If I recall correctly, is not the invoking of Article 50 non-revocable?
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UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
201–210 of 249 posts
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then what's the legal recourse / precedent for handling illegal votes? If it's not codified, then it sounds like a failure of the government structure and charter
Normally the result would be overturned. See Lutfur Rahman: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-45452342 Apparently the Brexit referendum was "advisory" so this doesn't count. > sounds like a failure of the government structure and charter Everything is a failure of the government structure and charter at the moment, pal. We've had half a dozen constitutional crises this year and the Speaker is digging up pr…
Yeah this is a mess.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_K...
Sounds like it's time for a revolution and rewrite.
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If it had gone the other way, all these points would have been exactly the same - why would it be any more/less acceptable (from a democratic process point of view)?
Normally major constitutional changes require supermajorities to pass
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup I wouldn't want it every weekend. But the scale of Brexit is much bigger, its going to affect our country for decades. It just seems like there should be more protests rather than marches or at least civil disobedience
True, but I think the British (my brothers to the east and north) need to remember that Brexit was ultimately a popular movement. Parliamentary shenanigans played a role, and have been making a mockery of themselves since but... Brexit was a popular vote, with neither party actually supporting it. The interest in Brexit also grew against the wishes of major parties, industries and most centres of power. A reason parl…
I think it's important to recognise that about 3 million UK long-term settled residents were not allowed to vote, and they were the people most strongly affected by it. And some UK citizens abroad were also not allowed to vote. Perversely given the nature of the issue, non-EU citizens with exactly the same type of migration were allowed to vote.
There were about 3.4 million non-UK EU citizens, many of them settled adults of voting age. They would have voted if they had migrated to the UK and become citizens. But they were told all their lives, that EU citizens don't need to become UK citizens, they have equivalent full rights in almost every respect without doing so, so they lived here in a fully settled way akin to citizenship. Sometimes for decades, with children and grandchildren in the UK. Some of them had respected positions in government.
Any of them, of voting age, could have registered to vote in the referendum if they had known sufficiently far in advance. That is, they could have applied for UK citizenship to do it - though not in the timescale in which the referendum actually occurred.
But EU citizens were discouraged from adopting UK citizenship because there was no need. This led to the perverse situation where non-EU immigrants had the vote, and EU immigrants did not, through no fault of their own.
The UK citizens, of voting age, who were not allowed to vote were all abroad. I expect most of them in the EU.
I'm pretty sure both groups would be pro-EU, and that 3 million number is more than enough to change the result.
So I would not say the Brexit referendum result of 2016 was even the popular result, for any reasonable definition of democracy in my mind.
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I would say the opposite: unless you do that, you have already given up on democracy. As you say yourself, despite all that has happened, the vast majority of leavers and remainers still believe in the same choice. Most of the issues are matters of opinion, not fact. Even if leaving the EU is a disaster, many Brexiteers will believe it was only disaster because "it wasn't done properly". My take on that is, this was…
> Most of the issues are matters of opinion, not fact. I don’t see how you can make this claim. Perhaps you have seen more mere-options than me?
The opinion that fewer immigrants will mean less crime. That our trade deal in the EU exposes our companies to unfair competition. That fewer immigrants will help preserve 'our' way of life. That we will be free to reach our own trade deals with other countries. Most of Brexit is about forward-looking hopes and expectations. I don't believe it, but it's hard to disprove because what do people even mean by 'our' culture, etc?
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#206We already had a robust set of tools in our technology stack to help us scale. Our primary tool is a combination of Amazon CloudFormation and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which we use to automatically deploy and scale instances in response to demand. Backing these instances is a PostgreSQL RDS database which acts as our primary data store. One other component in our stack is Amazon ElastiCache, a key-value store configured with the open-source Memcached engine, which caches generated fragments of HTML so we can speed up page build times.
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petiti...
Perhaps, a petition is required to employ a new Cloud Architect, as this is not the first time the Petitions service has had to cope with extra traffic & spew out 502 Bad Gateway error.
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#207Earlier 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…
At the end of the day, about 3 million people, fully settled in the UK, were not allowed to vote on the one thing which greatly affected them and for many is wrecking their lives.
That isn't due to apathy, and it isn't democracy either.
To avoid duplication, the rest of my comment is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19451579
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#208The chance to "petition" was before the vote happened in 2016. You've made your bed, time to sleep in it.
The country has changed its mind, but those in power haven't, because May (stubborn) and Corbyn (wants a hard brexit which he thinks will drive people to his brand of economics) don't accept it.
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#209This morning, the petition was getting about 60 signatures per second. I extrapolated it would reach about 1.15 million by noon. The rate was quite steady, and had accelerated gradually.
Then the site started crashing, and it slowed drastically (between 502 Bad Gateway nginx errors :-), at one point one signature in several minutes.
Then it resumed, but only at 20/s, and intermittently.
Now it is clocking up again, but at about 30/s.
It's impossible to be sure, but with this abrupt change of rates, I think it very likely the outage is continuing to affect many people trying to sign it, and will have a significant effect on the total number of signatures that are achieved.
Re: UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's perfectly revocable, until 11pm 29th March. Opinion is divided as to whether it requires Parliament or if the Government can do it without further ado.
So what happens on March 30th if it is not revoked? Nine days from now is truly the point of no return?
Then all treaties the UK is part of with the EU cease to apply
The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry
into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the
notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement
with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.
Even overflights of EU by UK will struggle - Chicago allows them, but will EU air safety recognize the UK's CAA
There have been various platitudes about how neither side wants this to happen, but not very clear how legally it will happen.