Posted on 04/01/2019 2:57:34 PM PDT by Jyotishi
"There are no ideal choices available and there are very good arguments against any possible outcome at the moment," said one lawmaker
LONDON — Britain's Parliament still can't agree on how to move forward on Brexit.
Four nonbinding measures that would have outlined a potential way forward on exiting the European Union all failed to gain a majority Monday.
The vote came after lawmakers last week rejected a withdrawal agreement proposed by Prime Minister Theresa May for a third time. Two of these votes were the largest and fourth largest losses in parliamentary history. Despite these defeats, May is reportedly considering putting her deal up for yet another vote in Parliament this week.
The options Parliament considered Monday included two proposals that aimed to retain close economic ties between Britain and the European Union. One would have kept the U.K. in a customs union for goods with the E.U. after Brexit, while another called for Britain to stay in the bloc's single market for both goods and services.
Another option wanted any Brexit deal to be submitted to a public referendum, and the fourth said Britain should cancel its departure from the E.U. if it comes within two days of crashing out of the bloc without an agreement.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said that she would step down if Parliament passes the deal she negotiated with the E.U.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
The slim majority voted to leave in a non binding referendum. The UK is a representative democracy. The parliament is sovereign, not the people.
By the four constituent nations of the union, two voted to leave (England and Wales) and two to stay (Scotland and northern Ireland).
Give the English and the Welsh the hard Brexit with no deal and let Scotland and northern Ireland stay
Two out of four constituent nations in the uk voted stay. The Scots voted 63% stay and all of their counties voted stay. Why should they be forced out?
Elites against the people? Hillary won two percent more of the popular bite than Trump but both you and me are glad that the “people” ie the popular vote winner didn’t win.
The fact is that many of “the people” are equally divided
AND most of the Brexit leaders ARE elites. Rees mogg is an old Etonian as is Boris Johnson. Ditto for Nigel Farage from Dulwich colley, though not as posh as Rees Mogg.
It is not the simple people vs elite and not the simple question you are stating
Old Etonian, the toniest school in England
He was then in Oxford -- as was Steven Baker, the deputy leader of the ERG
Boris Johnson is also Eton and Oxford
Both of these are the elitest of the elite schools and both Rees-Mogg and Johnson come from money, old money. They ARE the elite.
you cannot portray this Brexit fiasco as "the elite" versus "the rest", that is just not true. It is far more complicated.
“The slim majority voted to leave in a non binding referendum. “
If Remain had won the referendum result wouldn’t have been “non-binding”.
It would have been the sacred will of the people, never to be questioned !
Everyone accepted the legitimacy of the referendum and the determinancy of the result until Leave won.
Remainer sour grapes is the same Calvinball BS we get from Democrats in the USA. They thought they were sure winners against Trump, and when they lost they tried to rewrite the rules.
Remoaners are the same urban elites, and they are trying the same BS.
The best thing Britain could do by far would be a no deal Brexit. Even if they have to arrive at that outcome via a stalemate in Parliament, they will have stumbled into the best outcome. Here’s hoping.
If the Remain had won the referendum the result would still be non-binding.
Cameron should have clearly defined the parameters of the Referendum and made it a binding referendum. He did not, which is why there is debate over what this means or does not mean.
He should have also specified exactly WHAT leave meant - whether no-deal or customs union or something in between. He did not, leading to the mess we are in now.
And your statement “Everyone accepted the legitimacy of the referendum and the determinancy of the result “ - is false — people were asking at the beginning what Cameron was up to creating such an ambiguous referendum question
The problem is that you guys are seeing this as a mirror image of the situation in the US when it is not.
This is not about Democrats vs Republicans, this is about people who want to leave their perception of the EU versus people who want to actual leave the EU versus people who don’t want to leave the EU.
“Urban elite” - you mean the whole of Scotland who voted stay are “urban elite” in your opinion??
“people were asking at the beginning what Cameron was up to creating such an ambiguous referendum question”
It wouldn’t have been “ambiguous” if Remain had won.
This is elites vs people and urban vs rural.
I haven’t lived in the UK for more 15 years so I wasn’t eligible to vote.
But one of the things that bothered me about some of my relatives who are big Remainers, is that their main issue is that they want to live and work in the EU, and Brexit threatened that.
IE. they want the trade and labour laws of the UK to be optimized for their particular convenience - and they don’t even want to live in the country !
And that is the elites vs people problem.
We have an internationalist elite who are from nowhere, demanding that the people from somewhere defer to them, and dislocate their whole societies to accommodate them.
NO !
It would have been ambiguous if Remain won by 4% as well.
And we would never have heard the end of it about how Brexit wus robbed etc. Just as remainers are grumbling, leavers would be grumbling.
This was a badly designed referendum:
1. It should have been clearly stated that it was binding or non-binding. As the issue lies, as per the British constitution it is non-binding.
2. It should have clearly stated a % to leave - 60% would have made the situation unambiguous and would have also driven out more leave voters. A win of a few % either way was inevitably going to lead to bad blood.
3. OR they should have had it as a two-stage question
A. Do you wish to leave the EU or stay with the same status quo as today
B. If you vote leave then which option do you want
b.1. same status quo but more control over x y z
b.2. leave under WTO rules (no more following EU rules or payments or immigration or free movement of goods and services)
b.3. remain part of the customs union (free movement of goods, people, services and capital, and follow the rules)
b.4. rejoin the EFTA from the EU (all 4 freedoms + pay into the EU budget but no representation and no need to follow every rule)
This was a shoddily designed referendum and we see the result now.
Even if Remain had won we would have the same debates
The only unambiguous verdict was given by Scotland - 63% to stay.
Then why are the leaders of the LEAVE movement Eton-Oxford graduates? The cream of the cream?
So it wasn't a simple urban vs rural either
Live and work in other countries in the EU or in the UK-in-the-EU?
outside Britain, in Continental europe, specifically in France.
“Then why are the leaders of the LEAVE movement Eton-Oxford graduates? The cream of the cream?”
Because all the leadership in all these societies is from the elites, same as the USA, same as here in Canada.
My point is about the voters. Brexit voters are denigrated as being economic losers in the global economy, from unfashionable postal codes, and just not affluent, educated and sophisticated enough to be worthy to have a say in Britain’s future.
The same elitist garbage that gets directed at Trump voters, and also at Conservative voters here in Canada.
Well, that sort of messaging impresses and entertains the cool, woke, with-it crowd until they wake up the morning after the voting and ask: “what the f*ck just happened?”
Are you incapable of discussing? I’ve been on FR for 6 years longer than you have — well before I moved to Poland.
Stop posting lies about me - I’ve already reported your post to the admin. If you wish to disagree with me, go ahead. If you wish to point out errors in my posts, please do.
But simply tossing out insults instead of debating is not the FR way.
I do think the people who voted Leave have grievances, but not all of them are caused by the EU and indeed many of them were whipped up grievances (350 million going weekly to the EU - another euromyth)
Brexit voters are denigrated as being economic losers in the global economy, from unfashionable postal codes, and just not affluent, educated and sophisticated enough to be worthy to have a say in Britain’s future.
And that is wrong. Denigrating them for their status in life or education or "sophistication" is diverting from the original debate and serves no purpose. I have never and will never use such terms to describe someone who disagrees with me as that would be besides the point.
The Referendum was badly managed and as you point out, the calling of people "losers", "deplorables" etc. defeated the remain vote. It would have made more sense to stop, find out what the grievances are and actually explain rather than talk down to people
England had a problem with immigration -- a valid point -- but most of that was not EU immigration but immigrants from Pakistan etc. - and that was the UK's own creation, not the EU's
England had a problem with loss of jobs and blamed it on the Polish plumber, but these were caused by the British government's own policies that destroyed those industries in favor of big banking
Finally the false belief that the European commission makes decisions was also a factor -- no one seems to have told them that Juncker for all his bluster is a civil servant like Sir Humphrey. The hoop-la about decision making - I ask each person here, like 9lurker, what examples he has of loss of decision making and I get... silence.
So to sum up - the referendum was badly managed and I will state that one factor was also the talking down to people
My opinion is that Brexit is economically and diplomatically bad for the UK based on their industrial set up, their export-import, their educational system and their resource capabilities, BUT, people voted LEAVE and even if it was 50.0009%, they should leave and it should ideally be NO DEAL so that they can fully see the results
The first was that a complex problem was reduced to a false binary – leave or remain. Subsequently the entire country was locked into that binary: everyone must be either a ‘leaver’ or a ‘remainer’. and the possibility of there being a wide range of legitimate intermediate positions was swept aside. (If you reply ‘neither’ when you’re asked if you’re a leaver or remainer, you’re classed as some kind of nutter.)
The second flaw follows from the first. All referendums are necessarily reductive (which is why direct democracy as a system of government never got much beyond Periclean Athens): but when a referendum is about a change to the constitutional status quo, that defect can be mitigated by working out the alternative to the status quo in great detail before it’s put to the vote. Thus, for instance
- the other recent UK-wide referendum, in 2011, on a change in the voting system to a form of proportional representation, you weren’t asked ‘do you want a proportional representation voting system, yes or no’: you were asked whether or not to accept a very specific form of PR which was worked out and published in the enabling Act.
- the referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on the Good Friday Agreement ending the Troubles didn’t ask for a vote on whether or not to introduce an unspecified system of power-sharing government for the province: you were asked to accept or not a meticulously detailed form of devolved government which had been thrashed out in years of negotiation between all the parties.
- countries introducing new constitutions don’t hold a referendum until a constitutional convention etc has done something similar, and the electorate is asked to approve or not the detailed result (and usually require a decisive 2/3 majority).
In all these examples there’s no ambiguity about the result, as there has been from the outset with the Brexit referendum.
More or less everything which has gone wrong with Brexit since can be traced to these original design problems. The errors of the May government have of course made matters worse, but are not the root cause.
Why was it so badly designed? Well, Cameron’s only motive in calling the referendum was to lance a running internal sore in the Conservative Party. Since the result was (he assumed) a foregone conclusion, thinking through the wider consequences didn’t matter.
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