UK & EU Agree Post-Brexit Trade Deal

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by 1andrew1

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.

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.




---------- Post added at 09:56 ---------- Previous post was at 09:47 ----------

Originally Posted by roughbeast

<SNIP>

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.

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.

[papa smurf]

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.




---------- Post added at 09:56 ---------- Previous post was at 09:47 ----------



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.

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.

[Sephiroth]

On Gina Miller, everyone has the right to do what she did if she considered the guvmin to be acting unlawfully.

[roughbeast]

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.

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.

---------- Post added at 15:15 ---------- Previous post was at 14:23 ----------

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.




---------- Post added at 09:56 ---------- Previous post was at 09:47 ----------



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.

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.

[Sephiroth]

You have over-analysed the meaning of democracy. The GE proved that people having heard 3+ years of explanation, settled for Brexit.

It never ceases to amuse me how remainers cite polls post-referendum as proof things have changed, when the Leave campaign effectively shut up shop and stopped making the case for Leave in 2016 (and focused instead on lobbying to ensure the results were honoured), while the Remain campaign (or, at least, most of its senior members) continued promulgation of their warnings of dire doom and gloom, imminent catastrophe, failure to get a deal, etc etc etc. The chaos they and their placemen in the Commons (until 2019) concocted quite naturally worried a lot of people. They now brazenly use the fear they have created as evidence they are right. It’s nonsense on stilts.

[roughbeast]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

You have over-analysed the meaning of democracy. The GE proved that people having heard 3+ years of explanation, settled for Brexit.

Filtered through the first past the post constituency system the majority of electorate voted for parties that supported a confirmatory referendum, but still ended up with the minority who still support Brexit, getting their way.

---------- Post added at 20:48 ---------- Previous post was at 20:45 ----------

Originally Posted by Chris

It never ceases to amuse me how remainers cite polls post-referendum as proof things have changed, when the Leave campaign effectively shut up shop and stopped making the case for Leave in 2016 (and focused instead on lobbying to ensure the results were honoured), while the Remain campaign (or, at least, most of its senior members) continued promulgation of their warnings of dire doom and gloom, imminent catastrophe, failure to get a deal, etc etc etc. The chaos they and their placemen in the Commons (until 2019) concocted quite naturally worried a lot of people. They now brazenly use the fear they have created as evidence they are right. It’s nonsense on stilts.

Quoting post-referendum polls was a demonstration that democracy is a dynamic thing, and didn't end on 23rd June 2016.

53% of the population don't want what 47% have gained for us.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by roughbeast

Filtered through the first past the post constituency system the majority of electorate voted for parties that supported a confirmatory referendum, but still ended up with the minority who still support Brexit, getting their way.

---------- Post added at 20:48 ---------- Previous post was at 20:45 ----------


<SNIP>

Why is it that you've extrapolated the vote from the GE (representaive democracy), claiming a majority for Remain parties, but you deprecate the result of the actual Referendum (direct democracy)?

You cannot win this part of the argument.

What we must do is carry on and support the guvmin's efforts in realising the benefits for the UK they they are promising.

[pip08456]

Originally Posted by roughbeast

Filtered through the first past the post constituency system the majority of electorate voted for parties that supported a confirmatory referendum, but still ended up with the minority who still support Brexit, getting their way.

---------- Post added at 20:48 ---------- Previous post was at 20:45 ----------

That is untrue. 51.9% voted for parties that did not support a confirmatory referendum.

You are including the Lib Dem vote who had other ideas.

Every vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to stop Brexit and stay in the European Union.

For over three years Liberal Democrats have led the fight to stop Brexit. We campaigned to stay in the EU in 2016 and we unequivocally believe that the UK is stronger as part of the EU.

The election of a Liberal Democrat majority government on a clear stop Brexit platform will provide a democratic mandate to stop this mess, revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. In other circumstances, we will continue to fight for a people’s vote with the option to stay in the EU, and in that vote we would passionately campaign to keep the UK in the EU.

Originally Posted by roughbeast

Filtered through the first past the post constituency system the majority of electorate voted for parties that supported a confirmatory referendum, but still ended up with the minority who still support Brexit, getting their way.

---------- Post added at 20:48 ---------- Previous post was at 20:45 ----------



Quoting post-referendum polls was a demonstration that democracy is a dynamic thing, and didn't end on 23rd June 2016.

53% of the population don't want what 47% have gained for us.

Nice little sleight of hand, but as I already pointed out, a post-referendum poll does not tell you more than the actual referendum result. Our exit from the EU was gained for us by the votes of 51%, not the opinion of 47% (a figure which, incidentally, excludes don’t knows, and in any case is not the last word on the subject - a Yougov poll on 20 January reported 45% for leave and 40% for remain).

The only fair indicator is the actual votes in the real referendum, conducted after an official, regulated campaign. You and I both know how that turned out and there’s really no point going over it again and again making pointless assertions about its fairness, veracity or permanence. It was what it was, we all understood the outcome was intended to be implemented, and it was. The end.

There was another relevant poll in December, which voted in a government to get the exit done.

[papa smurf]

Originally Posted by Paul

There was another relevant poll in December, which voted in a government to get the exit done.

We have now left the EU so all this % rubbish is irrelevant,while i find it all highly amusing being told we didn't vote to leave when we clearly have gone

[Mr K]

Originally Posted by papa smurf

We have now left the EU so all this % rubbish is irrelevant,while i find it all highly amusing being told we didn't vote to leave when we clearly have gone

We're making a good impression of having stayed, still paying in , still obeying the rules...
31st Jan was just a cosmetic party piece for the easily fooled.

[papa smurf]

Originally Posted by Mr K

We're making a good impression of having stayed, still paying in , still obeying the rules...
31st Jan was just a cosmetic party piece for the easily fooled.

Sorry i don't speak Klingon,and your desperately clinging on

[Sephiroth]

Looks like the fishing question will be a sticking point. Remainers may well bleat that fishing is such a small part of our economy. But fishing waters are completely totemic to the matter of sovereignty.

We left the EU precisely because they are like this - grabbers, protectionists, schemers.