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:
While the huge number of signings on this petition obviously does reflect _something_, I'm not sure it's actually doing anything meaningful. Likewise the upcoming march this weekend for a Peoples Vote:
These are now simply ignored. The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position as evidenced by her statement last night means we're going to go to the wire on something that's been worked on for years. People calling it a national disgrace are absolutely correct.
I can only hope that the pressure exerted from various angles (petition, march, sane MPs) will result in Parliament revoking Article 50, but I don't see it happening. It would be too prudent for this parody of a political system.
edit: the site's back now. Apparently it runs on Rails with DelayedJob doing most of the grunt work in the background.
edit2: just found the most popular petition on there with over 4m votes and absolutely nothing came of that:
I think mostly everyone signing this knows this. But it’s not as though we’ve been listened to in any way.
I like the summary of @bootstrapcool on Twitter: “God knows we've tried everything else.[...] A brief use of collective impotent fury and a tiny squeak into the black holes of our futures, but it's something.”
> surely the original referendum counts as being listened to in some way?
Even ignoring all the illegality and fraud about the referendum, and ignoring that because it was advisory large portions of british citizens living abroad were prevented from having a say, and ignoring the arguments about 16-year-olds who it would be directly affecting because of the time lags, and ignoring the arguments around the fact that the process/success has been wildly, wildly different than promised,
Ever since the referendum 50% of the population of the UK has had no representation in Parliament and government, whilst being endlessly parroted at that it is the "will of the people" and simultaneously being blamed for everything going predictably wrong.
Democratic governments aren't supposed to have one vote then completely ignore the rest of the population.
Your original claim was that the people had "[not been] listened to in any way". My singular claim was that in fact they had been listened to at least in some way.
> Even ignoring all the illegality and fraud about the referendum
Something is illegal if deemed so by law and potentially affirmed by courts. If this is indeed the case, there should be proceedings that show this to be so. Something doesn't become illegal just by declaring it as such.
> large portions of british citizens living abroad were prevented from having a say
This is merely an anecdote, but I am a Brit living in the US and I got the chance to submit my Remain postal vote.
> ignoring the arguments about 16-year-olds who it would be directly affecting because of the time lags
This is the nature of every election and every vote. e.g. the poll tax was introduced in 1990 which had widespread ramifications for years to come, and impacted many people that couldn't vote in the prior 1987 general elections. The referendum is no different. This is just the way of democracy.
> Democratic governments aren't supposed to have one vote then completely ignore the rest of the population.
The government actually held a second vote - the general election requested by May in 2017. In that vote, despite winning a smaller plurality, the Tories were still re-affirmed. If everything you say is true, then the popular will would have selected Labour as an overwhelming majority. While the Tory victory was marginal, they still beat Labour.
Why such an important decision wasn't required to be 60/40 to pass completely baffles me. Almost as much as how the referendum is treated as some iron-clad decision while passing at 51/49.
Classic Remainer logic. If Leave had won 61/39 it'd have become "for such an important decision it should have been 75/25 to pass".
The reason decisions like elections use a simple majority is that otherwise it'd be a small minority of people oppressing the will of the majority, which is unstable, and otherwise known as dictatorship.
Nothing good happens when you cancel election results. See all these African countries with elections canceled...you better make sure the vote is not frauded in the first place.
As far as I'm aware nobody got convicted(unlike in the U.S) so your fraud argument is weak even today. I can see a second referendum on no-deal vs May's deal though.
The only reason the result wasn't chucked out due to fraud was that it was 'only' advisory. There are plenty of reasons to hold a second vote, beyond just I didn't like the first result.
Absolutely. I'm not positive about the outcome but I wouldn't berate people for trying, hence my comment "I can only hope that the pressure exerted from various angles (petition, march, sane MPs) will result in Parliament revoking Article 50". I've signed it myself!
Speaking solely for myself: I can't get to London for the march on Saturday (I live in Scotland) and even if I could, I'm middle-aged, with dodgy knees and a bad foot. Signing the petition is therefore a proxy for more direct activism.
(I note it has passed 750,000 signatures in well under 24 hours.)
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.
Ok I get your sentiment and I agree that peaceful protest is just woefully ignored in the UK - but someone with a job and a peaceful life typically doesn't want to risk getting arrested, and potentially convicted, trying to cause trouble on a march.
Things have to be much worse before people are going to start taking that risk, and sadly, while things do not look good, the average Londoner is not yet uncomfortable enough to start doing so.
>Paris has real protests
It may not be your intent but "It's not a real protest if something doesn't burn down" is a bit unfair. If things turn violent/destructive on this march public favour will not look kindly on it in the UK.
Remember the student protests for tuition fees? Those who occupied 30 Millbank were vilified as criminals by _both_ sides. Inconvenient and disruptive for sure - but to the press they are "rioters" and to others in the movement "anarchists who don't represent us".
People have been persuaded by the powers that be that any form of non-peaceful protesting is socially unacceptable and that we should chastise it. Convenient eh? Especially because "Without a path from protest to power"[0] there is never going to be any change or acknowledgement from the government.
Any form of protest that could actually get results is a) too risky for people who are currently comfortable enough and b) intentionally socially ostracised by those in power to discourage it.
Be the change you want to see in the world? But one person in a balaclava setting things on fire isn't going to make any difference to the outcome of the protest without a critical mass of others undertaking the same behaviour for a prolonged period of time.
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
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 parliament can't manage it decently is because parliament was and is mostly against it, including May.
This is not like ip laws, where interested lobbies co-opt the parliamentary systems with as little popular involvement (or knowledge) as possible. This was/is an actual division of opinions among the people. It wasn't imposed from above.
I hope you guys stay in, or at least close but I think it needs to be done in a way that respects the other side too.
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.
Popular movement sponsored by a weird coalition of lying press, controversy-driven TV, illegal use of personal data, and (seemingly) foreign intelligence services?
The inability to force a clear Leave manifesto is the root of the disaster. What "should" have happened is either a Leave PM, or the 2017 election should have been run on a clear Leave manifesto specifying a realistic deal to be sought against a Remain opposition.
Nothing in politics is ever clean, and all those things are problems. But, we have a tendency to notice these things more when we don't like the outcome. Treating Brexit as illegitimate is not a recipe for a good way forward, IMO. Democracy works better with respect
Ok here's an angle. I can completely understand you if you are concerned about wanting free trade, free migration; but abstracted representation? Foreign authoritative bureaucracies?
I don't mean to say you're wrong. I'm just saying there appears to be obvious, legitimate concerns here, and your suggesting otherwise seems possibly disingenuous.
Yes, the EU representation is quite distant. The UK has an unelected upper house.
> Foreign authoritative bureaucracies?
This isn't great, but at least the EU one is elected. The alternative in all the other trade deals is unelected. Hence all the opposition to things like TTIP, and earlier complaints about GATT etc.
Fundamentally, voting against the EU doesn't make it go away. Some sort of framework always needs to exist to make agreements with other European countries. If the EU didn't exist, it would probably be necessary to invent it.
Hence the Norway/Switzerland situation: not in the EU, has to follow EU rules without having a vote on them.
> legitimate concerns
Here's the thing: hardly anyone talks about those anymore. Brexit has been absolutely dominated by antipathy towards immigrants, both EU and non-EU (despite this not being anything to do with the EU). There's no way to "unwind" EU immigration without ripping families apart.
(I was a Euroskeptic about the treatment of Greece, for example. But ultimately Greece realised that however bad a situation it was in, crashing out would be worse. The same applies to the UK, with "Tory Syriza" running it)
I do think that Karen Bradley's explicit support a couple of weeks ago for the army murdering unarmed demonstrators on Bloody Sunday was not quite the coincidence or "mistake" it was made out to be. It was instead a warning.
Historically, the citizens of the UK and former British Empire have never managed to pull off a revolution. I don't know if complacency is ingrained in the culture (plenty of evidence for the opposite), but the French started beheading kings when they were not happy. The UK still supports a figurehead monarch. No evidence of correlation or causation, but just saying.
I don't think either of those count as popular revolutions; more the layer below the monarchy deciding to switch out the monarch for a more compliant one. Parliamentary, rather than popular, sovereignty. (This is partly why I'm fed up with all this pretending that "will of the people" was a thing in English politics - it wasn't until 2015. Different in Scotland with the Claim of Right.)
So what would count as a genuinely popular revolution? I'm always reminded of Orwell's view:
'Cyclically, the Middle deposed the High, by enlisting the Low. Upon assuming power, however, the Middle (the new High class) recast the Low into their usual servitude. In the event, the classes perpetually repeat the cycle, when the Middle class speaks to the Low class of "justice" and of "human brotherhood" in aid of becoming the High class rulers.'
You’re not wrong – though history could have turned out differently.
After the First English Civil War, there were two broad factions within the New Model Army: the Grandees (aristocratic wing) and the Levellers (the more radical, egalitarian, democratic and progressive republicans). Unfortunately, Cromwell’s faction won that particular power struggle and the rest is history. Nevertheless, this period of revolution acted as inspiration for the colonists in America, which in turn inspired the French republicans, thus influencing countless other revolutionary movements.
> 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.
The French make themselves unrulable, while the British have been utterly subjugated by the state. Positive change has completely exited the British imagination, to the point where even progressives can't articulate a positive program, only a defence of whatever happens to exist at the moment.
That would do nothing good. At this point only illegal things (black mail, kidnapping, etc) can force the brexitiers in parliament to call for a new election.
Since it is illegal, I do not endorse it; instead I will just watch the UK burn itself.
I think you may be surprised by the outcome. The real question is, do the Tory party want to commit political suicide by administering a no deal brexit, and risk never getting re-elected until the subsequent turmoil subsides? I think not.
Farage and the rest are no where to be seen (he still collects his salary from the EU apparently though!).
The upshot of all this mess will probably be as unlikely as the referendum result itself. Personally, I'm expecting the unexpected, and can see a total revocation of article 50, resulting most probably from a people's vote (anything else would be undemocratic). I mean, what other realistic option is there that isn't utterly pie-in-the-sky stupid?!
> commit political suicide by administering a no deal Brexit
I don't know how this would be political suicide, it is currently the most popular option in polling, and it's not considered to have any greater economic costs than the other options (including reversing the referendum decision entirely!).
1. It is not the most popular option in polling. Right now it is to remain in the EU.
2. The idea that it has no greater cost than the options is ridiculous. UK Treasury and economists from all around the world have all come to the conclusion that a hard brexit is significantly more harmful than a soft brexit. And it's common sense since it imposes trade friction on the UK's largest trading partner.
UK Treasury and economists from all around the world have all come to the conclusion that a hard brexit is significantly more harmful than a soft brexit
The problem is that these same people all came to the conclusion that on voting Leave, during the negotiation period the UK would lose 500,000 - 800,000 jobs and enter a massive recession caused by "uncertainty".
The UK has since hit the lowest levels of unemployment on record and economic growth is outstripping Germany, France and Italy.
Economists have no credibility with regards to Brexit. None. They have less than zero credibility in fact: if they're saying something, it's a good sign the reality is the opposite.
Thus the idea that no deal would be bad for the UK is a deeply suspect one. There are many things the UK can do outside the EU that would accelerate growth even further still, according to conventional economics. But regardless of what you personally believe, at this point it's just guessing - your views have no more legitimacy than the views of people who think any sort of deal with the EU is bound to be harmful to the country and its prosperity.
How can the potential breakup of the UK, increased economic uncertainty, increased political uncertainty, and a complete lack of plan yield any good outcomes for the Tories in the mid-to-long term? I mean, it may be popular, short term, but you have to remember that the people screaming their lungs out in favour of Brexit are probably the least informed about its potential consequences. And they are probably also the most affected by the potential consequences - they will turn as soon as the going gets tough.
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.
>> "Seriously anyone who thinks the Brexit referendum was democratic or fair is either ignorant or naive."
You may have a point about the fairness - the Government did pump in 9.3 million GBP to push the Pro-Remain position, in the form of a Pro-Remain pamphlet to every household in the UK. This, arguably, was hardly fair as the Leave side could not hope to match that level of expenditure to air their position, yet the people still voted Leave - go figure.
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)?
I'm talking generally across the world, and not just referenda.
> the original remain/leave referendum that happened a few years after joining
That wasn't constitutional change. Nor was it binding.
This referendum was also non-binding, it's right there in the act of parliament that authorized it.
Of course once Parliament agreed to invoke article 50 the referendum became irrelevant. Parliament - specifically the Tories, Labour, DUP, UUP and UKIP mps who decided to take us out of the EU with no deal, not the referendum.
320 MPs can change the UK constitution (although there are some protections with the House of Lords), which is the anomaly globally.
how many of the 50 M have not voted because they didn't understand what they were actually voting for? The hyperbole spread in campaign[1] was just surreal. You need informed discussions before calling for a referendum not the "feely hearts over minds" bullshit.
Putting the question to the people, in a representative democracy, is a terrible idea. they should have known this after Boaty McBoatface already.
In addition UK MSM has some of the most inflaming language in all the news in Europe (and even US). I have my news.google.com set to UK by default and I switch around to other region and languages to get a more complete picture. Every country has screamy headlines. But the UK tabloids (Express, Mirror and Daily) seem to be the absolute fucking worst. Even from just reading the headlines (and knowing that it's BS) fills me with more hate than any other country's news. And I wonder: if _I_ feel so incited by this, how do Brits feel who compared to me have actual skin in the game?
[1] actually on both sides. The leave camp was infiltrated by the radical right and the left was controlled by people who were so arrogant that they'd called anyone a racist who disagreed. Those minorities who are at the fringe and work 16 hrs days (while still on the brink of homelessness) were thrown into the same pot as white-supremacists.
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)
Yes. In many ways Brexit is one of those "cascade failures" we read about on COMP.RISKS; democracy has been malfunctioning for a long time, every effort to fix it has been blocked, and now we have the consequences.
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.
I wish this is true, but I don't think it is. In my country we had incompetent and corrupted left-wing government for 13 years. Now we have corrupted and incompetent far right extremists. And voting is mandatory here.
I have zero sympathy, or concern for the voices of those who chose not to exercise their right to vote.
The 50m (not that many - see Khol's reply) had their chance and blew it, and I say that as someone who voted remain and thinks this whole thing is a disaster, and leaving either with the May deal (bad) or the hard way (worse) would both be worse than staying. However, the people had their chance and they voted to leave. That's how democracy works. It's a serious business with real consequences.
If there is a new referendum it should be about the terms under which we will leave, and that's all. Yes the May deal is crap, but any deal we cut with the EU was going to be a horrible fudge. So much for 'cutting a deal with the EU will be the easiest in human history' because 'we hold all the cards'. I have nothing but sympathy for Theresa May. She's made mistakes, sure, but anyone else would have made their own mistakes.
Glad to hear such a profound and sane reply. I feel this whole topic is just so heated up, I understand that, that it's hard to talk reasonable about it.
As a German I hope this will be some kind of a lesson for the whole EU and UK and we will hopefully have the UK back in the EU "soon" (don't know how long this might take).
But I think it's important to draw a line now and make a "Brexit". On the one hand to show the consequences to the UK and the other unsteady EU states who might think about using some kind of exit as a vague threat, but, more important, to show the people of the UK that their will and votes are respected. I think that's what's missing in lots of EU states (at least I feel this way for Germany), so this might really be a chance for all of us.
The 50m is a slightly misleading point (it includes everyone too young to vote, whatever their viewpoint) but there's a much stronger case to take into account the perspective of the 16m people who voted against this car crash.
To declare that because a poorly defined proposition sold with untruth and misdirection won out in a vote means that we can't reflect on what is now known is absurd.
If every vote in which the outcome was swayed with misdirection and untruth was invalidated, we’d have to give up on democracy completely. Every view and opinion was expressed and the electorate had plenty of opportunity to make a decision. I certainly feel I had sufficient information to make an informed choice.
I take a longer view. Democracy is a serious business and the fact the referendum decided on a specific outcome matters. Parliament agreed to hold the referendum and agreed to honour it. In the long term interests of the integrity of our nation and system of government, we should face up to and follow through on those commitments.
It wasn't just the usual 'misdirection and untruth', the Leave campaigns were found guilty of multiple crimes (and there's still more to investigate). If it had been a binding vote, it would have been invalidated.
> If every vote in which the outcome was swayed with misdirection and untruth was invalidated, we’d have to give up on democracy completely.
I would say the opposite: unless you do that, you have already given up on democracy.
> I certainly feel I had sufficient information to make an informed choice.
So do 93% of both leavers and remainers. Trouble is, these two groups disagree about which statements are true: is the EU democratic? Which is responsible for employment rights? For the level of immigration from Africa and the Middle East? How expensive is it? What benefits does it provide?
It is necessarily the case that around half the UK voters believe total nonsense. I know which side I believe, but that doesn’t really help.
>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 a risk they chose to accept when voting for Brexit and which I chose not to accept when voting for remain. However they won the vote, so we all took that risk.
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?
Agreed. I thought the same while signing the original one right after the referendum result was announced — I wasn’t expecting to get what I wanted, but signed it in the hope of sending a “Of course I still love EU” message.
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.
Not in the UK, indeed the largest voter turnout of any election/referendum in the UK was...the EU referendum. Making it the largest vote for a decision in the entire history of the UK.
So best described currently as `interesting times`.
The difference between the leave and remain in the referendum was 3.8%. It's hard to picture how small is this difference, but one way to frame it could be this:
If you voted for Brexit, and you were born on any day of the year between the 14th of January and the 31st of December, your vote is matched by a vote for remain, a will opposite to yours and equally deserving of consideration.
> While the huge number of signings on this petition obviously does reflect _something_, I'm not sure it's actually doing anything meaningful. Likewise the upcoming march this weekend for a Peoples Vote:
Of course, they will keep voting until they get the answer you wanted.
It seems the NoDeal-petition is much older. It ends in April, and the Remain-petition ends in August. According to the web site, petitions run for 6 months. So it certainly isn't a counter-petition.
They were started with different context, and the remainer petition might only have traction atm because it is new.
Anyway - yeah, let's just decide everything with online petitions. Totally legit.
Does your site cache the numbers? It could be really useful to take some of the load off the main petition's site, as people keep going there and refreshing the page which is overloading it.
I've just been sharing your site URL around on Twitter quite a bit, but it seems to have broken it! If it doesn't have caching already, would be good to add it!
> 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 at all. She sacrificed a lot, her political career is completely over, and for no real result, because she was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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.
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 main island. The only deal possible is something like Norway and Switzerland have.
And the reality is, that neither Tory nor Labour MPs want to remain (because of how the political system works in the UK), either fully (in the EU), or partially (outside of the EU and subject to EU rules). So they (predictably) vote against that (only possible) deal.
Edit: This was, of course, perfectly obvious to all politicians, which is why no one wanted to deal with it.
> The only deal possible is something like Norway and Switzerland have
And yet, that's not what she was negotiating. You're correct in the sense that there was never a perfect Brexit to be had but we're about a week away from the worst possible outcome. Those were never the only two options.
And a lot of the problems are of her own making. The execution of the 2017 GE was one of the worst in living memory. That was entirely her doing. She then fought against parliamentary scrutiny and lost. She then threw away most of her negotiating position.
At that point, any sensible person would realise that they're not going to get everything their own way and start preparing for getting consensus. But no, they negotiated a deal without any discussion outside of the Government (even key members of her own party) and are then surprised when it doesn't pass.
I take that back. The deal didn't just not pass. It was the worst ever Government loss in the history of one of the oldest parliaments in the world. So time to reset, take stock and change tack? No, let's keep barrelling on. Why? No idea. I mean, the fixed date, red lines etc are there to keep the harder Brexiters on side i.e. the folk that aren't even voting for the deal.
The whole strategy only made rationale sense if she had a landslide in 2017. When that didn't occur, the only sensible approach was to spend 2 years achieving a cross party consensus for something.
And just to be clear, I'm not only a natural Tory, I was delighted when she was chosen as PM as she appeared to be the sort of pragmatic technocrat that I believed the country needed at this time. Unfortunately, I now believe she is the worst PM we have had in my lifetime. And about to cause preventable harm to the country I call home. It is most saddening.
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.
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.
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.
If she had thought strategically she might have held off on an election until closer to this moment and then she could have used the threat of an election, and the attendant annihilation at the polls, as a threat against the rebels to secure the key factor of party unity. Effective head-kicking is absolutely essential in these sorts of situations. May has ended up just making herself look weak again and again.
Her party was way ahead in the polks when she called the election. She is just incredibly bad at her job — literally, as in if you went back in time 5 years and described what she’d done[1], it would not be considered credible.
[1] hand-waving the credibility of tine travel, of course
She's tried everything except actual leadership. The reason her political career is over is that's she's an ineffective leader.
These sorts of situations are the very definition of what leadership is for. The fact it's nigh an impossible situation is partly due to the path she has chosen and her relative incompetence in her job.
You can feel for her and that's fine, but at the end of the day responsibility to get the job done falls to her and she has not delivered. There are no excuses.
If there was ever to be a workable Brexit it should have been driven by a Leaver. Theresa May was not a Leave campaigner before the referendum, just an anti-immigrant Home Secretary.
She therefore adopted the anti-free-movement position, which condemns the UK to being outside the free trade area, and completely blows up the Ireland situation.
What "should" have happened is one of Johnson, Davis, or Gove running it. Or, after the Tory Party elected a Remain leader, she should have stayed Remain and run a GE on that basis. If people wanted Leave they would have had to vote in UKIP.
I think those three would have failed just as hard.
IMO, whoever was in charge, it should have been done like this: 1. Nationwide consultations about type of Brexit; 2. Determine best fit; 3. Work out negotiation objectives and fallback plans; 4. Then invoke A50.
Building a deliverable, realistic consensus approach with cross-party support, reflecting the relatively close outcome of the initial referendum and the diversity of opinion within the "leave" movement.
But that's my question, what's a "realistic consensus"? Mind you, consensus within the UK isn't enough, you need consensus with the EU as well - and I don't think anything better than the current deal is even possible.
The EU are (or would have been) open to other models than the one TM settled on.
They have suggested they would be open to alternatives when Corbyn approached them earlier this year. If a general election or new referendum had taken place, I think the EU would have granted an extension to hear what new alternative would emerge.
They are saying TM's deal is the only deal now, but that's because it was negotiated exhaustively in private already, and TM told them, essentially, she would take it to the MPs to get it rubber-stamped.
The MPs said no, it's their job, not hers, to hash out the big important compromises for the country, she should have consulted them before getting to that point and they don't like the deal she made, and they rejected it with the strongest defeat in parliamentary history.
The problem is leaving consensus building so late, so the EU spent all their negotiating efforts on TM's version of things, and they don't want to negotiate twice (unless a really good reason shows up that lines up with their principles).
But that's my question, what's a "realistic consensus"?
It's really the prime minister's job to build this based on working cross-party, but an obvious example might be a relatively close Norway-style relationship, which would be much more likely to receive opposition support.
I don't think anything better than the current deal is even possible
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.
> You always get the worst of people when you target their irrational fears
You get the worst anti-democratic statements from people who believe their own voting to be based on rational thought and everyone else's on irrational fears.
Direct democracy isn't the only form of democracy.
We're all irrational and biased, that's inherent to being human. Some people are more informed than other and there are processes to mitigate biases (direct democracy isn't one of them).
The problem comes from people who have no business in the vote, no knowledge of the issues, are not even aware of what biases are, and drink the propaganda kool aid.
Brexit was mostly about:
- "we spend to much money on EU"
- "too many migrants"
Well first off London only strives because of international financial businesses, closing the borders and making it harder for people to migrate is a death sentence [0]. Since the vote Brexit cost the UK much more than what they contribute to the EU [1], they export/import ~50% of their good to/from Europe [2]
Time will tell, what I'm convinced of is that Brexit was sold on lies. It might turns out good for them, but if it does it won't be because of good planning and well thought decisions, it'll be a combination of luck and really good damage control.
> The problem comes from people who have no business in the vote, no knowledge of the issues, are not even aware of what biases are, and drink the propaganda kool aid.
Of course, that's always the other people...
> Well first off London only strives because of international financial businesses
London isn't the UK and "international" doesn't mean "about the EU-27".
> Since the vote Brexit cost the UK much more than what they contribute to the EU
Laughable nonsense.
> they export/import ~50% of their good to/from Europe
So does Iceland. Is it broke yet?
> Time will tell, what I'm convinced of is that Brexit was sold on lies
I rest my case about irrational voters... It's also quite pointless to turn every discussion into a superficial pro/con Brexit argument.
I never said that. It's all about intellectual honesty.
I know that I'm not qualified for my opinion to matter on the topic (I'm just debunking low quality propaganda here) despite the fact that I did hours of research on it.
We don't ask random people about their opinion on string theory, do we ?
Regarding your "googled sources" for the hilarious claim: GDP isn't wealth. Reduced GDP isn't "cost to Britain".
If you "spent hours researching" the topic, you should at least try to question such claims instead of quoting shoddy journalism and publications by dubious lobbyist groups. That's what intellectual honesty is all about.
Iceland is in the EEA and Schengen. If Brexit was moving the UK to that status it would only be slightly bad - almost identical to the current situation, except with more free movement and no ability to vote on EU rules.
Alas, history tells us that the people with "rational" opinions are no better to rule than the ones with "irrational" ones. At least not in the long run.
As a fellow EU-citizen I am absolutely horrified by the chaos currently unfolding in the UK, but dismissing the entire voting process while referring to "democracy yada yada" is far scarier than the outcome of a democratic election will ever be.
I think the above poster's point is that plenty of government decisions are not voted on by referendum, and shouldn't be. The consequences of Brexit are complex and far-reaching, more so than countless other types of decisions that are not directly voted on. So why should we expect The People to know any better?
They're not random, you're supposed to vote for them.
And they're supposed to represent your general opinion. They're supposed to have an education in politic/economics/&c. which makes them better equipped to make informed decisions. And it's supposed to be their full time job.
Just like anyone can bake bread at home with no tools / minimum knowledge but the bakery at the corner of the street will make better bread.
That doesn't magically make a person competent in other matters. On the contrary, many politicians with a background in economics or law show a frightening lack of insight in many other topics like environmental issues, information technology or science, whereas you will find plenty of experts within those fields (as well as economics and law) within the general populace.
The claim that elected politicians are somehow more competent than we are is a scary one. They are people just as we are. They have limitations just as we do. They specialize in various fields like they do, and just like the rest of us, that often means they don't really know that much about the stuff that is outside their own field.
Politicians in Western democracies are demonstrably not more thoughtful, deliberative, logical, rational, or intelligent than their average countrymen.
This. An advisory referendum is advisory. Constitutions use advisory refs for issues that are complicated and not suited for direct democracy. In the UK though, politicians were too coward to do their job and treated the referendum result as law.
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. Likewise, you could say:
voting population of UK - 17.6m leave votes = people who didn't vote for Brexit
Which is a huge majority and by that measure we shouldn't leave. I don't agree with that standpoint either, but both your viewpoint and that are misrepresentations.
>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 your cake (not give a toss about votes and not participate) and eat it (still have your opinion matter on voted topics) too
>That's 3 years ago. There are ~3-4 mil. more young people that are now elligible for vote. Should they have no say?
They don't have a say in any other long-term-implementation matter which was voted before they became eligible for vote, so why would this be an exception?
About 16 will have voted to leave, 16 to remain, 11 who didn't vote but could have, and 23 didn't get to vote because they were too young or aren't British citizens (even if they've lived here for 20 years and have British kids)
(based on 1 million births and deaths a year, with about 2:1 ratio of people dying voting leave (in line with surveys that the older you were the more likely you were to vote and the more likely you were to vote leave)
So about 24% would have voted to leave, 24% to remain, 17% didn't vote, 5% who can now vote but couldn't, and and 30% who still can't vote.
The problem is that only the views of the 24% that voted to leave, and arguably the 41% that voted leave or didn't vote, seem to matter.
>and 23 didn't get to vote because they were too young or aren't British citizens
Those are also not meant to vote, and rightly so. If you aren't a citizen (or aren't yet), you shouldn't decide of the country's matters. And if you're not an adult, you are considered not mature enough to have an opinion. That's part for the course in every democracy.
In a democracy, "X of the the country wants Y" = "X of people qualified to vote && who voted, want Y".
Even in the suffrage and civil rights era, nobody seriously complained that this doesn't include 10 year olds or non-citizens of a country.
>The problem is that only the views of the 24% that voted to leave, and arguably the 41% that voted leave or didn't vote, seem to matter.
That's not a problem, that's how democracy works. Want your opinion to matter? 1) Become an adult (e.g. just wait), 2) Become a citizen (if you're a foreigner) 3) DO vote (don't stay at home). Else the others who are will determine the result.
The real problem is the hypocrisy. In the sense that all of the above wouldn't be considered a problem if the majority had voted to remain.
The problem in this case is that europe has spent 40 years welcoming people from elsewhere in europe. Doesn't matter where you're born, you have the right to live there and build a life.
Imagine if Texas had a vote for independence, but only people born in Texas, and not those that moved from say Chicago, were allowed to vote.
> In the sense that all of the above wouldn't be considered a problem if the majority had voted to remain.
Except it would have been Farage was already calling for a second referendum before the results from the first came in. Rees Mogg and Owen Patterson were also big fans of two referendums, one to start the process, and one to confirm it 3 years later.
The point I was making is that the petition proves nothing that isn't already know - a lot of people don't want to leave. It's not even a march where people have to go somewhere to show how much they care. it's just a button click - which is an easier thing to do than go out and vote. so it's not worth reporting, it's meaningless.
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)
According to The Economist, Feb 23, reporting on a YouGov survey in December, 49% support Remain, and that number hasn't changed much. However, the 51% who don't support Remain support a variety of different proposals. To me it seems highly unlikely that any particular proposal would beat Remain in a choice between those two options. Remain is the Condorcet winner.
That "61%" is probably about right for what would you'd get for a two-way referendum between Remain and No Deal, or between Remain and May's Deal, but if you were to repeat the Remain-Leave referendum (which would be an insane thing to do - it was madness the first time), I wouldn't be surprised if Leave would win again, by a narrow margin.
Doing it this way screws over people whose first choice is a no-deal Brexit, but who would rather stay as a full EU member than accept May's "not quite EU" deal.
This is why you do ranked choice voting, which covers any combination of such opinions.
Indeed, it was Remain vs multiple incompatible alternatives presented as one (and frequently misrepresented as a totally impossible pick and mix of these incompatible options).
Please do remember, polls prior to the referendum got it wrong then, probably still will as well.
I have found betting odd's to be far superior insight than public opinioin polls and with that, ring up a betting shop and ask them what odds they will give that the UK stays as an EU member, that should give you a fair perspective as unlike polls, any mistake they make costs them money.
But for me and many others, polls are futile and so often very very wrong as Brexit and Trump have demonstrated.
You could have got 8 to 1 on the eve of brexit putting a bet on leave - and that was AFTER they called sunderland which was way more brexity than expect. Still kick myself for not taking that bet. It was similar for Trump too!
> [...]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.
Anyone who thinks they can't quickly and easily electronically check entries against the electoral roll is crazy. But congratulations on wasting your time.
Even if they're doing that it's relatively easy to find what postal code a bunch of British citizens live in (e.g. start with famous people whose primary residence is often well-known). I filled it in with "Fake McFakety" or something like that in a random postal code in London, so I wasn't even trying.
They're not going to have a known fool-proof mapping of names/postal codes to something that's guaranteed to be that person's current E-Mail address.
Which, in the age of allegations of say Russian interference in elections[1] means this sort of Internet poll is always going to be suspect.
It doesn't mean it's completely useless, it's some general way of gauging interest for sure, but the GPs suggestion was that something would change once it passed the 33 million mark. I don't think you can make that claim with a poll that's so easily gamed.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Agreed. If she's offering something different each time then you can possibly call it a negotiation. But the identical terms / proposition each time is a farce.
I'm of the opinion you guys should get the Empire back together. The Canadians would love it.
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 precendent from 1604.
People become more conservative as they grow older and more experienced (case in point: in Slovenia, the support for the far-left party with almost communist policies is highest amongst the young). Maybe the old dying would be outweighted by the young growing older.
I thought the same thing - the company the person is CTO of builds the petitions website if you click through the link in their bio and then into their projects page
It seems pretty plausible. His tweets give information about why the site crashed, some discussion about how the back-end works, and the company he claims to work for lists the Petitions website as one of their projects.
This 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.
"Well done everyone - the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database but we're back now at around 180k per hour by my estimation."
We 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.
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.
This will result in nothing more than a response of
"The Government’s policy is not to revoke Article 50. Instead, we continue to work with Parliament to deliver a deal that ensures we leave the European Union as planned"
Damage has been done and all the EU institutions are on leave and won't come back. Even if UK delays the leave it won't save them from damage that has been done.
It's only the politicians now who are trying to save their reputation. Sadly, they are willing to sacrifice country well-being to remain be seen as heroes.
Britain already has "special status"[1] that was given to it in before referendum. No other country in EU has such a deal.
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.
I know much of UK wants to remain, and Brexit is a mess, with EU Japan-ification and inherent mismatch of fiscal policy with monetary policy b/c of sovereign states, maybe UK will ultimately come out ahead as economic free agent?
It is possible that, over a generation-scale timescale, there will be some benefits to the UK's position. I don't think that anybody can reasonably argue against that, simply because of the uncertainty of the distant future.
The problem with that: the EU/EFTA is a large economic and regulatory power, with which the majority of UK international trade occurs (60% of imports and 48% of exports). This is basically a consequence of both geographic and cultural proximity. The result is that UK regulatory and trade regimes will be heavily influenced by actions of the EU/EFTA market in terms of regulation and trade policy; the UK will need to remain closely aligned for the foreseeable future. This means that being "outside" that market introduces obvious inefficiencies and costs, with few indications of any economic benefits that may emerge.
Maybe if you bet on Burnley to win the premier League next season you will win a fortune. All signs, experience and educated opinions, however point to this being a losing bet
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Citation needed. I have read the primary ruling on this[1], and I don't recall anything of the sort.
As the Court notes:
> Although, during the drafting of [Article 50 TEU], amendments had been proposed [...] to avoid the risk of abuse during the withdrawal procedure [...], those amendments were all rejected on the ground, expressly set out in the comments on the draft, that the voluntary and unilateral nature of the withdrawal decision should be ensured.
The situation is more convoluted. You are partially correct. The key sentence is this:
" In the second place, the revocation of the notification of the intention to withdraw must, first, be submitted in writing to the European Council and, secondly, be unequivocal and unconditional, that is to say that the purpose of that revocation is to confirm the EU membership of the Member State concerned under terms that are unchanged as regards its status as a Member State, and that revocation brings the withdrawal procedure to an end."
This means that any withdrawal from Atricle 50 can only be proper if this is the true end of the procedure. Otherwise, it would not be "unconditional".
This is not my reading at all. It brings _the_ withdrawal procedure to an end - the procedure under Article 50 is terminated. It does not preclude starting another. Indeed, it would be contradictory - the purpose of the notice is to confirm membership is "under terms that are unchanged" -- if the State loses its right to invoke Article 50, the terms _have_ changed.
No, the reading is very clear to me: a withdrawal cannot be lawful if it is made with the intent to continue exit negotiations. If negotiations were to continue the proceedings have not ended.
A new invocation of Article 50 can only be made as the start a new and completely independent process. Everything that has been negotiated and decided so far would have to be ignored.
> Everything that has been negotiated and decided so far would have to be ignored.
I'm not disagreeing. The current procedures are brought to close. IF new proceedings were brought, the EU would be well within its rights to say no and that anything it agreed to previously no long applies if the UK tried to rely on anything negotiated previously. It does not, however, prevent those new, independent proceedings starting at all.
The question is whether it is even possible to get to the initiation of new proceedings from where we are now. I doubt it. Any restart in the near future would imply that the preceding withdrawal was unlawful.
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.
Please see the quote in my other response. In a way, the criteria are much harder: the withdrawal must the end of the endeavor to leave the EU. That is, if Britain withdraws, then only if it is the end of Brexit. They could not that with the intent to continue exit negotiations.
> 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 Britain would try to invoke Article 50, the EU would say “no,” and then...? Civil war? Hard Brexit?
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.
That includes things like the treaties that allow planes to fly between the UK and EU, or the UK and the U.S (as the treaties covering that are between the EU and US)
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.
But haven't you Brits always been conflicted over the EU? I mean, significantly more than other nations? Looking at the big picture as an outsider (American), it's probably better that the UK leave the EU. The EU will be stronger and more united.
Even if Brexit doesn't destroy the UK economy[1], politicians everywhere in Europe (including the UK) would no longer be able to speak entirely in hypotheticals, which otherwise make it easy to string along the electorate as well as keep the electorate fickle. Brexit will finally realize the counterfactual that previously anybody and everybody could fabricate from whole cloth. Indeed, it'll also provide a much needed counterfactual in American political discourse and possibly elsewhere.
OTOH, I really like the suggestion in a comment to one of CGP Grey's Brexit videos: the UK and EU could simply ceremoniously reenact the Article 50 withdrawal notice and extension request every year on a new EU-wide holiday, Brexit Day. It provides substantially the same political catharsis, but in perpetuity. And it's perfectly consonant with English political culture more generally--anachronisms that not only bridge time but reconcile conservative and liberal political modalities.
Note: It's important that, at least theoretically, the ritual reenactment preserves the real threat of Brexit. Like with a roller coaster, the appetite for self-destruction cannot be sated without uncertainty.
[1] I mean, pro-Brexit activists were always dishonest and full of sh*t. Here's a mea culpa where an activist admits as much, even while continuing to lie to himself: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-brexiteers-forgot-abo... But, honestly, who knows what will happen post Brexit. Short term dislocation for sure, but beyond that it's a fool's game to make hard predictions.
Somebody let me know if they reach 17,400,000 signatures; because if they don't it's completely irrelevant. Not that signatures can't be faked; which seems much more likely.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/b2vmm0/gover...
While the huge number of signings on this petition obviously does reflect _something_, I'm not sure it's actually doing anything meaningful. Likewise the upcoming march this weekend for a Peoples Vote:
https://www.peoples-vote.uk/march
These are now simply ignored. The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position as evidenced by her statement last night means we're going to go to the wire on something that's been worked on for years. People calling it a national disgrace are absolutely correct.
I can only hope that the pressure exerted from various angles (petition, march, sane MPs) will result in Parliament revoking Article 50, but I don't see it happening. It would be too prudent for this parody of a political system.
edit: the site's back now. Apparently it runs on Rails with DelayedJob doing most of the grunt work in the background.
edit2: just found the most popular petition on there with over 4m votes and absolutely nothing came of that:
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/131215
I like the summary of @bootstrapcool on Twitter: “God knows we've tried everything else.[...] A brief use of collective impotent fury and a tiny squeak into the black holes of our futures, but it's something.”
I get the sentiment (as a pro-Euro Brit), but surely the original referendum counts as being listened to in some way?
Even ignoring all the illegality and fraud about the referendum, and ignoring that because it was advisory large portions of british citizens living abroad were prevented from having a say, and ignoring the arguments about 16-year-olds who it would be directly affecting because of the time lags, and ignoring the arguments around the fact that the process/success has been wildly, wildly different than promised,
Ever since the referendum 50% of the population of the UK has had no representation in Parliament and government, whilst being endlessly parroted at that it is the "will of the people" and simultaneously being blamed for everything going predictably wrong.
Democratic governments aren't supposed to have one vote then completely ignore the rest of the population.
Your original claim was that the people had "[not been] listened to in any way". My singular claim was that in fact they had been listened to at least in some way.
> Even ignoring all the illegality and fraud about the referendum
Something is illegal if deemed so by law and potentially affirmed by courts. If this is indeed the case, there should be proceedings that show this to be so. Something doesn't become illegal just by declaring it as such.
> large portions of british citizens living abroad were prevented from having a say
This is merely an anecdote, but I am a Brit living in the US and I got the chance to submit my Remain postal vote.
> ignoring the arguments about 16-year-olds who it would be directly affecting because of the time lags
This is the nature of every election and every vote. e.g. the poll tax was introduced in 1990 which had widespread ramifications for years to come, and impacted many people that couldn't vote in the prior 1987 general elections. The referendum is no different. This is just the way of democracy.
> Democratic governments aren't supposed to have one vote then completely ignore the rest of the population.
The government actually held a second vote - the general election requested by May in 2017. In that vote, despite winning a smaller plurality, the Tories were still re-affirmed. If everything you say is true, then the popular will would have selected Labour as an overwhelming majority. While the Tory victory was marginal, they still beat Labour.
The reason decisions like elections use a simple majority is that otherwise it'd be a small minority of people oppressing the will of the majority, which is unstable, and otherwise known as dictatorship.
As far as I'm aware nobody got convicted(unlike in the U.S) so your fraud argument is weak even today. I can see a second referendum on no-deal vs May's deal though.
Vote Leave fined for election fraud. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44856992 Leave.EU fined for election fraud. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44080096 Labour Leave fined for undeclared donations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47623595 Vote Leave fined for unsolicited texts using football lottery to gather details. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47623413 Eldon Insurance and Leave.EU fined for data breaches when misusing company email data. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...
Or, re-calling a general election after 1.5 years. Didn’t ‘the people’ already decide?
How about if they were promised one thing, and voted for it, and it turned out to be impossible and based on lies and fraud?
(I note it has passed 750,000 signatures in well under 24 hours.)
Ok I get your sentiment and I agree that peaceful protest is just woefully ignored in the UK - but someone with a job and a peaceful life typically doesn't want to risk getting arrested, and potentially convicted, trying to cause trouble on a march.
Things have to be much worse before people are going to start taking that risk, and sadly, while things do not look good, the average Londoner is not yet uncomfortable enough to start doing so.
>Paris has real protests
It may not be your intent but "It's not a real protest if something doesn't burn down" is a bit unfair. If things turn violent/destructive on this march public favour will not look kindly on it in the UK.
Remember the student protests for tuition fees? Those who occupied 30 Millbank were vilified as criminals by _both_ sides. Inconvenient and disruptive for sure - but to the press they are "rioters" and to others in the movement "anarchists who don't represent us".
People have been persuaded by the powers that be that any form of non-peaceful protesting is socially unacceptable and that we should chastise it. Convenient eh? Especially because "Without a path from protest to power"[0] there is never going to be any change or acknowledgement from the government.
Any form of protest that could actually get results is a) too risky for people who are currently comfortable enough and b) intentionally socially ostracised by those in power to discourage it.
Be the change you want to see in the world? But one person in a balaclava setting things on fire isn't going to make any difference to the outcome of the protest without a critical mass of others undertaking the same behaviour for a prolonged period of time.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/19/womens-march-w...
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 parliament can't manage it decently is because parliament was and is mostly against it, including May.
This is not like ip laws, where interested lobbies co-opt the parliamentary systems with as little popular involvement (or knowledge) as possible. This was/is an actual division of opinions among the people. It wasn't imposed from above.
I hope you guys stay in, or at least close but I think it needs to be done in a way that respects the other side too.
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.
The inability to force a clear Leave manifesto is the root of the disaster. What "should" have happened is either a Leave PM, or the 2017 election should have been run on a clear Leave manifesto specifying a realistic deal to be sought against a Remain opposition.
I don't mean to say you're wrong. I'm just saying there appears to be obvious, legitimate concerns here, and your suggesting otherwise seems possibly disingenuous.
Yes, the EU representation is quite distant. The UK has an unelected upper house.
> Foreign authoritative bureaucracies?
This isn't great, but at least the EU one is elected. The alternative in all the other trade deals is unelected. Hence all the opposition to things like TTIP, and earlier complaints about GATT etc.
Fundamentally, voting against the EU doesn't make it go away. Some sort of framework always needs to exist to make agreements with other European countries. If the EU didn't exist, it would probably be necessary to invent it.
Hence the Norway/Switzerland situation: not in the EU, has to follow EU rules without having a vote on them.
> legitimate concerns
Here's the thing: hardly anyone talks about those anymore. Brexit has been absolutely dominated by antipathy towards immigrants, both EU and non-EU (despite this not being anything to do with the EU). There's no way to "unwind" EU immigration without ripping families apart.
(I was a Euroskeptic about the treatment of Greece, for example. But ultimately Greece realised that however bad a situation it was in, crashing out would be worse. The same applies to the UK, with "Tory Syriza" running it)
https://imgur.com/4ShiHgb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England
Also the later, and peaceful, Glorious Revolution?
'Cyclically, the Middle deposed the High, by enlisting the Low. Upon assuming power, however, the Middle (the new High class) recast the Low into their usual servitude. In the event, the classes perpetually repeat the cycle, when the Middle class speaks to the Low class of "justice" and of "human brotherhood" in aid of becoming the High class rulers.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...
After the First English Civil War, there were two broad factions within the New Model Army: the Grandees (aristocratic wing) and the Levellers (the more radical, egalitarian, democratic and progressive republicans). Unfortunately, Cromwell’s faction won that particular power struggle and the rest is history. Nevertheless, this period of revolution acted as inspiration for the colonists in America, which in turn inspired the French republicans, thus influencing countless other revolutionary movements.
Related link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney_Debates
As for the Glorious Revolution, what did it do, other than put a German on the throne?
The French make themselves unrulable, while the British have been utterly subjugated by the state. Positive change has completely exited the British imagination, to the point where even progressives can't articulate a positive program, only a defence of whatever happens to exist at the moment.
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...
Since it is illegal, I do not endorse it; instead I will just watch the UK burn itself.
Farage and the rest are no where to be seen (he still collects his salary from the EU apparently though!).
The upshot of all this mess will probably be as unlikely as the referendum result itself. Personally, I'm expecting the unexpected, and can see a total revocation of article 50, resulting most probably from a people's vote (anything else would be undemocratic). I mean, what other realistic option is there that isn't utterly pie-in-the-sky stupid?!
I don't know how this would be political suicide, it is currently the most popular option in polling, and it's not considered to have any greater economic costs than the other options (including reversing the referendum decision entirely!).
2. The idea that it has no greater cost than the options is ridiculous. UK Treasury and economists from all around the world have all come to the conclusion that a hard brexit is significantly more harmful than a soft brexit. And it's common sense since it imposes trade friction on the UK's largest trading partner.
The problem is that these same people all came to the conclusion that on voting Leave, during the negotiation period the UK would lose 500,000 - 800,000 jobs and enter a massive recession caused by "uncertainty".
The UK has since hit the lowest levels of unemployment on record and economic growth is outstripping Germany, France and Italy.
Economists have no credibility with regards to Brexit. None. They have less than zero credibility in fact: if they're saying something, it's a good sign the reality is the opposite.
Thus the idea that no deal would be bad for the UK is a deeply suspect one. There are many things the UK can do outside the EU that would accelerate growth even further still, according to conventional economics. But regardless of what you personally believe, at this point it's just guessing - your views have no more legitimacy than the views of people who think any sort of deal with the EU is bound to be harmful to the country and its prosperity.
For example: https://www.ft.com/content/4849bf68-1b13-11e9-9e64-d150b3105...
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.
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 Brexit, than Remain. A democratic process and result.
Pull the other one. This isn't the BBC Have Your Say comments section. People won't just believe that because you've declared it so.
Illegal data theft: https://twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743104
Flagrant violations of electoral law: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/i-am-a/journalist/ele... - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/17/vote-leave-...
Blatant lies and disinformation on immigration: https://www.europeanlawmonitor.org/eu-referendum-topics/summ...
General lies: https://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-second-referendu...
More lies: https://minutehack.com/opinions/lies-damn-lies-and-brexit
Further lies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBxWiRz6A9E
External interference and disinformation: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/17/why-is...
And it's scandalous that the UK government hasn't properly invested everything that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
You may have a point about the fairness - the Government did pump in 9.3 million GBP to push the Pro-Remain position, in the form of a Pro-Remain pamphlet to every household in the UK. This, arguably, was hardly fair as the Leave side could not hope to match that level of expenditure to air their position, yet the people still voted Leave - go figure.
> the original remain/leave referendum that happened a few years after joining
That wasn't constitutional change. Nor was it binding.
This referendum was also non-binding, it's right there in the act of parliament that authorized it.
Of course once Parliament agreed to invoke article 50 the referendum became irrelevant. Parliament - specifically the Tories, Labour, DUP, UUP and UKIP mps who decided to take us out of the EU with no deal, not the referendum.
320 MPs can change the UK constitution (although there are some protections with the House of Lords), which is the anomaly globally.
Putting the question to the people, in a representative democracy, is a terrible idea. they should have known this after Boaty McBoatface already.
In addition UK MSM has some of the most inflaming language in all the news in Europe (and even US). I have my news.google.com set to UK by default and I switch around to other region and languages to get a more complete picture. Every country has screamy headlines. But the UK tabloids (Express, Mirror and Daily) seem to be the absolute fucking worst. Even from just reading the headlines (and knowing that it's BS) fills me with more hate than any other country's news. And I wonder: if _I_ feel so incited by this, how do Brits feel who compared to me have actual skin in the game?
[1] actually on both sides. The leave camp was infiltrated by the radical right and the left was controlled by people who were so arrogant that they'd called anyone a racist who disagreed. Those minorities who are at the fringe and work 16 hrs days (while still on the brink of homelessness) were thrown into the same pot as white-supremacists.
Having watched many Commons discussions, it basically always ends with "but the 17M".
* 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)
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
The 50m (not that many - see Khol's reply) had their chance and blew it, and I say that as someone who voted remain and thinks this whole thing is a disaster, and leaving either with the May deal (bad) or the hard way (worse) would both be worse than staying. However, the people had their chance and they voted to leave. That's how democracy works. It's a serious business with real consequences.
If there is a new referendum it should be about the terms under which we will leave, and that's all. Yes the May deal is crap, but any deal we cut with the EU was going to be a horrible fudge. So much for 'cutting a deal with the EU will be the easiest in human history' because 'we hold all the cards'. I have nothing but sympathy for Theresa May. She's made mistakes, sure, but anyone else would have made their own mistakes.
As a German I hope this will be some kind of a lesson for the whole EU and UK and we will hopefully have the UK back in the EU "soon" (don't know how long this might take).
But I think it's important to draw a line now and make a "Brexit". On the one hand to show the consequences to the UK and the other unsteady EU states who might think about using some kind of exit as a vague threat, but, more important, to show the people of the UK that their will and votes are respected. I think that's what's missing in lots of EU states (at least I feel this way for Germany), so this might really be a chance for all of us.
To declare that because a poorly defined proposition sold with untruth and misdirection won out in a vote means that we can't reflect on what is now known is absurd.
I take a longer view. Democracy is a serious business and the fact the referendum decided on a specific outcome matters. Parliament agreed to hold the referendum and agreed to honour it. In the long term interests of the integrity of our nation and system of government, we should face up to and follow through on those commitments.
I would say the opposite: unless you do that, you have already given up on democracy.
> I certainly feel I had sufficient information to make an informed choice.
So do 93% of both leavers and remainers. Trouble is, these two groups disagree about which statements are true: is the EU democratic? Which is responsible for employment rights? For the level of immigration from Africa and the Middle East? How expensive is it? What benefits does it provide?
It is necessarily the case that around half the UK voters believe total nonsense. I know which side I believe, but that doesn’t really help.
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 a risk they chose to accept when voting for Brexit and which I chose not to accept when voting for remain. However they won the vote, so we all took that risk.
I don’t see how you can make this claim. Perhaps you have seen more mere-options than me?
The other two I will grant you, and I thank you for providing them.
Not saying the signatures so far aren't genuine, just that to have the desired effect it'll need to be reasonably free from doubt
So best described currently as `interesting times`.
"The highest turnout recorded at a UK general election over the last 100 years was in 1950, 83.9%.", according to https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...
Either way, the 1992 general election had a turnout of 77.7% or 33,614,074, both of were larger than the EU referendum.
Implicitly agreeing to the "but the 17M" frame, the Remainers lost the public discussion.
They did, however the response was "50M didn't vote for the status quo"
If you voted for Brexit, and you were born on any day of the year between the 14th of January and the 31st of December, your vote is matched by a vote for remain, a will opposite to yours and equally deserving of consideration.
Of course, they will keep voting until they get the answer you wanted.
(Pending API availability)
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
They were started with different context, and the remainer petition might only have traction atm because it is new.
Anyway - yeah, let's just decide everything with online petitions. Totally legit.
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 at all. She sacrificed a lot, her political career is completely over, and for no real result, because she was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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...
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 main island. The only deal possible is something like Norway and Switzerland have.
And the reality is, that neither Tory nor Labour MPs want to remain (because of how the political system works in the UK), either fully (in the EU), or partially (outside of the EU and subject to EU rules). So they (predictably) vote against that (only possible) deal.
Edit: This was, of course, perfectly obvious to all politicians, which is why no one wanted to deal with it.
And yet, that's not what she was negotiating. You're correct in the sense that there was never a perfect Brexit to be had but we're about a week away from the worst possible outcome. Those were never the only two options.
And a lot of the problems are of her own making. The execution of the 2017 GE was one of the worst in living memory. That was entirely her doing. She then fought against parliamentary scrutiny and lost. She then threw away most of her negotiating position.
At that point, any sensible person would realise that they're not going to get everything their own way and start preparing for getting consensus. But no, they negotiated a deal without any discussion outside of the Government (even key members of her own party) and are then surprised when it doesn't pass.
I take that back. The deal didn't just not pass. It was the worst ever Government loss in the history of one of the oldest parliaments in the world. So time to reset, take stock and change tack? No, let's keep barrelling on. Why? No idea. I mean, the fixed date, red lines etc are there to keep the harder Brexiters on side i.e. the folk that aren't even voting for the deal.
The whole strategy only made rationale sense if she had a landslide in 2017. When that didn't occur, the only sensible approach was to spend 2 years achieving a cross party consensus for something.
And just to be clear, I'm not only a natural Tory, I was delighted when she was chosen as PM as she appeared to be the sort of pragmatic technocrat that I believed the country needed at this time. Unfortunately, I now believe she is the worst PM we have had in my lifetime. And about to cause preventable harm to the country I call home. It is most saddening.
- May chose the date to leave.
- May chose the redlines.
- May chose how the Irish backstop would work.
- May chose not to work with Corbyn on leaving.
- May chose to capitulate to the ERG.
And yet somehow this is the EU's fault ?
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.
[1] hand-waving the credibility of tine travel, of course
She's been told by the rules of Parliament that she can't have another vote on the same deal. That remains to be her plan.
These sorts of situations are the very definition of what leadership is for. The fact it's nigh an impossible situation is partly due to the path she has chosen and her relative incompetence in her job.
You can feel for her and that's fine, but at the end of the day responsibility to get the job done falls to her and she has not delivered. There are no excuses.
She therefore adopted the anti-free-movement position, which condemns the UK to being outside the free trade area, and completely blows up the Ireland situation.
What "should" have happened is one of Johnson, Davis, or Gove running it. Or, after the Tory Party elected a Remain leader, she should have stayed Remain and run a GE on that basis. If people wanted Leave they would have had to vote in UKIP.
IMO, whoever was in charge, it should have been done like this: 1. Nationwide consultations about type of Brexit; 2. Determine best fit; 3. Work out negotiation objectives and fallback plans; 4. Then invoke A50.
They have suggested they would be open to alternatives when Corbyn approached them earlier this year. If a general election or new referendum had taken place, I think the EU would have granted an extension to hear what new alternative would emerge.
They are saying TM's deal is the only deal now, but that's because it was negotiated exhaustively in private already, and TM told them, essentially, she would take it to the MPs to get it rubber-stamped.
The MPs said no, it's their job, not hers, to hash out the big important compromises for the country, she should have consulted them before getting to that point and they don't like the deal she made, and they rejected it with the strongest defeat in parliamentary history.
The problem is leaving consensus building so late, so the EU spent all their negotiating efforts on TM's version of things, and they don't want to negotiate twice (unless a really good reason shows up that lines up with their principles).
Ah, that's news to me. Do you have any more info, like an article explaining the potential alternative models?
It's really the prime minister's job to build this based on working cross-party, but an obvious example might be a relatively close Norway-style relationship, which would be much more likely to receive opposition support.
I don't think anything better than the current deal is even possible
This is again just absolutely false.
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)
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.
You get the worst anti-democratic statements from people who believe their own voting to be based on rational thought and everyone else's on irrational fears.
Direct democracy isn't the only form of democracy.
We're all irrational and biased, that's inherent to being human. Some people are more informed than other and there are processes to mitigate biases (direct democracy isn't one of them).
The problem comes from people who have no business in the vote, no knowledge of the issues, are not even aware of what biases are, and drink the propaganda kool aid.
Brexit was mostly about:
- "we spend to much money on EU"
- "too many migrants"
Well first off London only strives because of international financial businesses, closing the borders and making it harder for people to migrate is a death sentence [0]. Since the vote Brexit cost the UK much more than what they contribute to the EU [1], they export/import ~50% of their good to/from Europe [2]
Time will tell, what I'm convinced of is that Brexit was sold on lies. It might turns out good for them, but if it does it won't be because of good planning and well thought decisions, it'll be a combination of luck and really good damage control.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/371c63ba-4b08-11e9-8b7f-d49067e0f...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46338585
[2] https://fullfact.org/europe/uk-eu-trade/
Of course, that's always the other people...
> Well first off London only strives because of international financial businesses
London isn't the UK and "international" doesn't mean "about the EU-27".
> Since the vote Brexit cost the UK much more than what they contribute to the EU
Laughable nonsense.
> they export/import ~50% of their good to/from Europe
So does Iceland. Is it broke yet?
> Time will tell, what I'm convinced of is that Brexit was sold on lies
I rest my case about irrational voters... It's also quite pointless to turn every discussion into a superficial pro/con Brexit argument.
I never said that. It's all about intellectual honesty.
I know that I'm not qualified for my opinion to matter on the topic (I'm just debunking low quality propaganda here) despite the fact that I did hours of research on it.
We don't ask random people about their opinion on string theory, do we ?
> Laughable nonsense.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-economy/brexit...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/29/britain-bil...
https://qz.com/1477680/brexit-is-a-bad-idea-whichever-way-yo...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-22/u-k-brexi...
https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million...
If you "spent hours researching" the topic, you should at least try to question such claims instead of quoting shoddy journalism and publications by dubious lobbyist groups. That's what intellectual honesty is all about.
PS. I remember these predictions - do you? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37921036
As a fellow EU-citizen I am absolutely horrified by the chaos currently unfolding in the UK, but dismissing the entire voting process while referring to "democracy yada yada" is far scarier than the outcome of a democratic election will ever be.
After all, a stupid decision taken by uninformed politicians isn't necessarily better than a stupid decision made by the people.
They're not random, you're supposed to vote for them.
And they're supposed to represent your general opinion. They're supposed to have an education in politic/economics/&c. which makes them better equipped to make informed decisions. And it's supposed to be their full time job.
Just like anyone can bake bread at home with no tools / minimum knowledge but the bakery at the corner of the street will make better bread.
That doesn't magically make a person competent in other matters. On the contrary, many politicians with a background in economics or law show a frightening lack of insight in many other topics like environmental issues, information technology or science, whereas you will find plenty of experts within those fields (as well as economics and law) within the general populace.
The claim that elected politicians are somehow more competent than we are is a scary one. They are people just as we are. They have limitations just as we do. They specialize in various fields like they do, and just like the rest of us, that often means they don't really know that much about the stuff that is outside their own field.
voting population of UK - 17.6m leave votes = people who didn't vote for Brexit
Which is a huge majority and by that measure we shouldn't leave. I don't agree with that standpoint either, but both your viewpoint and that are misrepresentations.
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 your cake (not give a toss about votes and not participate) and eat it (still have your opinion matter on voted topics) too
That's 3 years ago. There are ~3-4 mil. more young people that are now elligible for vote. Should they have no say?
They don't have a say in any other long-term-implementation matter which was voted before they became eligible for vote, so why would this be an exception?
But in democracies the percentages who want this or that are counted through voting. So technically, it is correct.
About 16 will have voted to leave, 16 to remain, 11 who didn't vote but could have, and 23 didn't get to vote because they were too young or aren't British citizens (even if they've lived here for 20 years and have British kids)
(based on 1 million births and deaths a year, with about 2:1 ratio of people dying voting leave (in line with surveys that the older you were the more likely you were to vote and the more likely you were to vote leave)
So about 24% would have voted to leave, 24% to remain, 17% didn't vote, 5% who can now vote but couldn't, and and 30% who still can't vote.
The problem is that only the views of the 24% that voted to leave, and arguably the 41% that voted leave or didn't vote, seem to matter.
Those are also not meant to vote, and rightly so. If you aren't a citizen (or aren't yet), you shouldn't decide of the country's matters. And if you're not an adult, you are considered not mature enough to have an opinion. That's part for the course in every democracy.
In a democracy, "X of the the country wants Y" = "X of people qualified to vote && who voted, want Y".
Even in the suffrage and civil rights era, nobody seriously complained that this doesn't include 10 year olds or non-citizens of a country.
>The problem is that only the views of the 24% that voted to leave, and arguably the 41% that voted leave or didn't vote, seem to matter.
That's not a problem, that's how democracy works. Want your opinion to matter? 1) Become an adult (e.g. just wait), 2) Become a citizen (if you're a foreigner) 3) DO vote (don't stay at home). Else the others who are will determine the result.
The real problem is the hypocrisy. In the sense that all of the above wouldn't be considered a problem if the majority had voted to remain.
Imagine if Texas had a vote for independence, but only people born in Texas, and not those that moved from say Chicago, were allowed to vote.
> In the sense that all of the above wouldn't be considered a problem if the majority had voted to remain.
Except it would have been Farage was already calling for a second referendum before the results from the first came in. Rees Mogg and Owen Patterson were also big fans of two referendums, one to start the process, and one to confirm it 3 years later.
Sure, hypocrisy on both sides ensure it would be called a problem by the other side.
But it wouldn't be called a problem from _the same_ people today calling it a problem.
So, it's the kind that's only a problem when your side loses -- in which case, it can be discarded as the usual complaint of any losing side ever.
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)
That "61%" is probably about right for what would you'd get for a two-way referendum between Remain and No Deal, or between Remain and May's Deal, but if you were to repeat the Remain-Leave referendum (which would be an insane thing to do - it was madness the first time), I wouldn't be surprised if Leave would win again, by a narrow margin.
"Well, if you knows of a better 'ole go to it"?
A) Should we leave?
B) if we leave, should be we leave even without a deal with the EU?
I.e. two (or more) distinct questions. If you vote no at the fort question, you still get to express your opinion on the second.
This is why you do ranked choice voting, which covers any combination of such opinions.
I have found betting odd's to be far superior insight than public opinioin polls and with that, ring up a betting shop and ask them what odds they will give that the UK stays as an EU member, that should give you a fair perspective as unlike polls, any mistake they make costs them money.
But for me and many others, polls are futile and so often very very wrong as Brexit and Trump have demonstrated.
Polls before Brexit where wrong, no reasons to trust them now.
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.
The people behind the petition website are not idiots.
This can be worrying.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/electoral-register/view-electoral-registe... [1] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_fil...
They're not going to have a known fool-proof mapping of names/postal codes to something that's guaranteed to be that person's current E-Mail address.
Which, in the age of allegations of say Russian interference in elections[1] means this sort of Internet poll is always going to be suspect.
It doesn't mean it's completely useless, it's some general way of gauging interest for sure, but the GPs suggestion was that something would change once it passed the 33 million mark. I don't think you can make that claim with a poll that's so easily gamed.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
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.
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.
Well not completely. It allows UK politicians to imitate useful activity around the Brexit.
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.
Might as well just start banning "racists" and other undesirables from the polls outright if that's the path you want to go down.
One could say the same about May's repeated requests for votes in parliament on her "deal". It was rejected, we need a better solution.
I voted remain but I'd rather crash out with no deal on the 29th than go through this endless uncertainty ad nauseum.
I'm of the opinion you guys should get the Empire back together. The Canadians would love it.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/07/corrupt-vot...
If it's not codified, then it sounds like a failure of the government structure and charter
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 precendent from 1604.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_K...
Sounds like it's time for a revolution and rewrite.
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/07/24/conserva...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472493
https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108518184301268995
https://unboxed.co/product-stories/petitions/
e: This came out worded as if I was disproving, I'm agreeing with the grandparent comment and showing my working
[1] https://github.com/alphagov/e-petitions
At the time it went down, I was seeing 2k signups a minute and rising. I was just thinking how the load handling was impressive when poof it was down.
Back now, though, which is also pretty good. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584
UPDATE: It's down again. 502 bad gateway. I was seeing close to 3k signups a minute when it fell over this time.
UPDATE 2: Seems to be back? Clearly unstable though with these load levels.
Update: Eventually got the email and confirmed my support.
Or in marketing terms they could have use Request / Min.
I noted 3,350 per minute about 20 minutes ago!
Also no worries for posting :)
https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh/
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.
https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108673644660699136
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.
"The Government’s policy is not to revoke Article 50. Instead, we continue to work with Parliament to deliver a deal that ensures we leave the European Union as planned"
I have signed, however. Prove me wrong, UK Govt
It's only the politicians now who are trying to save their reputation. Sadly, they are willing to sacrifice country well-being to remain be seen as heroes.
Britain already has "special status"[1] that was given to it in before referendum. No other country in EU has such a deal.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35622105
I guess it's possible that there are no popular petitions in the last hour because of the outage.
Currently... "Petitions is down for maintenance. We know about it and we're working on it. Please try again later."
You've made your bed, time to sleep in it.
Real life isn't a video game. You don't get to replay from your last save if you don't like the outcome.
The problem with that: the EU/EFTA is a large economic and regulatory power, with which the majority of UK international trade occurs (60% of imports and 48% of exports). This is basically a consequence of both geographic and cultural proximity. The result is that UK regulatory and trade regimes will be heavily influenced by actions of the EU/EFTA market in terms of regulation and trade policy; the UK will need to remain closely aligned for the foreseeable future. This means that being "outside" that market introduces obvious inefficiencies and costs, with few indications of any economic benefits that may emerge.
https://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition=241584
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.
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.
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.
Citation needed. I have read the primary ruling on this[1], and I don't recall anything of the sort.
As the Court notes:
> Although, during the drafting of [Article 50 TEU], amendments had been proposed [...] to avoid the risk of abuse during the withdrawal procedure [...], those amendments were all rejected on the ground, expressly set out in the comments on the draft, that the voluntary and unilateral nature of the withdrawal decision should be ensured.
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...
" In the second place, the revocation of the notification of the intention to withdraw must, first, be submitted in writing to the European Council and, secondly, be unequivocal and unconditional, that is to say that the purpose of that revocation is to confirm the EU membership of the Member State concerned under terms that are unchanged as regards its status as a Member State, and that revocation brings the withdrawal procedure to an end."
This means that any withdrawal from Atricle 50 can only be proper if this is the true end of the procedure. Otherwise, it would not be "unconditional".
A new invocation of Article 50 can only be made as the start a new and completely independent process. Everything that has been negotiated and decided so far would have to be ignored.
I'm not disagreeing. The current procedures are brought to close. IF new proceedings were brought, the EU would be well within its rights to say no and that anything it agreed to previously no long applies if the UK tried to rely on anything negotiated previously. It does not, however, prevent those new, independent proceedings starting at all.
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.
So Britain would try to invoke Article 50, the EU would say “no,” and then...? Civil war? Hard Brexit?
Opinion is divided as to whether it requires Parliament or if the Government can do it without further ado.
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.
You announce to leave there should be no going back.
I get what you're saying but this poll is to say "Please look at this further" not "Please instantly do this thing in the poll"
Even if Brexit doesn't destroy the UK economy[1], politicians everywhere in Europe (including the UK) would no longer be able to speak entirely in hypotheticals, which otherwise make it easy to string along the electorate as well as keep the electorate fickle. Brexit will finally realize the counterfactual that previously anybody and everybody could fabricate from whole cloth. Indeed, it'll also provide a much needed counterfactual in American political discourse and possibly elsewhere.
OTOH, I really like the suggestion in a comment to one of CGP Grey's Brexit videos: the UK and EU could simply ceremoniously reenact the Article 50 withdrawal notice and extension request every year on a new EU-wide holiday, Brexit Day. It provides substantially the same political catharsis, but in perpetuity. And it's perfectly consonant with English political culture more generally--anachronisms that not only bridge time but reconcile conservative and liberal political modalities.
Note: It's important that, at least theoretically, the ritual reenactment preserves the real threat of Brexit. Like with a roller coaster, the appetite for self-destruction cannot be sated without uncertainty.
[1] I mean, pro-Brexit activists were always dishonest and full of sh*t. Here's a mea culpa where an activist admits as much, even while continuing to lie to himself: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-brexiteers-forgot-abo... But, honestly, who knows what will happen post Brexit. Short term dislocation for sure, but beyond that it's a fool's game to make hard predictions.