Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

If I remember correctly, you weren’t very happy when Parliamentary Sovereignty* was happening...

*In the U.K., we have the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, which holds that Parliament is the highest source of authority to make/amend laws without restriction.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

As has been explained, more than once in this thread, the leavers’ problem with parliament’s behaviour was that it was using its sovereignty to defy the expressed will of the electorate. That is a novel problem in our system because we don’t typically settle issues via referendums, but we did in this case, and that referendum was authorised by Parliament and conducted on the understanding, of both sides, that the outcome would be respected.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

And there we’ll have to agree to disagree - we either have Parliamentary Sovereignty, even if we disagree with how our Sovereign Parliament utilises it, or we don’t...

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

If Nathalie Loiseau reflects EU thinking then we will leave in December with no deal.........

Typical 1 way traffic from the EU that think the smart way to negotiate is to dictate terms.

It also seems the “Level playing field” is also a 1 way direction.

This is just a clip but seek out the whole interview.

https://youtu.be/vLPNB_HBCeM

---------- Post added at 19:09 ---------- Previous post was at 19:04 ----------

That like saying I don’t like how Stalin operates, but he is in charge so ....................

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

The British constitution has never been that binary, or so unyielding, as I’m sure you’re aware. Being unwritten, it is both stable and also flexible. Parliament called its own sovereignty into question by authorising such a referendum.

The constitutional understanding of parliamentary sovereignty has changed before and can change again - I would much rather parliament had not caused it to be challenged in this way, but they did, and now the question of where parliament’s sovereignty ultimately arises from, and how long parliament can go on frustrating the clearly expressed will of the electorate, remains open. It might just make our next constitutional crisis that much harder to resolve.

Re: Brexit Development(s) Discussion
 

Are we talking about Cummings or Johnson here? I'm not sure the latter has a clue, given his public performance when asked about the nitty gritty of Brexit.

---------- Post added at 20:58 ---------- Previous post was at 20:37 ----------

On the contrary, the two main Parliamentary parties did their best to comply with the will of the people. We have seen three years of classic parliamentary democracy in action.

The Tories initially conducted negotiations around May's red lines and then via Johnson, who pragmatically dropped the Irish Sea border red line. Labour promoted a customs union Brexit, consistently voting down anything that could not achieve that without another year of trade negotiations. They sought to confirm that choice with the electorate by having a confirmatory referendum.

Frankly, the difficulty for Parliament was that the binary referendum gave them no clue what the people really wanted. They were handed an insoluble conundrum. In 2016 the Leave campaign had dangled all kinds of Brexit in front of the electorate, from No Deal to being full members of the EEA. Farage famously recommended the Norway solution, but later denied it. The upshot of this was that those who voted for Brexit, voted with different models of Brexit in mind.

Throughout the following three years different political factions on the Leave side were able to promote different versions, but in the end No Deal zealots, on the back of Johnson's political ambitions, have won through. They have a virtual guarantee of No Deal in twelve months time, if they choose it, thus completely ignoring polls showing that most of us don't want No Deal and ignoring the fact that parties that wanted a confirmatory referendum collectively accrued more votes than those who promoted Brexit.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

Look up the word 'sovereignty' and you will see that it is always defined in terms of the state, not in terms of a small or large majority of the electorate.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

You always have to resort to emotional ad hominem personal attacks, rather than debating the point - what does that say about you and your position?

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

[/COLOR][QUOTE=Sephiroth;36024424]First, what is the State if not its people, the majority of which did not intend Parliament to misuse its sovereignty?

Second, what is your actual point? Support for the parliamentary games? Or just catching me out. I respect the latter!






A state is a nation or territory considered as an organised political community under one government. The people are an essential element of a state, but they are not synonymous with it.

Parliamentary sovereignty is a description of to what extent the Parliament of the United Kingdom does have absolute and unlimited power. The European Union Referendum Act 2015, approved on 14th December 2015, made legal provision for a consultative referendum to be held in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar, on whether it should remain a member state of the European Union or leave it. Parliament in so doing did not peel off some of its sovereignty and hand it to the people. This was a consultative referendum, that did not oblige the sitting government or Parliament to take that expressed public opinion through into legislation. Political reality and rash promises by some members of government, made it difficult to ignore public opinion, but Parliamentary sovereignty remained supreme. Parliament could decide whether to carry out the wishes of the 52% or not. Parliament decided to do so, when it voted to trigger Article 50, mostly because those parties who supported Remain were wary of consequences, come the next general election. As it happens, they should not have been afraid because public opinion has been at least 53% in favour of Remain for the last 18 months. If Parliament had held its nerve and voted against the trigger, history could have been so different.

Interestingly, if the referendum had been binding, and parliamentary sovereignty had been put out on loan to the people sic, the Electoral Commission has already announced that it would have had the power to nullify the result because of the industrial levels of electoral fraud by the leave campaign. As it is, it could only heavily fine the culprits. But, that is another story.

As for the conduct of Parliament, I stand by my view that the shadow government did not try to thwart the referendum result. Corbyn was adamant that we should try to leave with a customs union arrangement. Internal politics and the threat that Remainers might cease to support Labour, forced him to concede a confirmatory and binding referendum. This backfired, because Leave supporter's views had hardened in the direction of a No Deal Brexit. They wanted Brexit done, even though a Labour government on 13th December 2019 would have given business the certainty it needed to trade with the EU as before, i.e. frictionless trade, zero tariffs and JIT components and food stuffs.

The conduct of Parliament during this time was not a pretty sight, but it was parliamentary democracy as we have become accustomed to. Unfortunately, with the current model of political parties competing for power, policies and high principle often get brushed aside. Tory Remainers and Labour Leavers often voted against their conscience to tow the party line. Power became more important than principle. We can probably both agree that that is disgusting.

Ironically, we have just left a parliament, with its jurisdiction now 20 miles away from our coast, that has no party system and which more often than not votes purely on the merits of legislation. Now that is what parliamentary democracy should be like. Also ironic, is the fact that until the Tories came to power in 2010, the UK had voted for legislation that gained approval, 95% of the time. We made the EU what it is.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a9324086.html
Now there's a surprise ! Appears we're an irrelevance after all.. We've been played big time by both Trump and Putin. Welcome to the Third World, UK.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

I think the debate is around the tension between delegated democracy ie Parliament and the Lords and direct democracy ie the referendum. The latter is an integral part of democracies like Switzerland but the UK does not have a long tradition in this area.

Re: [Updated] The UK’s future relationship with the EU
 

Which, no doubt, is why we made such a mess of it. The Austrians, who are also referendum experts, warned us against a binary referendum. They told us that this would lead the leave side attempting to be all things to all people. dangling less radical forms of Brexit in front of the voter. By golly we certainly saw that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kgAPwqhoHo

The referendum was a travesty of democracy for the reason I gave above, but also for the way the Leave campaign deployed untruths to catch the wavering voter. The £350 million per week lie was one of many. Cummings has acknowledged that the lie on a bus won the referendum. Even today, 30% of Leavers believe the lie is true. The way the Remain campaign deployed expert analysis of the full range of possible outcomes of the full range of possible Brexit styles cannot be compared with the Leave campaign's distortion of reality appealing to our natural xenophobia with its declaration that we were being ruled by a bunch of foreigners in Brussels. Remain campaigners didn't deliver a dangerous appeal to racists and Islamaphobes. Farage was happy to tell us that our membership of the EU would lead to 70 million Turks and male Muslim refugees coming over here, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and raping our women and girls. Farage told us how Norway's rape incidents were far higher than ours and blamed Norway's acceptance of large numbers of refugees for it. He completely ignored the fact that Norway was a much broader definition of rape, as Assange learned to his cost.

Here we see Farage's photoshopped image of refugees, which wasn't even taken in the place he said it was. https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...mgZr4VoXzHxmjM

Democracy only works if the people have all the facts in front of them. We failed to provide them that. The way the referendum was conceived and deployed failed to deliver a democratic process up to the day of the binary referendum vote, leaving Parliament an angrily divided nation and no clue as to what kind of Brexit voters wanted. The following three years reflected that impossible conundrum. Parliamentary democracy didn't fail. Direct democracy failed.


NB delegated democracy? Representative democracy surely.