Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

Many had radically different aspirations for Brexit, no influence on the process and/or disliked May and her government on principle. Others were part of May's Cabinet, some even directly responsible for negotiations, but couldn't deliver anything which matched their initial promises, disliked the deal that was put on the table and decided eyecatching resignation was better than compromise. One or two, like Gove and Leadsom actually are still backing May, but fairly reluctantly. Everybody agrees the deal isn't fantastic, but few are prepared to admit their alternative aspirations were pure fantasy.

The flip side is that [nearly] all the Conservative MPs who voted down May's deal will vote confidence in her government very shortly because they value staying in power and loathe the opposition parties too. Which leads nicely on to the next point...

> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?

The same forces that protect a President that has made Nixon's actions look like model of propriety and is quietly despised many of his own party's leading figures. A mixture of partisanship, terror of defying ones own voters and party members, fear of what political upheaval might happen next and doubts over whether they actually would manage to stop things if they tried.

EU freedom of movement isn't unconditional. You can only move to a different EU country if you have a job or can support yourself.

You have three months to make it work, and then if you can't make it work, you can be asked to leave.

The UK deliberately opted out of this requirement. Until recently, the UK was one of the most generous and open states for EU immigration.

The UK also made the most noise about allowing the former Soviet Bloc countries to join the EU - coincidentally, the countries which have sourced a lot of supposedly objectionable immigration.

This is because the UK likes to play a game. First it imports cheap foreign labour to keep wages down. Then the same political group which quietly promotes this makes a big show of saying "Oh no! Look at all the immigrants! How terrible! We should do something!" in public.

And this reliably wins elections. It's been winning them for well over a century now.

You can be absolutely sure that if Brexit happens this game will be played again - most likely with cheap labour from the former commonwealth countries.

I would - respectfully - point out that's not the situation.

It is (was?) a promise in the sense that the government is there to enact the will of the people. The majority of people who voted, voted to leave (personally I was in the minority).

So now (in engineering terms) it's pretty simple. If everyone sits on their hands, the UK will leave the UK as scheduled in March (and so fulfil the wish of the people).

The actuality is the unedifying spectacle of lots of shuffling, muddying of the waters and lining of pockets as anyone with skin in the game scrabbles for whatever they feel is to their own advantage.

Crucially the referendum isn’t binding which is where the problem occurs. The vote didn’t go the way people thought it would go. Maybe because of the fall out of banking crisis and rising inequality, maybe because the leave campaigns broke the law, maybe because of Russian involvement. So now you have a representative democracy that is broadly pro EU vs a popular vote which has voted “out” whatever that means. The referendum is non binding so should be advisory only to the elected officials.

Now the government is in a pickle. Because even though the vote was just advisory if they’re seen to ignore this, people will start wondering if their vote matters at all. It could be a path to chaos. This is complicated further by the split of the age of people voting leave. They tended to be older and these voters traditionally vote conservative (aka republican in US terms). So they’d be disenfranchising their base.

The government doesn’t even have a majority and is propped up by another tiny party of 10 members called the DUP. This is a little complicated but the outcome is a really weak government because it doesn’t have the numbers to push through legislation it would like.

On top of that the euro-sceptic extremists are bolstered by vote and lobbying hard for out by any means necessary. They’re effectively driving policy by threatening to terminate her fragile leadership.

All this would have been a doddle if a decent opposition was sat opposite in the commons. However in a perfect storm the opposition is absent. This is even more complicated to understand but the summary is that the hard left socialists have more in common with the hard right anti-EU lot than either of them would like to admit. It’s weird.

Mays deal satisfied no-one and it’s taken 2 years to get this far.

One interesting side effect is that more people now know what being in the EU means than ever before. It was virtually never discussed before.

I’m off to stockpile toilet roll and pain killers