There should have been an election already. I think it was dishonest not to bring down the government in the recent vote of No Confidence, since it was and is blatantly obvious that absolutely nobody has confidence in Theresa May’s government. But they feared letting Labour in.
Edit to add: I would have thought some emergency compromise might work, eg a moderate Tory who backs the consensus plan as PM, maybe Corbyn as deputy, maybe Keir Starmer as Brexit secretary. Get the Brexit process on an even keel now, agree to call an election later.
That’s probably unthinkable on all sides, though. I feel like Corbyn in particular doesn’t actually care much about Brexit either way, and is much more focused on just winning an election and getting a Labour government in.
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.
The government that didn’t want it got replaced with one that did, which then called a General Election to strengthen its position and instead found itself weakened.
The PM stated (in writing!) that she called that election in order to increase her majority and so be able to force through her version of Brexit; however despite losing so many seats she needed a coalition afterwards, which in a democracy ought to be pause for thought, her post-election government not only still wants Brexit but also refuses to countenance any variation from her implausibly over-ambitious goals.
More a case of UK politicians not doing their job.
What do I expect them to do? Act solely in the interests of their pay packet and party. What should they do? Act in the interests of the nation. That was once supposed to be the point.
They could have sought concessions or adjustments from the EU as precursor to a second referendum. The few times another EU nation has rejected a treaty or some aspect of the Union there's been something of a renegotiation and a second referendum.
Since the ridiculous Fixed Parliaments Act there needs to be a super-majority to call a UK election early. Why not with a referendum for a change of such consequence?
Were the EU not such a divisive issue, for the whole 40 years of our EU membership, within the Tory party, they might have approached the issue with a little more honesty. It could all have SO easily been avoided.
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.
It was kind of the opposite - the party forcing Corbyn to support a second referendum lost a lot of votes in the North and led to them losing the election.
The alternative that possibly could have happened was a sanely negotiated Brexit, which would have been fine (lots of countries aren’t in the EU but have extensive trade relations etc.) but no brexit wasn’t really going to happen at the time.
Labour is in a bit of leadership dispute and the Article 50 negotiations haven't had time to go bad. Now is probably the best possible time to call an election. This time next year Labour might have gotten their house in order and the first results of the negotiations with the EU will be in and under close scrutiny, and it is very likely the the government will have been forced to make some tough concessions. Both of those things are likely to make winning an election much harder.
Also if they win now they can conduct the Article 50 negotiations in peace and with clear mandate. Trying to win an election and negotiate Brexit at the same time will be much harder, if for no other reason than the fact that the person across the table won't have any idea if the person they're talking to now will be in charge when it comes time to actually sign the papers.
Without an election Labour dont have enough seats to be an effective minority government. They would need either lots of support from other parties.
Best option right now is an election, its really our only path to stability. But the Tories will hang on for as long as they can as they are expecting to be wiped out if they held an election right now.
That's quite right, this is the trickiest issue. However if Brexit had been decided in the usual way then responsibility for addressing and resolving that issue would have been clear. So a party would have put Brexit in their manifesto, campaigned on the issue of delivering Brexit, and perhaps held a referendum to double-guarantee they had a solid mandate to do it. This is the exact process we followed to join 'Europe' in the first place, after all.
Instead the May government utterly collapsed the moment it got anywhere close to actually delivering anything. We're very, very lucky that Boris ended up leading the Conservative Party on a deliver Brexit platform and got a solid majority.
And I say this as a dedicated, thoroughgoing Remainer that will never forgive Boris for his sheer political opportunism over Brexit in the first place. But still. My attitude is, we eventually did have an election on the issue and a government committed to the goal, so let's get on and do it, and get it over with.
It's a great question. Of course it was widely considered. This should come as a surprise to nobody. And yet, here we are.
You might ask the same question about Trump. Surely someone in charge - someone with authority - should have seen the trainwreck a mile off, and done something about it?
The shocking truth is that there's no one with both common sense and overriding authority that prevents catastrophic wrong turns. This was absolutely an expected outcome of Brexit, by anyone with a clue. The trouble is that half the general population doesn't have a clue. Why did the government ask them? Because the party in charge at the time had a splinter faction led by some very radical, very loud voices, and it was beginning to cost them votes. They hoped to put the issue to bed by calling a referendum. Having done so, it was political suicide not to follow through even though it wasn't technically "binding".
Largely it's a matter of various people acting in their own selfish best interest at the expense of the interests of the country, and convincing a bunch of useful idiots to follow along.
It's possible Labor will take over if May loses her confidence vote. But Corbyn's current position has been that he'd pursue Brexit with unicorn promises, rather than cancel the whole thing like his constituents want him to do. So it's doubtful that Labor would revoke article 50.
Just spitballing here... Methinks May will win her confidence vote tomorrow. From there, the consensus seems to be to steer towards a peoples' vote -- aka a new referendum -- in spite of May being hostile to that idea. But don't rule out some back and forth with the EU. May has a long way to go to win a rerun of this vote, but if her premiership is anything to go by she's resilient, and the GBP lost around 10% against the USD and EUR within minutes of the Commons vote. (Edit: the GDP seems to have bounced back since.)
As an aside, I'm no fan of May, and the referendum campaign was full of lies and manipulation, but methinks May actually has merit in raising that a peoples' vote would not be good for the legitimacy of and trust in politicians and institutions. After all, what's the point of organizing a referendum and then electing representatives that don't deliver. And what's the point of organizing referendums if the powers that be will continue to ask the question again and again until constituents give the expected answer?
The actual referendum was very close, and there was a lot of room for Labour to argue that it wasn't intended to be binding, or at least a Brexit In Name Only. The result was that Labour was creamed and the Tories got a real majority, whereas previously they'd been saddled with UKIP.
Corbyn also failed at the referendum, arriving at a belated and wishy-washy stance, and without compelling Labour to follow it. Had he resigned then, things might have been very different. Instead, he continued to lead Labour in a way that left people confused about where they stood on Brexit when put in the form of a Parliamentary election. Nobody could read the results as anything but "The nation voted strongly for Brexit."
I don't believe that really reflects what voters wanted, but elections are poor tools for sending messages. What they do is put people in office, and the people in office were people strongly for 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.
The politicians have a hard time to get the first vote done. I doubt there will be a third.
Looking at the state of Brexit, it's due time to think it over, give people a chance a to remedy a grave mistake. Or go all the way, at any cost? With a 52%/48% vote? Really?
oh no I'm not suggesting that people knew what they were getting into in full, but then given that this is entirely unchartered territory I don't see how that could have worked really. This has never been done before and therefore no-one knows what it means.
Both sides of the campaign, in my view, heavily had the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt angles playing, but then that's no different to most/all UK elections (just look at the scottish referendum for another example)
However what I do think is that the leave campaign rhetoric (which won) largely revolved around border control and immigration, and any outcome that didn't involve a change here wouldn't be respecting the "will of the people". It's been clear since the vote that the EU (rightly in my opinion) won't budge on this point so the PM had to either do what she's done or basically disregard the result of the referendum.
I will disagree with one point you've made. The current government isn't unelected. In the UK we vote for a party not a person, and reshuffles and changes of PM without a general election have been a factor of UK political life for a very long time.
I'd love to see that change, but it's the system we currently have, and under that system this government is as elected as any other.
LibDems/Labour should just go into these elections saying "we'll keep the kingdom together".
I think there is a fair chunk of people who voted leave who didn't actually realize they were voting for England and Wales to leave Scotland and Northern Ireland, rather than voting for the UK to leave the EU.
If Labour and LibDems play their cards right, couldn't they make these elections about the mandate for Conservatives the break the United Kingdom apart, rather than a mandate to negotiate with the EU.
Under those circumstances: how big an upset is needed for the election results to be seen as a complete disqualification of the Brexit vote?
There should have been an election already. I think it was dishonest not to bring down the government in the recent vote of No Confidence, since it was and is blatantly obvious that absolutely nobody has confidence in Theresa May’s government. But they feared letting Labour in.
Edit to add: I would have thought some emergency compromise might work, eg a moderate Tory who backs the consensus plan as PM, maybe Corbyn as deputy, maybe Keir Starmer as Brexit secretary. Get the Brexit process on an even keel now, agree to call an election later.
That’s probably unthinkable on all sides, though. I feel like Corbyn in particular doesn’t actually care much about Brexit either way, and is much more focused on just winning an election and getting a Labour government in.
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