courts by Gina Miller and her lawyer friends, the same Parliament would still be in power and still be refusing to implement it, and it'd change nothing.
In the end the only way out of this mess is unilaterally leaving the EU and then starting to rebuild whatever relationship is possible from scratch, replacing most sitting MPs and formalising a written constitution.
> In the end the only way out of this mess is unilaterally leaving the EU
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs, colossal disruption, possible interruptions to food and medical supplies? Are you delusional that you think it's easy or do you just not care who gets harmed?
You overlooked the much more likely third option: I don't believe these claims are true. Most people supporting no deal don't believe they're true, and for valid reasons!
Let's break it down.
Loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is an economic prediction so we can't know for sure if it would be true or not unless it really happens. But before the vote, this very same prediction was made in very similar form and turned out to be completely false.
Britain’s economy would be tipped into a year-long recession, with at least 500,000 jobs lost and GDP around 3.6% lower, following a vote to leave the EU, new Treasury analysis launched today by the Prime Minister and Chancellor shows.
NB: This analysis was about voting to Leave, not actually leaving, so we can test its correctness now. The analysis talks about the uncertainty created by two years of negotiations, saying it would destroy at best 500,000 jobs and at worst 800,000 jobs. Leave won, there have been 3.5 years of uncertainty and the economy is performing incredibly well. Employment has grown strongly since the vote. This prediction posed as scientific fact, but was riven with huge Remain bias and turned out to be nonsense.
So now the same people are making the same claim again, but won't explain why this time they're right or what they learned from their previous failure. It's entirely reasonable to assume they've learned nothing, are making these claims for political reasons and will be wrong again.
OK, now, colossal disruption. Possible interruptions to food and medical supplies.
Really?
The explanation for why such disruption would happen goes like this. The UK will implement more customs checks, which would be slow and temporarily overwhelm customs infrastructure, leading to supply chain disruptions and disasters.
Two problems with this claim.
Firstly, why would any sane government insist on customs checks if people were dying due to lack of medicine or food? Tariff income isn't that important and on day one the precise rules will be the same anyway. It'd be much more sensible to just relax customs checks to whatever level was needed to ensure continuity of supply until enough infrastructure was built.
Secondly and more importantly, people who actually run ports are saying the infrastructure is already built and it's not true that there'd be large disruptions in case of no deal.
I write on behalf of the United Kingdom’s major port operators, responsible for handling 75 per cent of the country’s seaborne trade. Dover, handling around 6 per cent of UK port volumes, faces a unique combination of Brexit risk factors that are not faced by most major UK ports. These ports already have the capacity and infrastructure to handle large volumes of both EU and non-EU trade today without logjam.
So apparently the people running the ports think only Dover might have issues, but if it gets overloaded traffic would just go elsewhere. What does the head of Dover Port think about this?
The Port of Dover -- through which a sixth of the U.K.’s trade in goods flows -- can cope with any disruption thrown up by a no-deal Brexit, Chief Executive Officer Doug Bannister said, suggesting some of the direr predictions of chaos are wide of the mark.
So people who run ports are saying this is just politically driven scaremongering.
As for medicines, if you look at the NHS advice page, it says the extent of their plans is hiring additional space on planes or ferries to handle temporary transport disruption (which, remember, port operators are saying won't actually be an issue): https://www.england.nhs.uk/eu-exit/medicines/medicines-faq/
So the claims being made here to try and terrify the British population into giving up on Brexit, it's all stuff we heard before or people outside of the establishment are saying isn't true.
Somewhat off topic, but is there a name for this convention:
> Most people supporting no deal don't believe they're true, and for valid reasons!
> Let's break it down.
It is the same pattern and cadence that Sheryl Sandberg uses when describing exciting new privacy initiatives in interviews, but it's also used by PR managers at many tech firms.
Is there a PR school where they describe the subconscious thought process of a typical audience:
> Sure, I want to join this really fun bandwagon with all of the enthusiastic people developing privacy policies at Facebook, or learning all the great ways that a no deal Brexit is going to be truly awesome for the UK. However, that's just my emotional response to wanting to be included, so please give me some nominally rational arguments for post hoc rationalization
I think it probably works, at least until it is overused, but I am curious about whether there is a name for the whole approach.
What convention? You mean stating what you believe and then providing arguments for it? I'm not sure why you believe a normal argumentation structure is somehow linked to PR firms.
Do you have any actual rebuttals or, would you rather just make innuendos and insinuations (about what I'm not entirely sure).
Imports into the UK are under the control of the UK government. As such it's hard to imagine how and why food and medicine imports (or anything else deemed important) would be disrupted.
The first didn't specify how we would leave - Norway style, no deal of whatever. Hence the current 'no one voted for no deal' type arguments.
There was misinformation - we are now better informed.
I think if no deal won fair and square even remainers such as myself would say ok and accept it. Presently I don't think that's the case - there was a lot of misinformation - and so we are willing to try to block that.
Which one of "the ruling classes" are you referring to? The one that controls the narrative in the press, the civil servants that manage government machinery like the Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England, the people running successful businesses, the largest owners of real estate and capital?
I'm not sure we really have ruling classes these days but I think 2/3 of graduates and about 4/5 of MPs were remainers so I could see those running things being reluctant to leave.
As a member of the commonwealth with a parliamentary democracy, I’m confused by how many people think this was the wrong call. The PM is only the first minister, the serve at the behest of parliament. I wish Canada would also remember that Parliament is supposed to hold the ultimate power of government.
> The PM is only the first minister, the serve at the behest of parliament.
As a non-Commonwealther, what exactly is the PM supposed to (or not supposed) to do? In school the PM was always explained as "their version of President," which I know waxes over tonnes of detail.
The day after the proroguing announcement, I read a bit that claimed this was "normal" in the UK Parliament. What makes this so particularly unusual and illegal?
The timing is normal (for the conference season and Queen's speech). The duration was longer than normal, and of course we're in the middle of a crisis with a ticking clock. A two-week prorogation might have worked fine. But the intent
> what exactly is the PM supposed to (or not supposed) to do?
Normally this kind of conflict doesn't arise, because the government has a large majority, and if they cease to have a majority then the PM is replaced by a no-confidence vote.
Normally the PM is supposed to Be A Good Chap and Do The Decent Thing, which are ill-defined concepts from British honour culture, but have basically gone out the window with Johnson's behaviour.
There's also an important difference between recess and progrogation.
Recess is just a quick break for the conference season, and is normal at this time of year. Progrogation brings all parliamentary business to an end, bills are not carried over to the next session (so work on them has to start from scratch), and select committees can't sit. That's a very different state of affairs.
Canada barely has any laws requiring the existence of a prime minister.
We elect a parliament. Then one of them goes to the Governor general and says "I have support of the majority of the members", and voila: they are the Prime Minister.
Could be any member, from any party, for any reason, just so long as the majority of MPs support the person.
And once that person is PM, that just means they sit in and control the Prime Minister's office, and choose the Cabinet.
After that, they're just a figurehead who happens to be the MP with the most power.
My Hail-Mary hope for this next election is that Jody Wilson-Rayboul reruns as an independent, wins, then Trudeau gets a minority and gets kicked out as head of the Liberals. This leaves a strange minority government situation that is perfect for Jody to take charge as the first independent PM. (It could happen!)
Very few laws in the UK requiring a prime minister either. That said, there is one missing power which is critically important: the Queen acts by convention on the advice of her ministers, and by convention that is the advice of her prime minister. So although there's very little legal power to the office of PM in either Canada or the UK, by effectively controlling the use of the Crown's prerogative powers its a very powerful office indeed.
Of course, the convention could change, and the Queen take someone else's advice. But that would be a major constitutional change that would make today's relatively small development pale into insignificance.
Parliament is sovereign over the executive and legislative branches of government. The prime minister is chosen by the monarch as the person deemed most likely to have majority support of parliament, granted powers with which to carry out the executive will of parliament.
The situation now is that the prime minister doesn't have majority support in parliament and is using powers like prorogation to act against the majority of parliament.
> I read a bit that claimed this was "normal" in the UK Parliament.
Short prorogations are normal in order to prepare for Queen's speeches. However, this one is unusually long, with a political context of preventing parliament from exercising their powers.
> In school the PM was always explained as "their version of President".
In US terms the role of the PM in European parliamentary democracies is closer to the role of the head of a US government agency than the president, i.e. the head of the DOD, USDA, DOE etc.
Except the role of this "agency" is "run the country". But it's the same in the sense that the head of a US agency serves at the pleasure of the president, the PM serves at the pleasure of parliament.
Yes, and he has a majority in Parliament...that is why he is the PM.
And the issue people have is the alternative. There is no alternative.
The implication of the decision is that Parliament is now going to do something...well, the European Council won't meet until before Oct 31 anyway...which is when Parliament would get to scrutinise the final deal.
And the big plan that the opposition has is: to go to the EU, negotiate the same exact deal that has been voted down 4 times, and then whip their MPs to vote it down again.
The lack of actual practical understanding here, not just here but on the part of journalists, is astonishing.
The only comparison that comes to mind is in football: journalists and fans will turn on a manager, they will laugh at them on Twitter, write endless articles about how they are washed up, clubs will then panic and fire the manager...and then only then realise that there is no-one else to do the job, and they just fired the only person who can.
> Yes, and he has a majority in Parliament...that is why he is the PM.
He doesn't hold a majority.
> And the big plan that the opposition has is: to go to the EU, negotiate the same exact deal that has been voted down 4 times, and then whip their MPs to vote it down again.
No it isn't. The plan of the opposition is to get an extension, and hold a general election as a proxy for what should happen: Tory party for no deal fuck you up the arse brexit, Lib Dems for revoke it and put out the fire, Labour for a 2nd referendum with clear options that involves significantly less self-mutilation than an empty "leave" deal.
He does. He has the DUP. And, I would presume, you don't believe that all the Independents are going to vote against the govt every time...Nicholas Soames has not turned into a Corbynite afaik.
And you don't appear to have thought out what the practical impact is. They will still have to negotiate a deal and it is not going to be any different to the deal that May got because they are taking exactly the same approach. Stick head in sand, delay, hope something changes.
Tory party policy is deal. They have never suggested anything otherwise. What people are confusing is the strategy and the deal. The strategy is to, attempt to, resolve the constant crisis and delay. Part of this involves accepting that the EU has red lines that they won't shift on.
Tory + DUP does not make a majority - it is still far off.
And yes, I believe the independents will vote against the government every time until the extension is got and then they will VONC/FTPA into an election.
> Part of this involves accepting that the EU has red lines that they won't shift on.
This is true. But accepting that means throwing all the promises of the referendum campaign out of the window and accepting that leaving the customs union means significant damage to the economy and that the EU will not allow them to leave free movement while remaining in the customs union.
I think the argument being made is that he still has a de facto majority, as most of the folks kicked out of the party are still likely to vote ideologically similar to how they'd previously voted.
Like how Angus King (I-VT) can be relied upon to vote with the Democrats in the US Senate.
The strategy was to play chicken with the EU, but luckily the other two branches of government realized that risking the UK economy on a hilariously obvious bet was tremendously stupid and shut it down.
This demonstrates a fundamental structural flaw in parliamentary systems, whereby there is not an adequate separation of powers. The Executive should be independent. Without an independent Executive the government can't get things done. The UK know it wants to leave, but a group of hundreds of representatives are bound to disagree and prevent the nation from settling on and executing one course of conduct. A nation needs an executive to execute.
I think this is a terrible verdict. The British courts are interfering with the functioning of parliament. This would never happen in America, because it would trample on the very notion of the three separate branches.
Based upon recent events the American system is really not one we want to be taking tips from. What Johnson did was unlawful and this is exactly what the high court should be for.
Note that it was the prime minister who wanted to suspend the parliament, not parliament itself. So the court protected the functioning of parliament from interference from the prime minister.
Also, the US also has the Supreme Court ruling on actions by the other two branches, so there's really no difference there. If Trump tried to suspend the House of Representatives and a court had to rule on that, you can bet Trump would get slapped down.
And then there's the recent politicalization of appointments to the Supreme Court; not exactly good for the Court's independence.
Until he dismisses it again. It means next to nothing other than one branch interfering in the operations of another. Brexit will happen whether you want it to our not.
there is no hierarchy between judges and representatives. the parliament willingly shutdown itself. they could have acted otherwise. everybody is acting respectfully.
Almost entirely for ceremonial purposes though. She gets presented things and signs other things, but basically if she doesn't follow, that would most likely be an immediate end to that position.
Which kind of begs the question, what would happen if the position was terminated and possibly replaced with a President (which would have a bigger role)
We already had a referendum in 1999 which was voted down.
A president in Australia would be a significant departure from the current system, and I'm not sure I know anyone who would support it. We don't vote for a person to be Prime Minister, we vote for a person in our specific federal electoral seat and the leader of the party that wins the most seats is the Prime Minister.
This person also doesn't have any powers that their party doesn't give them for the most part. No veto powers etc afaik, and party leadership (and hence the Prime Minister) can be changed at any time by a party vote.
> A president in Australia would be a significant departure from the current system
There are parliamentary systems with presidents as head of state with no significant power. E.g. Iceland. So it doesn't need to be much of a departure.
Iceland simply replaced their king (also the Danish king) by a president, made the president elected, and changed little else.
US style presidential government would certainly be a big departure.
Really? It seems like one of the most insane parts of the Australian voting system. Forcing people that don't know enough to vote under their own motivation doesn't suddenly impart them knowledge or wisdom, it just introduces a huge number of low information voters into the system.
NZ's approach seems safer; compulsory enrolment, so that come voting day everyone should be able to vote if they so choose. Voter turnout is still very high.
The referendum does seem to have been seriously flawed though; it didn't ask "should we become a republic", but "should we become a republic in this specific way" and many that were fine with the republic were not fine with the specific way.
The Brexit referendum had the opposite problem; they only asked whether to leave, and not the way in which it should be done (not that they really could have, lacking a specific deal at the time) and now they can't agree on the way.
The system here does need some serious reform though (and you might as well bin the Queen while you're at it).
The STV approach at electorate level is good, but the electorates then being combined FPTP style to form a government retains most of the downsides of an FPTP system anyway. Safe seats are largely ignored and minor parties have far fewer seats than their support would warrant.
NZ's approach (a vote for your electorate MP, and a vote for your preferred party, with the government formed in line with the percentages in the party vote) is more representative and would be a big improvement to the system.
NZ's could be improved in a couple of ways though; the vote for the electorate MP is still really FPTP, we should copy the AU STV system for that part. And we retain an unrepresentative 5% minimum for representation at the party vote level*, this should be dropped entirely, or if not then votes should also be transferred from any party falling under that line to preferences above it.
Kiwi living in Australia if any of the we/you/here/there is confused :D
Forgot the * - by winning an electorate seat, you end up getting at least that seat, and any seats in parliament proportionate to your party vote, even if you would otherwise have been cut by the 5% threshold.
Now you have the problem of a political president that wants to start doing controversial things, instead of a neutral head of state that at least all of the public can agree on. There is a lot of value of an apolitical the Queen as she unites (pretty much) the nation behind her. Regardless of political views, we can all say thats my Queen.
I don't really see any value in that. We can all agree that the sun rises in the East as well, but so what?
That said, while providing little benefit, the monarchy also causes little harm and there are more important things to be done than toppling figureheads.
It's been done in a variety of other Westminster-model countries, using several different models - a lot of former UK colonies moved away from the Queen as head of state on independence. The closest eqivalent in kind is probably Ireland, where the President is also mostly a figurehead who holds reserve powers. Some countries have moved further to systems with an executive President, though.
Any president would probably have much the same role, in practice. The Irish president, say, has a similar role to the British monarch. Presidential democracies are rare in the developed west; it's not credible that the UK would become one.
I believe they are like Canada. The Queen is our Monarch, but has no real power here. The UK government is completely unrelated. We have a Governor general that is the Queen's viceregal representative, but we choose who that is.
I strongly recommend people read the judgment, or at least the summary. It's very clearly written, and it would let people argue about what the court found, as opposed to what they think the court might have found.
To clarify: I'm a Remainer, and not a Tory supporter.
However, I remember discussing the issue at referendum time with my Leave voting neighbours who were very much the supposedly angry working class type that have been ridiculed and condescended to repeatedly by the liberal media.
They (my friends and neighbours) were adamant that "it doesn't matter what we vote anyway, they will just stop it happening."
At the time, I thought they were being paranoid.
Now they look prescient and wise. Parliament has had 3 years to honour the vote of the people.
Boris Johnson (who I have little like for and am suspicious of his character) is the first leader who has shown the will to make that decision happen.
So, though I regret the referendum decision (and that the moral impetus has been taken on by people I don't feel a natural affinity to), I respect it and support his move to enact it without further delay.
Why would you vote in an explicitly non-binding “advisory” referendum and think that this somehow mandated the government to act? Particularly when the win margin was a couple of percent.
Whatever the technical niceties of "advisory" there was never any dispute that the referendum would decide the future of Britain within the EU.
The whole "advisory", "win margin" etc. phrasing is post-vote weasel words by the losing side (mine). Those are nullification criteria to be established before the vote, not after it doesn't go your way.
If Remain had won by a similar small margin, do you think we would have been using those words to acknowledge some moral failure of our victory?
It seems weird to initiate something as radical as a total political realignment of your country on the basis of a 2% win margin, particularly when you don't actually have a concrete plan for how you're doing it (and when no majority of the pro-Brexit voters seem to support the actual plans that have been proposed.) The total failure of your politicians to complete this project after several free and democratic parliamentary elections seems to me to be a reflection of that fact, rather than some kind of weasel.
>If Remain had won by a similar small margin, do you think we would have been using those words to acknowledge some moral failure of our victory?
Not really -- preserving your existing trade relationships doesn't seem like the kind of thing that requires an overwhelming majority.
Nobody established any nullification criteria. They just said “do you want to leave the EU”. Parliament then negotiated an exit deal. The problem seems to be that the many of the same voters who said “yes” are unable to get their representatives to agree on accepting that deal.
It didn't, and 3 years ago that point was (in my opinion) at least partially understood.
However since then it has been treated as an article of the faith by both the major political parties in the United Kingdom that "brexit means brexit" (and a wide variety of other fairly meaningless slogans)
Now, reversing course would be seen by a large percentage of the population as a betrayal and would quite likely lead to a hard right victory in the next general election (although the vagaries of FPTP could make outcome rather random)
And yet multiple elections later you seem unable to deliver the results. Is this because your parliamentary elections are less democratic than your referendum?
No, it is because there is a tension between them and enough people acting in poor faith on each side to enable that tension to undermine the people's decision.
Who exactly is supposed to deliver them, and what are the results? You keep electing parliaments that negotiate specific deals and then loudly, angrily denounce those same deals. (And I'm not just talking about the Remainers. I'm talking about the ostensibly pro-Brexit party.)
(possibly) interestingly, I'm of a very similar opinion which is why I was curious :)
I'd prefer remain at this point, as it's obvious the British political establishment has made a total mess of this process, and will continue to do so. Also as the economic consequences of Brexit become clearer, it's obviously not in the countries interest to do it.
However, I have a strong feeling that remaining now will give endless fuel to hard right parties and their stories of how great Britain would be if it could only break free of the EU.
They will get a lot of support from people who feel betrayed by "the establishment", and they can continue their narrative without actually having to prove anything.
Whilst I can see that there's no such thing as a "clean break" brexit, I think from a political perspective, the consequences of carrying on with this deadlock will be worse in the long term.
Yes, I agree with a lot of that - but I think that remaining would potentially lead to significant civil unrest powered by righteous anger that would dwarf what we've already been through.
Leave are largely older. There's not going to be civil unrest from them.
The hard right parties aren't going to suddenly go away either if Brexit happens. They're not going to sit back and enjoy Brexit. There would likely be an increase in street attacks on UK-resident Europeans. The economic impact isn't going to be pretty either.
Leave arguments aren't based in facts, so they can't be satisfied by changing the facts. The whole thing is really a successful campaign by the rightwing press, not the parties.
> Leave voting neighbours who were very much the supposedly angry working class type that have been ridiculed and condescended to repeatedly by the liberal media.
I can understand this but, burrowing in to it, we have a class of people who are struggling for opportunity, work and dignity in an environment which is openly hostile to people in poverty. The bit that hurts my head is that people want to leave the EU as they think the government will then step in and give them the opportunities, work and dignity which they have crave. When it was the governments (of the last 40 years) which have put them in this position..
Here in the North East we have investment from the EU, do you honestly think that the tories are going to jump in and replace that investment? If you say that they have said that they will invest x amount then that it merely a drop in the ocean for regions like this.
For me brexit has, for many people, been a case of them voting against their own best interests, due to believing what they're being told by politicians.
The Leave camp, during the campaign, were very strong on the idea that leaving would have economic benefits, not penalties.
When combined with the UK press use of the EU as a scapegoat for many unpopular decisions over the last 40 years, it's not surprising to see the outcome we did.
Reality will only sink in, once we've left and the outcome becomes apparent. I really wish that weren't the case and that people would look at the people pushing brexit to see they are not likely to act in the interests of the majority of the population, but I don't think that's what's happened.
Regardless of whatever side you are on, you have to admit that we're currently living in extraordinary times in UK politics.
A decade ago, the kind of things we've seen over the last 3-4 years would have been borderline unthinkable. If this were all a TV show, people would've called it too far-fetched or too distant from reality.
Whatever happens - there will be enough content to create movies, whole modules for university classes, and a dozen or so questions for pub quizzes.
As for Boris - imagine being the first Prime Minister in British History to be found guilty of misleading the monarchy. Now, imagine going through a shattering defeat in court, while STILL being far ahead in the polls.
> Whatever happens - there will be enough content to create movies, whole modules for university classes, and a dozen or so questions for pub quizzes.
That's what we say now, because we're used to the way it was. We need to start preparing ourselves for the possibility that these changes are permanent.
The current clown show in the USA will become essentially permanent if 45 is re-elected. Even if he isn't his party has changed forever and the decorum of the presidency has been tarnished beyond the possibility of any quick repair. Likewise, I expect, in the UK... especially if a no-deal brexit comes to pass.
As someone from a country which was in fact made a province of another country (by an act of Parliament, no less), I find your conception of the legal relationship between the UK and the EU somewhat concerning.
"It worked out fine" is rather debatable. During the 60s and 70s, prior to European integration, the United Kingdom was called the Sick Man of Europe with good reason. The Winter of Discontent, the Three-Day Week and the $3.9 billion loan/bailout from the IMF in the 70s were certainly not indicators of a healthy economy.
> Labour's current policies would be far worse than Brexit.
Is that so? From the notoriously left-wing Telegraph a couple of weeks ago:
"Corbyn better than no-deal Brexit, say investment banks" course they had to add "as anti-capitalist Labour wins unlikely new City fans"
They try their best, bless 'em, to spin him as devil incarnate, but Citibank and Deutsche Bank sound unconvinced. The FT was much more open minded reporting the same news.
Corbyn's and Labour's biggest problem is their refusal to take a side yet. "It depends" is hardly a vote winning stratagem. Had they made up their sodding mind, we might easily have had a Corbyn government by now. Most of their other policies sit well with the populace.
I wrote that the far left would be worse than Brexit. The only way businesses might think no deal Brexit (not just Brexit) would be worse is that they hope that a communist government would be quickly voted out of power or somehow prevented from doing what they say they would do.
Of course with Corbyn we would get both Brexit and the far left. I.e. the worse of both worlds.
Most people still prefer the Tories to that, as shown in the polls.
So. Nationalising companies is not communist per se. RBS and Northern Rock were nationalised in '08. Network Rail was re-nationalised in '13, though it was never properly private. What about Amtrak? I have seen no mention of "handing control to workers". Nor of Apparatchiks.
Wouldn't be the first non-communist country to limit private education either. That said, it sure doesn't seem fully thought out - but what policy is at conference? Tory party policy certainly isn't.
I seem to have lived through a very different 1970s to you. :)
Most of the problems of the 1970s, throughout the West, stemmed from the abandonment of Bretton Woods and the 73 oil crisis and its after effects. Both of which fuelled rampant inflation throughout much of the West. For Britain a very significant additional part were the policies of the Heath government through 74. Overly strong unions and poor labour relations played their part, which were increasingly problematic, but on top of the systemic issues. The Tories did far worse here than Labour.
It was Heath who fuelled the 72/73 boom that spectacularly crashed with the oil crisis and the 400% rise in oil price. Why? Because he was ideologically opposed to unemployment and it had risen markedly since he got elected. So he spent and spent until it went away. After the crash and oil crisis they had to abandon dozens of manifesto promises. Yet not that labour and price policy. Stagflation was born. That made Britain's "sick man of Europe" label inevitable - though there had been (much) lesser issues in the sixties that contributed.
It was under Tory Heath we had the miner's strike and three day week, rationed electricity, and evenings by candle light. TV shut down at 10 to save electric. Fun Tory times. That was the last three months of the oil crisis, so there were still queues and rationing at the pumps.
Labour under Wilson and Callaghan - for the rest of the 70s - was mostly attempting damage control with no money. Not surprisingly this wasn't hugely effective. Healey going to the IMF 12 or 18 months after getting elected wasn't terribly surprising either - though certainly it made life more difficult. It was Heath's unemployment reducing boom, his ridiculous income policy (and leaving Bretton Woods and that oil crisis) that fuelled the problems of the rest of the decade. Oh, and made someone replacing him as leader downright certain. It was adopting a very Heath-like incomes policy in their last year, to try an control inflation, that brought the fight with the unions and the Winter of Discontent, that ushered in Thatcher. Coldest winter for years gave a few more %% to Thatcher.
Last, Thatcher was shaping up for at best a much reduced majority. More likely hung parliament or defeat, except there was this small incident called The Falklands War. Early election, huge majority. Naff all to do with economics - we were barely out of recession and still had double digit inflation, nor policy performance, just a dictator in the South Atlantic.
> I have seen no mention of "handing control to workers
Ah you need to listen. Their plan is to nationalise then to organise the companies as cooperatives:
"McDonnell made clear that the plans do not attempt to emulate the nationalised industries of the past. Instead, it will promote the use of co-operatives." (2018) [1]
McDonnell is a Marxist and his plan is to hand control of the means of production to the workers. Unsurprisingly...
> Wouldn't be the first non-communist country to limit private education either.
They did not say they would 'limit' private education. They said they would abolish it, seize private schools' assets and redistribute them "democratically". Considering how private education helps the state sector, all their attacks against it are purely ideological and counterproductive, in addition to being extremist.
These are communist policies. They are not hiding them. Everyone who does not bury their heads in the sand can plainly see them.
I guess it depends who you ask. I preferred the Labour policies from the last GE, but outside of some pie-in-the-sky thinking about private education and universal credit, I think they have some solid policies.
The average person doesn't care about policies, though. Labour under Ed Milliband had some good policies, but he was undone because he looked weird when eating a bacon sandwich. You could argue the same for Gordon Brown, who looked weird when he smiled when compared to the overly polished David Cameron.
IMO, the people just don't like Corbyn, and many people cling to the idea that the PM is the outright ruler of the land, when Brexit has shown the exact opposite - they are a leader, but they need a house to push their majority through.
I do agree with you, though. If Owen Smith had plotted a coup a few years later, he'd probably be 20-30 points ahead, and Boris would do everything possible to avoid a GE. The one good thing about Corbyn is that he is a campaigner, so the second a GE becomes a reality he'll be in his element.
If Boris wins, then I give up. The Tories will have sold their soul for Brexit, the Labour party will have destroyed any credibility as a viable opposition, and the Lib Dems will have aligned too heavily with the Tories to be viable themselves. I don't know where the country goes from there, but I would love to not be a part of it.
The main issue with Corbyn's Labour is that it is too much on the left, with some major policies being textbook communist (e.g. nationalisations with handing control to workers), and a Marxist as Shadow Chancellor.
Their current delirium about private education, which is also a textbook communist party style policy (suppression, assets seizure and "democratic" redistribution), only adds to this.
I could add their populist war in private landlords and calls for rent controls...
Beyond Corbyn himself this does scare many people away.
I agree with you on private schools. My other half went to a private school, and her parents were in no way wealthy. She left state education because her primary school messed her education up so much she (alongside other kids in her class) failed her Year 5 SATS and refused to take the blame for not teaching the class adequately. She went from failing in Year 5 to getting a first at uni - probably thanks to a solid private education.
With that being said, the current policy doesn't seem to be to scrap them entirely, but to remove their charity status. This does make sense, but will require more thought than what they've given so far. Removing their status ensures they're paying fair tax, but it also means that they are no longer required to share their facilities with state schools.
It's a weird policy to lead with, and the cynic in me believes they're doing so to push the class divide, in order to get more Leave voters behind them.
> With that being said, the current policy doesn't seem to be to scrap them entirely, but to remove their charity status.
It does not make sense to scrap their charity status.
As you said, people who send their children to private schools are not necessarily wealthy. But in any case they do pay their taxes yet they do not use state schools' resources, which actually means more money per state school pupil. Why would these people have to pay extra taxes for not using state facilities that they already finance? (Because that's exactly what this would mean)
Private schools help the system. Hitting them would hurt everyone.
That being said, at this year party conference they did vote to scrap private schools altogether, to seize their assets, and tho redistribute these assets "democratically".
> they're doing so to push the class divide
It is an ideological class war. This is communist.
Well you could take the view, as I heard expressed on World at One at lunchtime, that the British Constitution needs the odd attempt to take the piss to keep it on the rails.
All those precedents, conventions and case law look so weak compared to a fully written constitution. Yet a written constitution can spawn no end of legal activity to decide the precise meaning of a comma.
Whether the British Constitution's famous flexibility is a good thing will be argued for centuries to come, I suspect.
> the kind of things we've seen over the last 3-4 years would have been borderline unthinkable
Which you could say is the result of the last time someone decided to take the piss constitutionally. The chances of another PM being quite so cavalier in the next 20 years or so are slim to none. Regardless of what you wished to happen, there's no way Johnson's "cunning plan" worked out as intended, or with positive press resulting.
> Boris - imagine being the first Prime Minister in British History to be found guilty of misleading the monarchy
I think there's precedent, but before it was formally PM, but still just First Lord of the Treasury. Lord North possibly?
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