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Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

bbc.com

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was addressing why politicians might override an electorate morally; I don't believe I took a stance either way on Article 50. The public referendum was non-binding, and legally, can be ignored.

But the topic of discussing is article 50. So I am contextualizing your post with the current topic. > My comment was addressing why politicians might override an electorate I think in the in the current case a referendum was a fairly standard democratic procedure that everyone agreed on. No one questioned weather or not there should have been a referendum in the first place. Some people are just upset that there sid…

Plenty of people questioned wherever there should be a referendum. More people questioned whether a simple majority was appropriate.

By the time of the vote, people questioned whether they had enough information, and after various "promises" were withdrawn mere hours after the result was announced, further questioned what the plan was.

We still don't know the plan.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in the in the current case a referendum was a fairly standard democratic procedure that everyone agreed on that. No one questioned weather or not there should have been a referendum in the first place. Some people are just upset that there side lost. Again, it was not a legally binding referendum. The government is free to throw the results out. Politicians must be ready to sacrifice their political career…

> Again, it was not a legally binding referendum. That is probably part of the argument that was made to require a parliamentary vote. Which is conceivably a fair judgement. But on the other hand what is the purpose of having a referendum to leave the EU if it is not intended to be enacted in law? It would be rather nonsensical to hold referendums that have no effect and could be discarded at will. Nevertheless, as w…

The purpose, assuming a remain win, was for the Conservative party leadership to tell their anti EU members to shut up and get on with other things, and for the party as a whole to retain appeal in the face of UKIP.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#43
post #31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MPs represent constituencies in parliament. Many constituencies voted overwhelmingly to remain, which is why some MPs, especially on the labour side, felt they couldn't vote for the the bill. Some, like Ken Clark, have been pro-EU for decades and simply believe Brexit is the wrong thing to do. He opposed the referendum. If you strongly believe something to be a terrible mistake, should you support it just because it'…

So your happy for MP's to cede your sovereignty rather than risk a popular vote? Because that's how Britain ended up in the EU in the first place.

In representative democracies, generally the idea is to substitute someone else's judgment for your own. And then if you sufficiently dislike their judgment, vote for someone else next time.

So in general, MPs should vote what they believe, and let their constituencies decide whether to return them for it.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This basically means you would not code for other people only at a pay lower than what a Romanian would accept, as if a Romanian would accept a pay of X, that also means he/she would accept a pay of X+ε, for all wages from X to ∞. This makes you a pretty cheap labour, and if your hate against Romanian people can somehow be turned to motivation, probably a very productive one! If you are formulating hatespeach against…

How did you extrapolate low wages to hatespeech against Eastern-Europeans? This presupposes quite a lot and suggests a lot more about you. I made a pretty specific and narrowly tailored statement. Your postulate primarily neglects reality.

You implied that Romanians are beneath you.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the topic of discussing is article 50. So I am contextualizing your post with the current topic. > My comment was addressing why politicians might override an electorate I think in the in the current case a referendum was a fairly standard democratic procedure that everyone agreed on. No one questioned weather or not there should have been a referendum in the first place. Some people are just upset that there sid…

Plenty of people questioned wherever there should be a referendum. More people questioned whether a simple majority was appropriate. By the time of the vote, people questioned whether they had enough information, and after various "promises" were withdrawn mere hours after the result was announced, further questioned what the plan was. We still don't know the plan.

> Plenty of people questioned wherever there should be a referendum.

Yes they did. And there arguments were deemed insufficient by the majority of there peers and fellow citizens.

> We still don't know the plan.

Its a fair point. But In order to negotiate 'the plan' which will include various bilateral trade agreements and so on the PM has to have the authority to trigger article 50. And I believe the PM has to indeed trigger article 50 before the government can negotiate such agreements if they wanted to be perfectly legal about things. I seriously doubt that this would have passed if the insiders did not have a fairly material plan. I doubt that its entirely worked out but thats to be expected. And Its certainly not going to be released to the public at this point. That would compleatly undermine there negotiating position.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you extrapolate low wages to hatespeech against Eastern-Europeans? This presupposes quite a lot and suggests a lot more about you. I made a pretty specific and narrowly tailored statement. Your postulate primarily neglects reality.

You implied that Romanians are beneath you.

Indeed. Also I wanted to point out how ironic that while one implies that others are below him, the very sentence carries the exact opposite meaning of the intended meaning.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how leaving the EU is genocidal and/or fascist ? How it is going to change the government in the UK ?

I'm guessing that was a reference to the US election.

Or possibly the end of the Weimar Republic.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#48

Leaving the pros/cons of brexit out: if there was a plebiscite where the electorate voted in favor of something, and if we assume that politicians are supposed to be representing the electorate, shouldn't it have been pretty straightforward that the corresponding bill would pass largely unchallenged? If it had failed, how would the politicians have justified to their electors voting against their express intentions?

On a related note, it doesn't say much of the representative nature of the chamber that the vote doesn't reflect the split hair referendum result.

52% to 48% is "split-hair"? In England it was 53.4% to 46.6%.

http://www.bbc.com/news/politics/eu_referendum/results

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#49
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your happy for MP's to cede your sovereignty rather than risk a popular vote? Because that's how Britain ended up in the EU in the first place.

In representative democracies, generally the idea is to substitute someone else's judgment for your own. And then if you sufficiently dislike their judgment, vote for someone else next time. So in general, MPs should vote what they believe, and let their constituencies decide whether to return them for it.

Sadly, as we've seen in recent years, in practice this system often does not even resemble having representative government or any real accountability to the electorate.

Mostly it actually resembles having a field of candidates where many voters don't much like any of them (with an inevitable "Well you should just run for office yourself then!" retort when this is pointed out), who campaign based on a tiny number of issues that will utterly dominate the voting but that are invariably determined by what is prominent in people's mind during the relatively short electoral period, and who may then proceed to do whatever they like, even to the extent of completely reversing their stated pre-election positions on those major issues for no apparent reason, with at most a possibility of subsequently losing their job as much as five years later. In many cases, even that won't happen.

However, in almost all cases, issues outside the top 2 or 3 in election season don't count for much at all, even those that may significantly affect millions of people over the term of the next parliament and government. Sometimes, issues that come to dominate politics for several years -- such as the Iraq war, or the negotiations to come over what Brexit will look like -- will be mostly or completely unmentioned at election time. By the time the people have any say over those decisions at the next election, the country may already have been committed whatever the consequences or (un)popularity of the decision with the electorate.

If the Brexit referendum campaigns showed us anything, it was that any pretense of elected politicians somehow being better informed or better able to make good decisions than a lot of the voters could make for themselves is laughable. The biggest sources of misinformation during the campaign were almost all senior MPs, and those on both sides repeated half-truth after arbitrary prediction after outright implausibility. The best sources of objective information and considered opinions were mostly non-political experts, and the best arguments I heard for voting one way or the other invariably came from normal people who had used the multi-month campaign window to educate themselves and form their own opinions on the issues.

Re: Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you extrapolate low wages to hatespeech against Eastern-Europeans? This presupposes quite a lot and suggests a lot more about you. I made a pretty specific and narrowly tailored statement. Your postulate primarily neglects reality.

You implied that Romanians are beneath you.

Because there are actually a lot of people in Romania that across Europe to work for a lower salary and be totally content with that while I wouldn't? How free trade drives down labor costs when a government promotes an actual borderless free market? How it is an actually good business plan to go recruiting in Romania and other surrounding countries for both skilled and unskilled labor?

I don't know guys, I think you are attempting to censor reality by latching onto something that isn't even considered insensitive.

Disrupting free trade agreements like that disrupts cheaper labor. The same concept inflates the salaries within the United States as well with its limited visas and exiting trade agreements.

I see "standards of living costs are lower in those countries so it is rational to undercut the local workers" you see "he's saying they're beneath him". Are we really at an impasse? How deep in the gutter are your minds

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