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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

#71

Post by jon889 »

dalbasal wrote: post #57
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.

You don't want french protest culture, IMO. There are some good things about it and specific protests can achieve good results, but it adds up to a very stasis oriented bureaucracy/policy ecosystem. It also gives populists a hand.

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

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

#72

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

chrisseaton wrote: post #33
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #20

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.

Has any vote ever been won by a majority of the entire population, eligible to vote or not? If that’s the standard you’re after nothing would ever pass and no government would ever be formed. Seems an unreasonable bar to set, to me.

Sure the "50M didn't vote for Brexit" is BS as is the "but the 17M" with such a tiny margin of pro-Brexit votes.

Implicitly agreeing to the "but the 17M" frame, the Remainers lost the public discussion.

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

#73

Post by blinky1456 »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #56
avar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...]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…

Are you sure they don't check the electoral roll behind the scenes?

Entries are absolutely validated, you cannot just use proxies and automate hundreds of thousands of signings.

The people behind the petition website are not idiots.

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

#74

Post by dabeeeenster »

nisuni wrote: post #49
Jarmsy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

They were within a margin of error on the day of the vote.

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

#75

Post by arethuza »

tomp wrote: post #54
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…

> The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position What do you mean? To me, it seems she's tried pretty much everything, but the parliament voted down most of the proposals... Edit: I have nothing but respect for her. She's literally the only person in the wide political spectrum in the UK that's willing to actually deal with this like a sensible adult, and she's been eating a ton of shit for it, barely complaining a…

Perhaps if she hadn't called a pointless general election and then run one of the worst campaigns in living memory that ended up removing the Conservative majority requiring pandering to the DUP I might have some sympathy.

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

#76

Post by lm28469 »

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)

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

I get it's a democracy yada yada, but how are people expected to make such a decision ? It has so many consequences on short and long term, even experts in the field struggle(d) to predict. We're not talking about the color of a national football team jersey or a 1% increase on alcohol tax here.

The vote wasn't about staying or leaving EU, it was about how modern propaganda can tear apart a leading world nation.

You always get the worst of people when you target their irrational fears "they" steal our money (EU budget) , "they" invade our country (immigration), &c.

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

#77

Post by Zenst »

gmueckl wrote: post #52
Zenst wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Ironically, the EU itself is unable to fix it. The contract has to be amended by the member state governments. The MEPs are powerless on this.

Not totally true, MEP could raise a motion that would then go down the process and eventually come up as an amendment that the EU member countries would have a final vote upon and. But I don't foresee any wanting to block something as fundamental as that.

Just sad that that initiative has just never happened, actually it exacerbates me personally even though it has no effect upon me whatsoever; Just irks me as one of those great unfairness that could and should be fixed even if too late now for the current utilisation, but any future use. Though I'm wondering if the EU likes it as it stands so it will cause friction and allow that friction to be laid upon those who action article 50. Who knows, beyond it's a massive oversight upon peoples rights from a collective that trumpets, peoples rights.

Though we do live in strange times.

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

#78

Post by matthewmacleod »

tomp wrote: post #54
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…

> The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position What do you mean? To me, it seems she's tried pretty much everything, but the parliament voted down most of the proposals... Edit: I have nothing but respect for her. She's literally the only person in the wide political spectrum in the UK that's willing to actually deal with this like a sensible adult, and she's been eating a ton of shit for it, barely complaining a…

I'm sorry, this is emphatically not true.

May has made several easily predictable errors in her handling of this issue. She has steadfastly refused to shift her position in response to events, has miscalculated response to her interventions repeatedly, and has spent substantial time in the past several months publicly blaming everybody but herself for this outcome.

Her political career will be over not because she was "stuck between a rock and a hard place", but because she refused to acknowledge political and technical reality. I have literally no sympathy or respect for her behaviour or position, and I genuinely struggle to see a way in which this could have been handled less competently.

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

#79

Post by xioxox »

tomp wrote: post #54
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…

> The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position What do you mean? To me, it seems she's tried pretty much everything, but the parliament voted down most of the proposals... Edit: I have nothing but respect for her. She's literally the only person in the wide political spectrum in the UK that's willing to actually deal with this like a sensible adult, and she's been eating a ton of shit for it, barely complaining a…

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 soundbites, is cruel, stupid, unable to compromise and isolated.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/theresa-may-s-bre...

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

#80

Post by lm28469 »

huffmsa wrote: post #66
minikites wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You don't get to keep having do overs until enough of your opposition has died to get the result you want. Might as well just start banning "racists" and other undesirables from the polls outright if that's the path you want to go down.

Or realize that referendums shouldn't be used for anything other than getting a rough idea of the population's opinion and starting discussions between people who actually know what they're talking about.
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