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Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

nytimes.com

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Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#271

Post by tim333 »

RafiqM wrote: post #223
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #99

I'll be the first to admit: I'm an American. I fundamentally do not understand Brexit. I understand the following timeline: 1. A largely disseminated, nation-wide vote occurs, bolstered by nationalist sentiment, that the EU is bad for the UK. This vote results in a conclusion that UK should leave the EU. 2. This is controversial, due to the majority of the populace in general not desiring to leave the EU, but not vot…

> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it Essentially, they want to honor the will of the people. The will of the people, by democratic vote, was to leave the EU. With that in mind, they have no options that are in any way good: 1) Push ahead and exit with no-deal (economically disastrous) 2) Push ahead and exit with the proposed deal (economically bad…

I don't get how going back to the people is political suicide and creates distrust. I mean the first question was do you want to leave and the vote was yes. The second would be that now we know the facts were not entirely as advertised do you still want to go ahead? Not sure how that is betrayal, political suicide and the like - it seems fairly fair and sensible.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#273

Post by NeedMoreTea »

davidw wrote: post #117

I loved the comparison to a submarine made of cheese: https://twitter.com/hugorifkind/status/1072222230791229440?l...

No more insane an idea than the reality. Cameron called the referendum to put the right wing of the Tory party back in the box.

We were "supposed" to vote remain. Rees Mogg would have still have been an unknown on the lunatic fringe if we had.

Cameron's reaction to the result was priceless. As was the damage done to the country and our politics. I expect history to rank him down with Eden and Lord North.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#274

Post by paxys »

hazeii wrote: post #258
yholio wrote: post #41

The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on. It was a lie, you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal. If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode. Somebody needs to own up to that lie and accept that a "no deal" outcome, wh…

>The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on.. 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 schedule…

Brexit itself can of course be delivered, but the larger promise sold to voters - that the country would be able to negotiate favorable trade deals, that it would directly result in increased NHS funding, that it would lead to reduced immigration without affecting free movement for workers, that customs and border control would be seamless, that European court of justice would stop having jurisdiction in UK affairs etc. - was the lie.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#275

Post by simonbarker87 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #212
itissid wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the others are just angry - and I mean really angry. Out of curiosity, how has "EU is telling us what to do" affected these people to make them so angry?

This is a complicated topic, but a short and overly basic version: There are many people in the UK - as in the US, as in most of the West, actually - for whom neoliberalism has not been kind. They see immigrants getting jobs and struggle to make ends meet and have been told via various right wing media outlets (in the UK, principally the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun, Telegraph and Times newspapers), that there are…

This is an excellent summary and manages to articulate some of the aspects I struggle to link up, thank you.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#276

Post by abalone »

m0zg wrote: post #217
abalone wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some elections right here in the US are decided by as few as a dozen votes This is a basic "false equivalence" logical fallacy.

I don't see any fallacy. I'm sure some elections in the UK are decided by a few votes as well, and they too are accepted. Why should a referendum be any different. The definition of a majority is 50% + 1 vote all over the world. The definition of majority vote is that majority decides the vote. And in this case nearly 1.3 _million_ more people voted to leave than to stay, not a few dozen.

You're saying the opposite though: you said some referendums are in fact "different", specifically "re-dos" are "bullshit". That is inconsistent with democratic principles that regularly subject major decisions to some additional levels of verification that it's what the people really want in the long run.

Democratic procedures often build in some protections against short-term passions, fraud, poor turnouts, etc. and these verifications are scaled to match the magnitude of the decision. As others have noted, the kinds of "few dozen vote" contests you're talking about in the U.S. are themselves re-voted upon every few years. Follow-up referendums are perfectly consistent with democratic principles and happen all the time in the U.S. and elsewhere. Bypassing these kinds of verifications of the public will usually require supermajorities -- a direct contradiction of your claim that "the size of the voting margin is somewhat irrelevant in a properly functioning democracy."

Also, nobody put words in your mouth. They are your direct quotes.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#277

Post by tcgv »

School-Cotton wrote: post #194
makomk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May's deal permanently blocks the UK from ever fully leaving the EU without the EU's permission, meaning that anyone who wants to leave won't support it. It also removes almost all the benefits of remaining in the EU, meaning Remain supporters hate it too. Oh, and for bonus points it effectively makes Northern Ireland no longer fully part of the UK, meaning that the DUP (the Northern Ireland unionist party which the…

The UK is a sovereign country -- how is it possible for them to never be able to do something without someone else's permission?

Apparently the UK is able to leave at any time if only they're willing to accept unfavorable EU terms. If they want a better deal they need to negotiate.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#278

Post by mandeepj »

yholio wrote: post #41

The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on. It was a lie, you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal. If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode. Somebody needs to own up to that lie and accept that a "no deal" outcome, wh…

> you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal

source?

The deal failed inside UK parliament and not at EU.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#279

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kodablah wrote: post #19
tunesmith wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand (and I am very ignorant!) is why the initial vote can't just be looked at as a stage in the decision process. Time has gone on, and the public has become more educated as to what the true effects of Brexit will be. Even leaving aside the question of how dishonest the pro-Brexit arguments were. It just seems reasonable to have another vote.

> It just seems reasonable to have another vote. It seems absolutely unreasonable to me. It's hard to measure how certain tactics influenced the vote on either side. The voting process needs to be done with confidence and we should not so easily assume our peers are misinformed and/or so easily swayed. The efforts put forth by legitimate actors to campaign for their cause goes for not, as does confidence in the democ…

The voting process does need to be done with confidence.

In the first vote Leave were referred to the police for illegality, and they still haven't provided a full account of their funding - at least some of which seems very likely to have come from foreign sources.

This is explicitly and very clearly not legal, because foreign money has no business trying to influence the vote in a sovereign British matter.

So a People's Vote would be the first honest vote.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#280

Post by throwaway_fjmr »

It bewilders me that people, including elected MPs, don't want to understand how electoral/representative democracies should work. The will of the People, yeah, right. It's like pub talk on a Friday. Grab a lukewarm ale and a bag of crisps, and cry about how great the empire once was. MPs should represent the best interest, not the lunatic dreams of their voters.
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