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Originally Posted by papa smurf
If only she was trying to do that,in reality she was trying to stop brexit out of her own self interest.
Any hoo all the remainers treachery/ back stabbing /lies and scheming got them no where and democracy won the day albeit 3.5 years late.
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Gina Miller has a long history, prior to the referendum, of tackling misuse of power or misuse of law. You need to research this. All cases she raised were attempts to ensure the law was clarified and/or complied with.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
I’m quite certain that the sovereignty discussion was of a leaver/Remainer flavour. Both sides correct and neither accepting the other’s total view on what sovereignty entails.
You have just rekindled the representative vs direct democracy debate, which touches sovereignty particularly when parliamentary sovereignty pokes two fingers up to direct democracy.
I would have thought that Brexit has introduced a tradition that the people are worth consulting and that ruling elites should be so guided.
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That is a terrible thing to say. Your preceding paragraphs sought to justify that binary referenda are a folly. No they are not - avoiding them would be a patent display of government dodging an issue that needs to be put to the people.
‘Parliamentary democracy’ never occurred back then; only ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ happened. If you can’t see that then I’m worried.
As to buses and lies, both sides exaggerated their claims. Well after all that was exposed, the GE settled matters; the people had not been deceived.
---------- Post added at 10:00 ---------- Previous post was at 09:56 ----------
..... and btw, I am a Gina Miller fan. Everyone has the right to challenge government power in the courts.
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Last first. You cannot equate the industrial levels of fraud and lies of the Leave campaign with Cameron's and Osbourn's inept and overblown handling of the factual expert analyses. They treated the electorate like idiots, but compared with the deceit of Leave they were amateurish. It is also noteworthy that the Eurosceptic press cherry-picked the most extreme predictions of broad-spectrum expert analyses of the full range of Brexit outcomes, turned them into headlines and called it Project Fear.
If you really want Parliamentary democracy then you will have to argue for doing away with the party system, which is a whole other debate. Meanwhile both houses of Parliament did their best to democratically seek a solution to the hopeless puzzle the referendum left them. Because of the flaw of having a party system the whole process became as much about tribalism and political power as it was about making the best of the most fundamental change our country has had to deal with since WW2.
You insist that our representatives in The Commons thrust two fingers in the face of the electorate. I have explained above why, over all, they did not. True the SNP, representing a nation that voted to Remain and the LibDems, sought to prevent Brexit, as did a minority of Tories and Labour MPs. However, both main parties had their own serious proposals for Brexit. Indeed Corbyn attracted the hostility and mistrust of Remainers for pushing his customs union Brexit.
Not all binary referendums are inappropriate. A referendum on fox hunting or capital punishment would need to be binary. However, to make binary and complex referendums work, organisers must ensure that proper information is made available and that fake information is minimised. That certainly didn't happen in our referendum.
To make it worse, a binary referendum, as we were warned would, in this case, create more problems than it solved. Our referendum result told Parliament that 48% of the electorate that voted wanted to Remain (clear enough) and that 52% wanted to Leave the EU, but not in which manner. As I explained above, even now, Parliament hasn't decided how we leave the EU. We have approved a political declaration and have formally left, but have no clue what our trading relationship will be. More uncertainty for commerce!!
To avoid the last three years of uncertainty we should have had a referendum with more than one choice of how to leave the EU, ranging from, for example, EEA, Norway-style, a customs union Brexit, Canada ++ and No Deal. All the options would have the outcome of us being free of all the EU treaties. To avoid splitting the Leave vote there would have had to have been two ballot papers. Ballot 1, giving a clear choice between Leave and Remain and Ballot 2, using a system of one perhaps two transferable votes with second and third choices of Brexit styles coming into play in the case of no clear winner. The outcome, would have been a majority for Leave or Remain from Ballot 1 and a majority for a particular kind of Brexit from Ballot 2. The Leave campaign would not have been able to tempt waverers with a soft Brexit when they were clearly entrapping people to get a hard Brexit outcome. Instead the referendum campaign could have been an informed debate about the merits of one kind of Brexit or another and the comparative merits of Remain. Farage and others would have been forced to come clean about their intention to have a No Deal Brexit and would probably have had to reveal that the real motive for pushing for a referendum in the first place was to avoid the new EU rules on off-shore tax avoidance which finally came into EU practice on 31st January 2020. Phew! That was close!
Yes, the GE has settled matters by allowing one point of view to prevail, but it has not settled the debate. Mostly due to Remain disarray, the Remain vote was split and the Brexit vote was focused on getting Johnson elected to 'get Brexit done, however, parties supporting a confirmatory referendum,collectively got more votes than the Tories, Brexit Ltd and UKIP got collectively. This closely reflected the poll of polls finding that a sustained majority of between 54% and 53% of voters wanted to Remain over a period of the last eighteen months.