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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

#111

Post by pmuk »

franky47 wrote: post #70
europsucks wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be meaningless, anyway, unless you compare it to the number of people who are opposed to the petition?

I made a progress bar against the NoDeal counter-petition: https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh (Pending API availability)

That's actually really cool. Who needs parliament to vote for a second referendum? We can run our own mini referendum using the two petitions :)

Brexit petitions in realtime:

710,563 signed for remain - 65.81% #RevokeArticle50 371,020 signed for no deal - 34.17% #NoDeal

https://twitter.com/paulmaunders/status/1108684812414533632

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

#112

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

franky47 wrote: post #70
europsucks wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be meaningless, anyway, unless you compare it to the number of people who are opposed to the petition?

I made a progress bar against the NoDeal counter-petition: https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh (Pending API availability)

nice! (minor nitpick: the numbers weren't visible in firefox and had to launch google-chrome to actually view the page).

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

#113

Post by ksec »

jonplackett wrote: post #21

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)

The question, or the Referendum was never very clear. There are those who voted Leave but would not have voted for leaving the EEA. There are those who voted leave because there were not happy with EU AND the UK Government. When you have inequality, people start to blame something, whether that is EU or UK.

Basically the Referendum should never have happened in the first place, it doesn't have a legal blinding ( Correct me if I am wrong on this one ), and I totally blame David Cameron for the current mess.

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

#114

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

avar wrote: post #44
jonplackett wrote: post #21

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 petitio…

Anyone who thinks they can't quickly and easily electronically check entries against the electoral roll is crazy. But congratulations on wasting your time.

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

#115

Post by pjc50 »

kerrsclyde wrote: post #104
jon889 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand there are some blockades of motorways planned if Brexit is delayed. [1] The fuel blockades of the early 2000's resulted in some significant political action, more than marches seem to have. [1] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/m4-m5-blocke...

Christ. Have they not realised that if Brexit does happen, most of the southeast around the M20 is going to be "blockaded" by Operation Stack?

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

#116

Post by nutjob2 »

europsucks wrote: post #39
colinramsay wrote: post #5

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…

Wouldn't it be meaningless, anyway, unless you compare it to the number of people who are opposed to the petition?

Not at all, the point is to have your voice heard.

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

#117

Post by matthewmacleod »

gmueckl wrote: post #48
buboard wrote: 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.

I'm not sure there's any "court ruling" of that sort. The only applicable case would be Wightman, which just confirms that revocation must be and “unequivocal and unconditional decision” on accordance with a country's “own national constitutional requirements”.

You may be thinking of the Advocate General's initial opinion, which accepted that unilateral revocation would be possible only if it did not involve an "abusive practice", under which the idea of revocation followed be immediate re-notification might be considered "abusive". However, no reference to this appears in the final judgement of the CJEU.

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

#118

Post by raxxorrax »

jonplackett wrote: post #21

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)

True. A petition is clearly less worth than a referendum. I think the UK should just leave, consolidate the result, and re-join if they wish to do so.

Sure, they would have to give up a lot of privileges, but these would be scrapped anyway and are mostly counter to the idea of a union.

I am not from the UK and I would have voted for staying in the union. Even if the EU is a undemocratic, bureaucratic moloch that really needs a lot of constructive criticism to improve.

But having people actually want to be part of a union is much more important than any technicalities involving trade, foreign relations and policies.

The lack of respect for the position of Brexiteers had its own effect, no matter how stupid you think their decision is.

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

#119

Post by ben_w »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #30
SeanDav wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I agree, if you don't vote (having voted in every election the last 30y and would never not vote) you're ok with the result and can't complain, but from a Remainer standpoint the framing would be "50M didn't vote for Brexit" - then I'd think their arguing would be easier. Having watched many Commons discussions, it basically always ends with "but the 17M".

The trouble with your first point is that UK democracy feels like this:

* Vote winner — your fault, don’t get to complain

* Vote loser/2nd party — you lost, suck it up, don’t get to complain

* Vote 3rd party/spoiled ballot — you wasted your vote, don’t get to complain

* Didn’t vote — you must be OK with any outcome, don’t get to complain

* Found new party — how interesting, let’s invite you on TV even if you got 249 votes total (Lord Buckethead), but anyone who voted for you still threw away their vote

* Left country — who cares, certainly not the council who is supposed to send you a postal vote (happened to a friend of mine in the EU referendum, would’ve voted remain)

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

#120

Post by xioxox »

tomp wrote: post #102
xioxox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think she has handled this dreadfully. She should have built a parliamentary cross-party consensus on what option to pursue well before now. Her only negotiating tactic with parliament is pushing things up to the deadline and saying my deal or no deal. Read Matthew Parris' reports of her personality (e.g. [1]). He (a conservative journalist) says that almost everyone says she doesn't listen to anyone, speaks in sou…

> saying my deal or no deal But consider it from a higher-level perspective. Had she done everything perfectly (for whatever definition of "perfect"), would anything be different? The EU is the "problem" here, not the UK parliament. The UK was never going to get what they wanted - free trade with no freedom of movement, nor no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and no border between Norther Ireland and the m…

The deal is the only one possible with her red lines. She should have reached agreement on the red lines before starting the negotiation. She shouldn't have called Article 50 before getting an agreement across the parties. ~50% of the country voted to stay in and ~50% to stay out, so compromise is required. One solution would have been to have a followup referendum to ask the public what kind of Brexit they wanted - setting out the real options with their advantages and disadvantages.
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