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UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

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Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brexiteers had won when they successfully framed Brexit as "the will of the 17M". Remainers didn't counter-frame this with "50M didn't vote for Brexit". Therefor all the marches, petitions etc. are always/can be ignored in the context of "but the will of the 17M". "Don't Think of an Elephant!" is now such an old book, and still a lot of people haven't read it. Brexiteers have read it it seems.

If someone does not vote, when there was ample opportunity to do so, then they implicitly are accepting the outcome - whichever way it goes. This actually should read "Brexit - The will of the 17m + 50m who are okay with this" This would have read the same if the result had gone the other way: "Remain - The will of the Xm + 50m who are okay with this" At the end of the day, there was a vote and more people wanted Bre…

Well, it's more like "The will of the 17.4M + 13M who were okay with it", with the other 21.5M unable to vote due to immigration status, age, failure to register, or other reasons.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#43
post #7

will there be a "reinvoke article 50" after this?

When this stage of leaving is complete and discussion turns to the future relationship, I expect the EU will replace article 50 with something fit for purpose. Article 50 itself is very short and doesn’t explain any ifs and buts of the process. The courts had to interpret it a few times to determine things like how revocation works, how can extensions happen, etc.

Indeed, Article 50 is flawed in many areas.

One big flaw I raised with the EU authorita's in 2015 was that it has no provision for displaced nationals. I raised that several times, serveral MEP's from many countries, Tusk, you name it.

The response - nada, nothing, zilch and even too this day, not one single MEP or eurocrat has bothered to fix that glaring flaw that sees and allows innocent nationals to be used as negotiation pawns.

Even now, no attempts are being made or driven to fix this oversight in Article 50 and that kind of lack of priority and care is never going to win votes in the public's eye's. So it could all happen again, causing undue and unfair stress upon innocent people caught up in a situation that could of been totally avoided.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#44

Petitions for Brexit are completely pointless. We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay, so unless that petition has more than 33 million signatures then it doesn't prove much does it. (FYI: I voted remain and think Brexit is completely dumb, but it doesn't change how pointless petitions are for subjects where it's well established what people's opinions are)

> [...]so unless that petition has more than 33 million signatures then it doesn't prove much does it[...]

It's not going to prove much even then. As a test I just signed this with a fake name, all you need is an E-Mail address and to enter some valid UK post code.

Anyone who's paying any attention to some Internet petition that's implemented like this is crazy. In some other European countries there's online petitions like this, but they'll make you go through the government's official login gateway.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#46

Petitions for Brexit are completely pointless. We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay, so unless that petition has more than 33 million signatures then it doesn't prove much does it. (FYI: I voted remain and think Brexit is completely dumb, but it doesn't change how pointless petitions are for subjects where it's well established what people's opinions are)

>We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay

The two halves are not static. Leave voters are predominately older and enough of them have died to shift the proportion (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...). It's clear that that Leave was a racist (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/25/483362200...) campaign designed to frighten old people.

>Even if no one had changed their mind since the 2016 referendum, population changes mean that, from 19 January 2019, a majority of voters will back staying in the EU, according to the analysis. By 29 March, when Britain is due to leave the bloc, the Remain side is forecast to have a majority of around 100,000.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#47
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I think this petition will fall on deaf ears, you can't definitively say "half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay", because not all of the country voted in the referendum. Those that didn't vote either way, don't count, and shouldn't count. Percentages in elections are of active voters. Unless they were prevented from voting some way, their post-facto protests are meaningless. You can't have yo…

I agree. But the statement "half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay" is still false.

Taken literally it is indeed false.

But in democracies the percentages who want this or that are counted through voting. So technically, it is correct.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#48
post #7

will there be a "reinvoke article 50" after this?

Not easily. There is a court ruling that states that invoking Article 50 repeatedly can be seen as an illegal abuse of the rule to exert undue pressure on the EU. So if Britain wants to do it all again, they need to clear that bar.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#49
post #37

Petitions for Brexit are completely pointless. We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay, so unless that petition has more than 33 million signatures then it doesn't prove much does it. (FYI: I voted remain and think Brexit is completely dumb, but it doesn't change how pointless petitions are for subjects where it's well established what people's opinions are)

"half the country wants to leave" A slim majority of those who voted, several years ago, stirred up by masses of illegal propaganda, especially in the last days before the vote. Now after getting some idea of the reality, the tides look to have significantly changed. Current opinion polls are showing significant majority for remain.(61% in the last YouGov poll) (Also, it was 17 not 33)

> Current opinion polls

Polls before Brexit where wrong, no reasons to trust them now.

Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

#50

These petitions are almost always met with a boilerplate response. There was a recent one (which I can't find as the site's currently down) regarding Russian interference in the last UK election, with the government response being along the lines of "we don't know what you're talking about, move on". More on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/b2vmm0/gover... While the huge number of signings o…

I don't really understand how Paris has real protests almost every weekend, yet we're leaving the EU and we've just had a few marches. Marches do nothing, they're preplanned to cause minimal disruption, just make the people in them feel like they're doing something so that it doesn't go further than that. The march on Saturday needs to at least move off the preplanned route and actually cause some inconvenience.
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