This puts Labour in a very difficult position. The bill will, of course, carry. But this will expose the wide gulf between the Labour leadership and its traditional white working class base (who were overwhelmingly leave) as it tries to straddle two stools and fails.
I expect the Prime Minister is quietly allowing herself a wry smile as she realises what a powerful weapon to beat the opposition with she has been handed by the court.
Be under no illusions, although the bill will pass, this could do serious damage to the opposition in the process, as Labour MPs decide whether to vote against their hearts and frustrate the democratic will of their constituents or prefer to ensure their career prospects.
Around 70% of Labour MPs are in seats where leave was a majority, but most Labour MPs are urban liberal types who want to remain and will be viewed as traitors by the Twitterati and Guardian set if they side with their constituents.
I'm not sure sure it'll be an overwhelming majority - this is a great opportunity for constituents to write to their MPs to appeal for them to vote in favour of staying in the union.
There was a lot of remorse, particularly when the NHS promises turned out to be lies.
By all means try, but writing to your MP to ask them to put their career on the line by angering Brexit voters & party leadership is a tough sell. My MP (Stephen Hammond) has made it very clear that he'd rather toe the party line despite opposing Brexit.
I don't mean to disparage, I just think letters are a lost cause. Perhaps there are alternative approaches?
This is true for almost every MP in the UK. The whip system heavily discourages voting against the party, regardless of what the constituents would prefer. The best you'll see are MPs 'abstaining' (i.e. not showing up).
I think what they said was "we can't actually commit to this because we're not the government". Given the sum isn't actually massive and NHS spending is likely to increase anyhow it may very well turn out to have happened anyway a year or two after Brexit.
NHS spending has decreased, and it's likely to keep decreasing. That's what sustainability and transformation plans are - cuts to provision of service.
In recent years we've seen a reduction of 1 in 16 acute beds, and 1 in 5 MH beds. This would be ok if we'd seen an increase in funding for community services or for care services, but they've been cut too.
Your are spreading a lie. The money in "real terms" might have increased, (by, as your link say, "equivalent to an average annual increase of just 0.9 per cent") but you've failed to account for increased use -- larger population, older population, iller population.
> Because all of the people making the claim backtracked the day after the result.
Much as remain advocates backtracked on their claims that a vote to leave would trigger the end of the world, economic catastrophe, would require an emergency 'Brexit budget', etc.
Both of the official campaigns were criticized in the run-up to the referendum for presenting claims they knew to be false.
I personally assume logically incoherent promises are broken at the point it is made.
If I promised to "stop sending PJDK $1 million pounds a week and to spend it on the NHS instead" when in fact I wasn't doing that in the first place, how do I keep that promise? How do I break it?
AFAIK the 300M figure or whatever was deliberately misleading, being gross and not net, but not literally false.
Spending that money on the NHS instead would require cutting spending on some of the things that the money we got back from the EU was previously going to. But it wouldn't be logically incoherent, at least not for the reason you suggest.
I've never understood this "gross not net" defence.
"You'd save £100 pounds if you didn't buy those shoes, we could spend it on apples instead".
"Actually they reduced the price, they're only £50".
"Yes, but that's just net, I was talking about the gross figure"
That's a logically incoherent excuse for another logically incoherent statement. If anything it makes it worse to admit you knew the figure was wrong and just used an accounting fiction instead because it was a higher number. There is no way to "instead" spend money on something else if part of that money was never spent in the first place.
And as you yourself mention, a chunk of that money gets spent on stuff in Britain, (the equivalent of getting cashback on the shoe purchase that I could spend on shirts) so even if they were right about this gross stuff, they'd still be misleading even with their weasel-worded "send to" phrase.
Ah, I was not aware of the rebate (I probably had been at one point and had forgotten about it). I was under the impression that £350M was gross in the sense that it was the amount we actually send them, and the net figure was that minus what they send back.
Correct. This is a win/win for May IMHO. Any MP who votes down the deal will be committing political suicide if they are in a leave constituency (which they most likely are outside of London). Brexit will happen no matter.
I posted to HN about Brexit's effects on tech before the vote and most people here said they'd rather not read about politics, then promptly flagged the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All politics is local. All Theresa May's actions since getting the leadership have been on the basis that she will always choose being Prime Minister of a smoking crater over not being Prime Minister of not a smoking crater.
There isn't much theory to it: you have to design systems that align people's personal interests with the interests of the people/entities they're representing. That's usually easier in the business world where structures are malleable. But more often than not, well-intentioned policies are often subverted until they only create a superficial appearance of fairness (i.e. bankers' bonuses, too-big=to-fail).
In politics, there is nothing you can do but hope for the decency and analytic ability of the population, and the press to provide the context for accurately judging daily politics.
Actually all evidence of the campaign suggest that Corbyn and advisors were pretty strongly in favour of Brexit but couldn't be open about it - they pretty much had the 1970s view of the EEC/EU as a "capitalist plot".
[Edit: Absolutely fantastic book - it doesn't take sides at all and is pretty damming about everyone involved with the possible exception of Dominic Cummings (who had a blog article here on HN a few days ago)]
Corbyn was a leading part of Tony Benn's Labour Leadership campaign team.
One of Benn's campaign promises was "out of the EU on day one".
I think that's why he was quiet on the subject during the Brexit campaign and took a lot of flak from the Remain camp for "not doing enough", i.e. he's Brexit ideologically but knows it is political suicide from his liberal backers.
I really wish the "far left" parties were more popular. Unfortunately labour seems to want less focus on class issues and more on silly tax issues and identity politics.
Really wish Corbyn could pull labour through to a proper leftist party.
But doesn't the opposite equally apply to Conservative MPs that represent well-heeled urban constituencies that voted Remain?
I would have thought this represented a golden opportunity for a London-based "euro party" to form on the basis of challenging at the next election all MPs in that general region that vote for the enabling legislation.
It's very easy to say "I don't agree but we must abide by the results of the referendum", it's much harder to say "Sod the referendum, I'm voting for what I think is right for the country".
There are a lot of people who paid their £3 to vote for Corbyn without realising that he was a Leaver (and spectacularly incoherent on policy in general).
A lot of people in this thread seem to think the PM has benefited from this decision, which seems strange given that she was on the other side of the litigation!
It's potentially explosive for the Conservative party as well. Many MPs were for Remain, and most importantly a large part of the traditional business/corporate backers depend on single market access, financial passporting, etc.
(I note in passing that if a Labour government had dropped the pound by 20% and threatened to expel much of the finance industry from the City, the Tory press would be screaming at them and demanding heads.)
No, the problem is that nobody really knows what happens after the button is pressed, only that it might be extremely bad. So nobody wants to press it. Look at Gove and Johnson turning down the opportunity to be PM! Look at how many senior Leave people have simply .. lost interest in the process. Farage has gone off to be a radio host: https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/1147470/n...
And the GBP goes down again.
May's speech at least brought some certainty now what?
If they want to call art 50 before March it will require a rush vote that may be have a different outcome.
And even then the EU might come and say well sorry but the referendum was binding in our view so better call it anyhow.
Plenty of statements made by the Prime Minister and others since the referendum could conceivably be interpreted as Article 50 invocations if the EU wanted to go down that road.
They won't, of course, because an acrimonious Brexit is in nobody's interests.
Well, clearly it's in interest of Rupert Murdoch, since his newspapers keep calling supreme judges "traitors of the people" and spewing nonsense about how UK is going to be some sort of paradise after leaving EU. So there must be a group of ultra-rich people for whom brexit is beneficial in some way.
That would be very stupid on the EU part and extremely unlikely to happen. Article 50 explicitly calls out that the formal intention to leave must be given in accordance to the constitutional rules of the leaving nation. The UK supreme court just clarified those rules.
I found the headline quite misleading: it sounds to me like "Court orders that Parliament give Article 50 the go-ahead", but it's actually "Court says that Article 50 cannot go ahead without Parliament's approval".
What hypocrisy to even consider bypassing the parliament in the first place. Thank god the Surpeme Court still stands up for the Parliamentary supremacy [1]. Have a non-binding referendum and then the government bypassing the parliament altogether would have really put the UK in a constitutional crisis and created lasting damage to the very institutional stability that is behind the success of UK governance.
The failure lay with David Cameron's government, by not putting any legal effect in the bill that authorised the referendum. One paragraph was all it would have taken. 'If the referendum carries, the Prime Minister shall be authorised to invoke Article 50'.
Why didn't he? Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.
> Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.
Was he an idiot? Or did he figure that, if he did lose the referendum, he needed to put as many obstacles between the result and the actual Brexit as he could?
To be fair to him, if you had a world class propaganda operation working on your behalf most of the time, you'd be a bit mentally unprepared for what happens when you go against it as well. Poor boy probably thought he squeaked to (partial) victory twice on his policies or statesmanship or something ridiculous like that.
FYI, the usual argument against that position is that the EU itself has made major changes since we joined and will surely continue to do so, so treating membership as status quo in that way is unwarranted.
It seems likely that ministers were fully aware that they couldn't change the legal framework of the UK, the rights of UK citizens, as well as armfuls of other issues without an act of Parliament. That would suggest this was something of a delaying tactic.
Staying in the EU requires no changes to UK law. Leaving requires the repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act; an Act of Parliament can only be repealed by parliament (unless the referendum was made legally binding, which it was not).
During the debates on what was then the referendum bill, one MP after another, up to and including the level of government ministers, stood up and quite unambiguously supported the right of the people to make the decision. There was little if any hedging at that time. You can read the transcripts in Hansard, and you'll be hard pressed to find any MP who actually said what you just wrote, or anything like it.
In the official government leaflet, sent to all households at considerable expense and amid considerable controversy, the explanation was also quite unambiguous. There was nothing in there about just giving the government a hint either.
The legal difficulty seems to be that the enabling legislation for the referendum was poorly drafted and what was written didn't actually reflect what was being said during the parliamentary debates. Put another way, it's not clear that MPs were actually voting on what they thought they were voting on.
I'm a little surprised that Pepper v Hart didn't seem to come up during the resulting confusion, but given the profound constitutional implications, the lack of explicit provision in the enabling legislation for what should happen after the referendum seems to be the main reason for the Supreme Court's majority decision today.
Right. If you ask a question, you have to take the answer seriously. In a democracy, the voters' vote matters even if the result does not please the government in power.
You can change it before they vote, by telling the voters that this election is a serious matter and their vote matters greatly. In that case the law doesn't force you, but your own statements require you to.
Would you say that the British political parties told the voters that the brexit referendum would decide the nation's future? Or did they say "we'd like to hear your advice and then we'll consider the matter"?
But also, we have established procedures for how things are done and who has the power to do what. We haven't given the government the power to trigger article 50, so it would be undemocratic for them to simply take it.
that's why the first step to authoritharian rule is always dismantling the supreme court or the constitutional court; see e.g. turkey, hungary, poland.
Remainers tried to get a re-vote, or get the vote overturned/ignored, despite the validity of the referedum. Is that not also a 'step to authoritharian rule'?
I don't know why it would be. Putting the question a second time doesn't seem especially authoritarian. Running the country as the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be, rather than direct democracy where referenda have final say doesn't seem authoritarian either.
It does in the context that the original referendum had a lot of official enforcement of the 'right' way to vote, and a second referendum would no doubt be accompanied by even stronger marketing.
Also, there are small, random influences on the referendum - any close election can give the result you want so long as it remains close, and you keep doing it until you win.
> the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be
What about the monarchy it was supposed to be? Representative parliament is supposed to be a compromise of practicality, not preference.
> If Parliament refuses to carry out the people's wishes, would this be a case in which the Queen would be justified in stepping in?
No.
Parliament authorised Britain's EU accession with the 1972 European Communities Act. It then consulted the people in a non-binding referendum. It has every right, Constitutionally, to do as it pleases. Note that the "Crown only dissolves Parliament before a general election under conditions laid out in the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 (dissolution)" (emphasis mine) [1].
I find it interesting that an article about British politics stays on the front page but American politics seems to not exist in the HN universe.
But I am all in favor of dumb ideas people vote on go ahead, that way everyone will see the end result, and then quietly or loudly realize how dumb it really was. Speculation is entertaining but reality is much harder to dismiss.
I think timing is the issue - the bulk of the US contingent of HN users probably haven't arrived yet. Once they do arrive articles like this tend to disappear off the front page quite quickly.
I'm interested, what benefits will a Brexit have in your opinion? I can't see any way that the UK is better off after a Brexit. Especially if you take the looming WTO problems into account: http://www.politico.eu/article/forget-brussels-brexits-tough...
Ok, will prepare that reply over weekend, since it's nuanced: but as replied below, I don't know if it represents most brexiters, I only know the reasons for a few other brexiters.
I'd like to second jagermo with this question, and in all honesty.
if you're uncomfortable about commenting publicly, or if anyone else who can chime in is, feel free to send me an email instead. I mean it!
I really do want to understand the pro-brexit side and I can imagine there being many points of agreement (I'm not fully pro-EU in part on account of generally being suspicious over decentralization). But my bubble is firmly on the anti-brexit side, so I'd love a different-thinking HN user or two to share their views and talk about it.
100 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI expect the Prime Minister is quietly allowing herself a wry smile as she realises what a powerful weapon to beat the opposition with she has been handed by the court.
Be under no illusions, although the bill will pass, this could do serious damage to the opposition in the process, as Labour MPs decide whether to vote against their hearts and frustrate the democratic will of their constituents or prefer to ensure their career prospects.
Around 70% of Labour MPs are in seats where leave was a majority, but most Labour MPs are urban liberal types who want to remain and will be viewed as traitors by the Twitterati and Guardian set if they side with their constituents.
I really don't envy Jeremy Corbyn.
There was a lot of remorse, particularly when the NHS promises turned out to be lies.
Poll after poll has shown people who voted leave are happy. People who voted remain are unhappy.
By all means try, but writing to your MP to ask them to put their career on the line by angering Brexit voters & party leadership is a tough sell. My MP (Stephen Hammond) has made it very clear that he'd rather toe the party line despite opposing Brexit.
I don't mean to disparage, I just think letters are a lost cause. Perhaps there are alternative approaches?
Now you might think it's likely to be broken in a couple of years (and you're probably right) but still.
Not that anyone making the "promise" had any authority to do so.
Because all of the people making the claim backtracked the day after the result.
In recent years we've seen a reduction of 1 in 16 acute beds, and 1 in 5 MH beds. This would be ok if we'd seen an increase in funding for community services or for care services, but they've been cut too.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...
The specific cuts you mention may have happened, but money going in in real terms has increased.
How much is the "right" amount to spend on health care is probably for a different thread.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-cuts-spend...
Much as remain advocates backtracked on their claims that a vote to leave would trigger the end of the world, economic catastrophe, would require an emergency 'Brexit budget', etc.
Both of the official campaigns were criticized in the run-up to the referendum for presenting claims they knew to be false.
It was a blatant lie; very manipulative, and people who knew it was a lie but who said nothing before the vote should be ashamed.
If I promised to "stop sending PJDK $1 million pounds a week and to spend it on the NHS instead" when in fact I wasn't doing that in the first place, how do I keep that promise? How do I break it?
Spending that money on the NHS instead would require cutting spending on some of the things that the money we got back from the EU was previously going to. But it wouldn't be logically incoherent, at least not for the reason you suggest.
"You'd save £100 pounds if you didn't buy those shoes, we could spend it on apples instead".
"Actually they reduced the price, they're only £50".
"Yes, but that's just net, I was talking about the gross figure"
That's a logically incoherent excuse for another logically incoherent statement. If anything it makes it worse to admit you knew the figure was wrong and just used an accounting fiction instead because it was a higher number. There is no way to "instead" spend money on something else if part of that money was never spent in the first place.
And as you yourself mention, a chunk of that money gets spent on stuff in Britain, (the equivalent of getting cashback on the shoe purchase that I could spend on shirts) so even if they were right about this gross stuff, they'd still be misleading even with their weasel-worded "send to" phrase.
https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million...
Residents are also the constituents for MP's.
[0] https://vis4.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/brexit-map-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952724
In politics, there is nothing you can do but hope for the decency and analytic ability of the population, and the press to provide the context for accurately judging daily politics.
See: "All Out War" by Tim Shipman:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01I9AEIPU/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...
[Edit: Absolutely fantastic book - it doesn't take sides at all and is pretty damming about everyone involved with the possible exception of Dominic Cummings (who had a blog article here on HN a few days ago)]
Worth noting that it is laugh out loud funny at some points as well, which I wasn't expecting.
Edit: To think that for a single text about a tweet we'd probably have a different PM....
One of Benn's campaign promises was "out of the EU on day one".
I think that's why he was quiet on the subject during the Brexit campaign and took a lot of flak from the Remain camp for "not doing enough", i.e. he's Brexit ideologically but knows it is political suicide from his liberal backers.
Really wish Corbyn could pull labour through to a proper leftist party.
I would have thought this represented a golden opportunity for a London-based "euro party" to form on the basis of challenging at the next election all MPs in that general region that vote for the enabling legislation.
also known as working class given that just under 90% of the country is white. Do non-white working class vote differently?
There are a lot of people who paid their £3 to vote for Corbyn without realising that he was a Leaver (and spectacularly incoherent on policy in general).
A lot of people in this thread seem to think the PM has benefited from this decision, which seems strange given that she was on the other side of the litigation!
It's potentially explosive for the Conservative party as well. Many MPs were for Remain, and most importantly a large part of the traditional business/corporate backers depend on single market access, financial passporting, etc.
(I note in passing that if a Labour government had dropped the pound by 20% and threatened to expel much of the finance industry from the City, the Tory press would be screaming at them and demanding heads.)
No, the problem is that nobody really knows what happens after the button is pressed, only that it might be extremely bad. So nobody wants to press it. Look at Gove and Johnson turning down the opportunity to be PM! Look at how many senior Leave people have simply .. lost interest in the process. Farage has gone off to be a radio host: https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/1147470/n...
If they want to call art 50 before March it will require a rush vote that may be have a different outcome. And even then the EU might come and say well sorry but the referendum was binding in our view so better call it anyhow.
This can turn into a very Kafkaesque shit show.
They won't, of course, because an acrimonious Brexit is in nobody's interests.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/brexit-guy-h...
I agree that if you're not familiar with the case you could read it the wrong way though.
But it's changed now (thanks, mods!), so shrug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
Why didn't he? Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.
Was he an idiot? Or did he figure that, if he did lose the referendum, he needed to put as many obstacles between the result and the actual Brexit as he could?
After all if companies and even the local allotment association have to get a 2/3 or 75 majority to change the rules surly a referendum should too.
During the debates on what was then the referendum bill, one MP after another, up to and including the level of government ministers, stood up and quite unambiguously supported the right of the people to make the decision. There was little if any hedging at that time. You can read the transcripts in Hansard, and you'll be hard pressed to find any MP who actually said what you just wrote, or anything like it.
In the official government leaflet, sent to all households at considerable expense and amid considerable controversy, the explanation was also quite unambiguous. There was nothing in there about just giving the government a hint either.
The legal difficulty seems to be that the enabling legislation for the referendum was poorly drafted and what was written didn't actually reflect what was being said during the parliamentary debates. Put another way, it's not clear that MPs were actually voting on what they thought they were voting on.
I'm a little surprised that Pepper v Hart didn't seem to come up during the resulting confusion, but given the profound constitutional implications, the lack of explicit provision in the enabling legislation for what should happen after the referendum seems to be the main reason for the Supreme Court's majority decision today.
The problem was that the actual wording of the law that was passed wasn't explicit either way.
Would you say that the British political parties told the voters that the brexit referendum would decide the nation's future? Or did they say "we'd like to hear your advice and then we'll consider the matter"?
Also, there are small, random influences on the referendum - any close election can give the result you want so long as it remains close, and you keep doing it until you win.
> the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be
What about the monarchy it was supposed to be? Representative parliament is supposed to be a compromise of practicality, not preference.
No.
Parliament authorised Britain's EU accession with the 1972 European Communities Act. It then consulted the people in a non-binding referendum. It has every right, Constitutionally, to do as it pleases. Note that the "Crown only dissolves Parliament before a general election under conditions laid out in the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 (dissolution)" (emphasis mine) [1].
[1] https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/relations-with-othe...
But I am all in favor of dumb ideas people vote on go ahead, that way everyone will see the end result, and then quietly or loudly realize how dumb it really was. Speculation is entertaining but reality is much harder to dismiss.
Also, Brexit is not a "dumb idea", if you think so, argue you point (or provide your credentials).
if you're uncomfortable about commenting publicly, or if anyone else who can chime in is, feel free to send me an email instead. I mean it!
I really do want to understand the pro-brexit side and I can imagine there being many points of agreement (I'm not fully pro-EU in part on account of generally being suspicious over decentralization). But my bubble is firmly on the anti-brexit side, so I'd love a different-thinking HN user or two to share their views and talk about it.