Quote:
Originally Posted by denphone
That might well be the case as it might be all bluff.
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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 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
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.
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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.