EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Not Jeremy’s iirc.

"is this sovereignty?"

butterflyman meme intensifies.

Brexit campaign: let's get back Parliamentary sovereignty!

Bojo: Let's suspend Parliament!

Should be a few high profile resignations coming up?

Sajid Javid

Matt Hancock

MH2

Michael Gove

Amber Rudd

Hohoho

No, no, sovereignity is not for the little people like you and me and our little votes, only the ruling class decides what it is and when it suits :)

Don't try to apply Dutch logic to it, we don't have this bizarre class system England has. Neither does NI, but it has a bizarre form of identity politics see the DUP :(

This is a good editorial, particularly:

But it is not just remainers who are appalled by Mr Johnson’s behaviour. Prorogation is an exercise of royal prerogative that is tolerable in a modern democracy only insofar as it is ceremonial. Its deployment by a prime minister without an electoral mandate of his own, in pursuit of a partisan agenda for which there is no Commons majority, represents a grotesque abuse of the country’s highest political office. Mr Johnson is hijacking powers symbolically vested in the crown and wielding them in aggression against his parliamentary opponents. That he does it in pursuit of a hard Brexit is distressing for pro-Europeans. That he is prepared to do it at all should alarm everyone who values the traditions of British democracy.

(My emphasis.)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/28/the-guardian-view-on-proroguing-parliament-an-affront-to-democracy

Obviously, as with much of all this that's currently going on, everybody is suddenly an expert in prorogation. Like most, I only know about it what I've read in the last couple of weeks, but that convinces me that Johnson is devious and wrong to do it.

Mendacious liars the lot of them...masters of Doublespeak!

Supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies?

^ hahahaha. So true. And masters of Doublespeak might be overstating their competencies somewhat.

That is defaming protoplasmic invertebrate jellies...supine or otherwise!

So I've been playing with the signup data from the Article 50 and the Do not Prorogue petitions.

It's kind of interesting.

Sign ups for the Do Not Prorogue petition already seem to have started to tail off compared to the Article 50 one.

I'll update it later on with more data on my twitter feed for anyone interested.

1 Attachment

https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1167040180882214912?s=19

Needless to say, I agree with the majority here that Johnson's decision to prorogue is wrong and undemocratic, and the fact is that he has quite blatantly lied about his motivations for calling for a new session of Parliament.

That said, I also can't help but feel that Parliament has brought this upon itself. It's not enough for Parliament to say what it doesn't want. It has to offer an alternative that it will, collectively, support and push for. And after 3 years of bickering, and having given itself a number of opportunities to do so, it not only hasn't done so but seems no sign of having reached a conscensus about what should actually be done.

Parliament had the chance to tell the government what it wanted. It blew that chance. Why do we think it stands a better chance of doing so now? Kicking the can down the route for ever and a day is not a viable option, and never has been.

I still blame the govt for that.

The red lines that were introduced meant that no consensus option was available. Parliament is unable to solve an impossible conundrum, the govt has to give some space to move or be reasonable and it did not.

Surely if there is no majority to do something we should do nothing, rather than burn everything down.

Parliament wasn't bound by the red lines though, and never was. It could have proposed any alternative it liked, whether or not that alternative stuck to the government's red lines. Norway plus, Canada plus, EEA, EFTA, CU+SM, 2nd referendum, revoke A50, whatever. All those options were open to Parliament to identify as its preferred option, and they failed to agree on a single one of them.

We've had two round of indicative votes where Parliament has been given the opportunity to find an alternative it can collectively agree upon. In the second round of indicative votes two of the options were Ken Clarke's common market proposal and Nick Boles' Common Market 2.0 proposal (which I think was also in the first round). Neither of those proposals satisfied May's red lines, so it simply isn't right to claim that Parliament was hamstrung by May's red lines. It had a totally free hand to decide what alternative it wanted to propose, and failed to agree on any alternative proposal. Twice.

There was a majority to invoke Article 50 though, a massive one. And everyone knew at the time that the default position was no deal if no withdrawal agreement could be reached. Parliament agreed to invoke A50, knowing there was no withdrawal agreement on the table at that time, and not having agreed (or even started to try and agree) what the withdrawal agreement should contain.

yeah I know. i see how we're fucked. all the previous no-deal avoiding should have been to change the default option to revoke rather than crash out. then we could have had a shot at mays deal, rather than comparing it with the mystical no deal that we've got.

all the previous no-deal avoiding should have been to change the default option to revoke rather than crash out.

The trouble with that is that you're only going to get a majority for that option if the majority want to revoke. May's deal was a dead duck from beginning to end, and everyone knew that except May. So what you'd really voting for in that case is revocation. Which is one of the many options Parliament can't agree upon...

yep, as i said, i think we've fucked it.

I think you're right.

There was a majority to invoke Article 50 though

It was so odd when they did that. It was passed so easily - with relatively little dissent from what I remember. It seemed a fairly seismic statement of intent to me.

The problem is that parliament, like the UK as a whole, is completely divided and each side is getting more entrenched and further apart. Within the remain and leave groups, they are even further subdivided - revokers, 2nd ref, no-deal, May's deal etc and so on.
The time for compromise and consensus was immediately post-ref, pre-red lines. At that point, before the goalposts started shifting, a strong leader would have got everyone together and found an option that could have found majority support. Way too late now.
During the indicative vote process it got very close, but in the end too many MPs voted with the whips rather than conscience and now we're all fucked.
Not sure where things go now even if no-deal can be legislatively blocked.

It was so odd when they did that. It was passed so easily - with relatively little dissent from what I remember. It seemed a fairly seismic statement of intent to me.

As I recall the Tories were never going to vote against it because it was official government policy and the Labour Party was preoccupied by its ongoing mission to turn itself into a People's Front of Judea tribute act and lacked the courage to suggest that it was a stupid idea to invoke Article 50 without having made any preparations for leaving the EU, and so Corbyn decided to put a 3 line whip in favour of the most disastrously ill-considered piece of legislation this country has seen in centuries.

The major parties wanted to be on the wrong side of the newspaper headlines being declared traitors to the country.