Parliament must vote on whether government can start Brexit process | Hacker News Reader

Parliament must vote on whether government can start Brexit process

bbc.com

88 pointsdavnicwil94 comments

This puts Labour in a very difficult position. The bill will, of course, carry. But this will expose the wide gulf between the Labour leadership and its traditional white working class base (who were overwhelmingly leave) as it tries to straddle two stools and fails.

I expect the Prime Minister is quietly allowing herself a wry smile as she realises what a powerful weapon to beat the opposition with she has been handed by the court.

Be under no illusions, although the bill will pass, this could do serious damage to the opposition in the process, as Labour MPs decide whether to vote against their hearts and frustrate the democratic will of their constituents or prefer to ensure their career prospects.

Around 70% of Labour MPs are in seats where leave was a majority, but most Labour MPs are urban liberal types who want to remain and will be viewed as traitors by the Twitterati and Guardian set if they side with their constituents.

I really don't envy Jeremy Corbyn.

Actually all evidence of the campaign suggest that Corbyn and advisors were pretty strongly in favour of Brexit but couldn't be open about it - they pretty much had the 1970s view of the EEC/EU as a "capitalist plot".

See: "All Out War" by Tim Shipman:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01I9AEIPU/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

[Edit: Absolutely fantastic book - it doesn't take sides at all and is pretty damming about everyone involved with the possible exception of Dominic Cummings (who had a blog article here on HN a few days ago)]

Corbyn was a leading part of Tony Benn's Labour Leadership campaign team.

One of Benn's campaign promises was "out of the EU on day one".

I think that's why he was quiet on the subject during the Brexit campaign and took a lot of flak from the Remain camp for "not doing enough", i.e. he's Brexit ideologically but knows it is political suicide from his liberal backers.

I've heard lots of good things about this book. Thanks!

I've just about finished the Audible version - which is excellent as the narrator manages a subtle impersonation of the various voices.

Worth noting that it is laugh out loud funny at some points as well, which I wasn't expecting.

Edit: To think that for a single text about a tweet we'd probably have a different PM....

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-... : "Nearly two thirds of Labour and SNP voters (63% and 64%), seven in ten Liberal Democrats and three quarters of Greens, voted to remain."

There are a lot of people who paid their £3 to vote for Corbyn without realising that he was a Leaver (and spectacularly incoherent on policy in general).

A lot of people in this thread seem to think the PM has benefited from this decision, which seems strange given that she was on the other side of the litigation!

It's potentially explosive for the Conservative party as well. Many MPs were for Remain, and most importantly a large part of the traditional business/corporate backers depend on single market access, financial passporting, etc.

(I note in passing that if a Labour government had dropped the pound by 20% and threatened to expel much of the finance industry from the City, the Tory press would be screaming at them and demanding heads.)

No, the problem is that nobody really knows what happens after the button is pressed, only that it might be extremely bad. So nobody wants to press it. Look at Gove and Johnson turning down the opportunity to be PM! Look at how many senior Leave people have simply .. lost interest in the process. Farage has gone off to be a radio host: https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/1147470/n...

Let's be honest, Labour stopped being a proper opposition a good while ago.

It genuinely saddens me that a strategic decision like brexit was triggered and decided on based on local politics and grievances.

I posted to HN about Brexit's effects on tech before the vote and most people here said they'd rather not read about politics, then promptly flagged the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952724

All politics is local. All Theresa May's actions since getting the leadership have been on the basis that she will always choose being Prime Minister of a smoking crater over not being Prime Minister of not a smoking crater.

This is chilling and explains a lot of problems in politics. Does game theory have any ideas about this?

There isn't much theory to it: you have to design systems that align people's personal interests with the interests of the people/entities they're representing. That's usually easier in the business world where structures are malleable. But more often than not, well-intentioned policies are often subverted until they only create a superficial appearance of fairness (i.e. bankers' bonuses, too-big=to-fail).

In politics, there is nothing you can do but hope for the decency and analytic ability of the population, and the press to provide the context for accurately judging daily politics.

Correct. This is a win/win for May IMHO. Any MP who votes down the deal will be committing political suicide if they are in a leave constituency (which they most likely are outside of London). Brexit will happen no matter.

It wasn't just London that voted remain [0]. I hope MP's will vote based on the indication that their constitutes voiced.

[0] https://vis4.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/brexit-map-...

> white working class

also known as working class given that just under 90% of the country is white. Do non-white working class vote differently?

I'm not sure sure it'll be an overwhelming majority - this is a great opportunity for constituents to write to their MPs to appeal for them to vote in favour of staying in the union.

There was a lot of remorse, particularly when the NHS promises turned out to be lies.

The NHS promise is a funny one to latch onto. We've not left the EU yet so how can the promise be broken?

Now you might think it's likely to be broken in a couple of years (and you're probably right) but still.

Not that anyone making the "promise" had any authority to do so.

> We've not left the EU yet so how can the promise be broken?

Because all of the people making the claim backtracked the day after the result.

> Because all of the people making the claim backtracked the day after the result.

Much as remain advocates backtracked on their claims that a vote to leave would trigger the end of the world, economic catastrophe, would require an emergency 'Brexit budget', etc.

Both of the official campaigns were criticized in the run-up to the referendum for presenting claims they knew to be false.

The NHS money was a simple direct claim printed on the side of a bus and used as a backdrop in photocalls.

It was a blatant lie; very manipulative, and people who knew it was a lie but who said nothing before the vote should be ashamed.

I think what they said was "we can't actually commit to this because we're not the government". Given the sum isn't actually massive and NHS spending is likely to increase anyhow it may very well turn out to have happened anyway a year or two after Brexit.

NHS spending has decreased, and it's likely to keep decreasing. That's what sustainability and transformation plans are - cuts to provision of service.

In recent years we've seen a reduction of 1 in 16 acute beds, and 1 in 5 MH beds. This would be ok if we'd seen an increase in funding for community services or for care services, but they've been cut too.

Sorry but that's just not true.

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...

The specific cuts you mention may have happened, but money going in in real terms has increased.

How much is the "right" amount to spend on health care is probably for a different thread.

Here's an update, now even the government have accepted that they're cutting funding in real terms.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-cuts-spend...

Your are spreading a lie. The money in "real terms" might have increased, (by, as your link say, "equivalent to an average annual increase of just 0.9 per cent") but you've failed to account for increased use -- larger population, older population, iller population.

I personally assume logically incoherent promises are broken at the point it is made.

If I promised to "stop sending PJDK $1 million pounds a week and to spend it on the NHS instead" when in fact I wasn't doing that in the first place, how do I keep that promise? How do I break it?

AFAIK the 300M figure or whatever was deliberately misleading, being gross and not net, but not literally false.

Spending that money on the NHS instead would require cutting spending on some of the things that the money we got back from the EU was previously going to. But it wouldn't be logically incoherent, at least not for the reason you suggest.

I've never understood this "gross not net" defence.

"You'd save £100 pounds if you didn't buy those shoes, we could spend it on apples instead".

"Actually they reduced the price, they're only £50".

"Yes, but that's just net, I was talking about the gross figure"

That's a logically incoherent excuse for another logically incoherent statement. If anything it makes it worse to admit you knew the figure was wrong and just used an accounting fiction instead because it was a higher number. There is no way to "instead" spend money on something else if part of that money was never spent in the first place.

And as you yourself mention, a chunk of that money gets spent on stuff in Britain, (the equivalent of getting cashback on the shoe purchase that I could spend on shirts) so even if they were right about this gross stuff, they'd still be misleading even with their weasel-worded "send to" phrase.

https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million...

Ah, I was not aware of the rebate (I probably had been at one point and had forgotten about it). I was under the impression that £350M was gross in the sense that it was the amount we actually send them, and the net figure was that minus what they send back.

> There was a lot of remorse, particularly when the NHS promises turned out to be lies.

Poll after poll has shown people who voted leave are happy. People who voted remain are unhappy.

Could that possibly be because people are happy when their side 'wins'? And conversely are unhappy when they 'lose'.

Tell that to The Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/10/daily-c...

Why have you linked me to an article which states ~90% of leave voters do not regret their vote?

TBF there's been zero polling evidence for this. This is just wishful thinking.

>... write to their MPs

By all means try, but writing to your MP to ask them to put their career on the line by angering Brexit voters & party leadership is a tough sell. My MP (Stephen Hammond) has made it very clear that he'd rather toe the party line despite opposing Brexit.

I don't mean to disparage, I just think letters are a lost cause. Perhaps there are alternative approaches?

This is true for almost every MP in the UK. The whip system heavily discourages voting against the party, regardless of what the constituents would prefer. The best you'll see are MPs 'abstaining' (i.e. not showing up).

Let's face it Corbyn is probably the worst Labour leader since Michael Foot

I really wish the "far left" parties were more popular. Unfortunately labour seems to want less focus on class issues and more on silly tax issues and identity politics.

Really wish Corbyn could pull labour through to a proper leftist party.

In what way is "class" not identity politics? Is it just identity politics that you identify with?

But doesn't the opposite equally apply to Conservative MPs that represent well-heeled urban constituencies that voted Remain?

I would have thought this represented a golden opportunity for a London-based "euro party" to form on the basis of challenging at the next election all MPs in that general region that vote for the enabling legislation.

It's very easy to say "I don't agree but we must abide by the results of the referendum", it's much harder to say "Sod the referendum, I'm voting for what I think is right for the country".

The house of commons represents many more people than those who have voting rights in the referendum.

Residents are also the constituents for MP's.

Nobody envies Corbyn like he does himself. I thought the guy was a closeted pro-brexiter anyway.

What hypocrisy to even consider bypassing the parliament in the first place. Thank god the Surpeme Court still stands up for the Parliamentary supremacy [1]. Have a non-binding referendum and then the government bypassing the parliament altogether would have really put the UK in a constitutional crisis and created lasting damage to the very institutional stability that is behind the success of UK governance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

The failure lay with David Cameron's government, by not putting any legal effect in the bill that authorised the referendum. One paragraph was all it would have taken. 'If the referendum carries, the Prime Minister shall be authorised to invoke Article 50'.

Why didn't he? Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.

> Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.

Was he an idiot? Or did he figure that, if he did lose the referendum, he needed to put as many obstacles between the result and the actual Brexit as he could?

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained with stupidity"

I don't think it's being attributed to malice in this case.

Or follow parliamentary custom and practice that a 2/3 or 75% majority is required to implement such a major change.

After all if companies and even the local allotment association have to get a 2/3 or 75 majority to change the rules surly a referendum should too.

FYI, the usual argument against that position is that the EU itself has made major changes since we joined and will surely continue to do so, so treating membership as status quo in that way is unwarranted.

Thats not the point ignoring eskine and may is

Where does Erskine May say anything about requiring such a supermajority under the present circumstances?

To be fair to him, if you had a world class propaganda operation working on your behalf most of the time, you'd be a bit mentally unprepared for what happens when you go against it as well. Poor boy probably thought he squeaked to (partial) victory twice on his policies or statesmanship or something ridiculous like that.

It seems likely that ministers were fully aware that they couldn't change the legal framework of the UK, the rights of UK citizens, as well as armfuls of other issues without an act of Parliament. That would suggest this was something of a delaying tactic.

that's why the first step to authoritharian rule is always dismantling the supreme court or the constitutional court; see e.g. turkey, hungary, poland.

Remainers tried to get a re-vote, or get the vote overturned/ignored, despite the validity of the referedum. Is that not also a 'step to authoritharian rule'?

I don't know why it would be. Putting the question a second time doesn't seem especially authoritarian. Running the country as the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be, rather than direct democracy where referenda have final say doesn't seem authoritarian either.

It does in the context that the original referendum had a lot of official enforcement of the 'right' way to vote, and a second referendum would no doubt be accompanied by even stronger marketing.

Also, there are small, random influences on the referendum - any close election can give the result you want so long as it remains close, and you keep doing it until you win.

> the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be

What about the monarchy it was supposed to be? Representative parliament is supposed to be a compromise of practicality, not preference.

Not only a compromise of practicality. Mob rule and dictatorship of the majority are not pretty.

Obviously things are not that black and white. Parliament voted overwhelmingly to hand this decision to the people in the form of a referendum.

They voted to let people have a voice in it, not make the decision.

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

During the debates on what was then the referendum bill, one MP after another, up to and including the level of government ministers, stood up and quite unambiguously supported the right of the people to make the decision. There was little if any hedging at that time. You can read the transcripts in Hansard, and you'll be hard pressed to find any MP who actually said what you just wrote, or anything like it.

In the official government leaflet, sent to all households at considerable expense and amid considerable controversy, the explanation was also quite unambiguous. There was nothing in there about just giving the government a hint either.

The legal difficulty seems to be that the enabling legislation for the referendum was poorly drafted and what was written didn't actually reflect what was being said during the parliamentary debates. Put another way, it's not clear that MPs were actually voting on what they thought they were voting on.

I'm a little surprised that Pepper v Hart didn't seem to come up during the resulting confusion, but given the profound constitutional implications, the lack of explicit provision in the enabling legislation for what should happen after the referendum seems to be the main reason for the Supreme Court's majority decision today.

Unless the result was for staying in the EU, then it would be "the nation has decided".

Staying in the EU requires no changes to UK law. Leaving requires the repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act; an Act of Parliament can only be repealed by parliament (unless the referendum was made legally binding, which it was not).

Yes, the key word here is "non-binding".

Right. If you ask a question, you have to take the answer seriously. In a democracy, the voters' vote matters even if the result does not please the government in power.

It was explicitly a non-binding referendum. You can't change the question after people vote.

You can change it before they vote, by telling the voters that this election is a serious matter and their vote matters greatly. In that case the law doesn't force you, but your own statements require you to.

Would you say that the British political parties told the voters that the brexit referendum would decide the nation's future? Or did they say "we'd like to hear your advice and then we'll consider the matter"?

If it had been explicitly a non-binding referendum, we wouldn't be in this mess.

The problem was that the actual wording of the law that was passed wasn't explicit either way.

But also, we have established procedures for how things are done and who has the power to do what. We haven't given the government the power to trigger article 50, so it would be undemocratic for them to simply take it.

still confused on the whole politics on HN things I guess. This is fine, obama's promises are not. Can someone explain please.

I found the headline quite misleading: it sounds to me like "Court orders that Parliament give Article 50 the go-ahead", but it's actually "Court says that Article 50 cannot go ahead without Parliament's approval".

This is a context thing, in the UK this issue is so much discussed that the meaning is clear.

I agree that if you're not familiar with the case you could read it the wrong way though.

I am in the UK, and I'm sufficiently familiar with the case that I'm willing to stick my neck out and say "no, it was just unclear".

But it's changed now (thanks, mods!), so shrug.

If Parliament refuses to carry out the people's wishes, would this be a case in which the Queen would be justified in stepping in?

> If Parliament refuses to carry out the people's wishes, would this be a case in which the Queen would be justified in stepping in?

No.

Parliament authorised Britain's EU accession with the 1972 European Communities Act. It then consulted the people in a non-binding referendum. It has every right, Constitutionally, to do as it pleases. Note that the "Crown only dissolves Parliament before a general election under conditions laid out in the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 (dissolution)" (emphasis mine) [1].

[1] https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/relations-with-othe...

I find it interesting that an article about British politics stays on the front page but American politics seems to not exist in the HN universe.

But I am all in favor of dumb ideas people vote on go ahead, that way everyone will see the end result, and then quietly or loudly realize how dumb it really was. Speculation is entertaining but reality is much harder to dismiss.

What are you talking about? HN is very US-centric, American politics appear here all the time.

Also, Brexit is not a "dumb idea", if you think so, argue you point (or provide your credentials).

I'm interested, what benefits will a Brexit have in your opinion? I can't see any way that the UK is better off after a Brexit. Especially if you take the looming WTO problems into account: http://www.politico.eu/article/forget-brussels-brexits-tough...

Ok, will prepare that reply over weekend, since it's nuanced: but as replied below, I don't know if it represents most brexiters, I only know the reasons for a few other brexiters.

I'd like to second jagermo with this question, and in all honesty.

if you're uncomfortable about commenting publicly, or if anyone else who can chime in is, feel free to send me an email instead. I mean it!

I really do want to understand the pro-brexit side and I can imagine there being many points of agreement (I'm not fully pro-EU in part on account of generally being suspicious over decentralization). But my bubble is firmly on the anti-brexit side, so I'd love a different-thinking HN user or two to share their views and talk about it.

Understand though - I can only talk of my own opinion, not of Brexiters in general.

Brexit isn't really a "British" issue; it's an issue that will have a huge impact all over Europe.

I think timing is the issue - the bulk of the US contingent of HN users probably haven't arrived yet. Once they do arrive articles like this tend to disappear off the front page quite quickly.

And the GBP goes down again. May's speech at least brought some certainty now what?

If they want to call art 50 before March it will require a rush vote that may be have a different outcome. And even then the EU might come and say well sorry but the referendum was binding in our view so better call it anyhow.

This can turn into a very Kafkaesque shit show.

That would be very stupid on the EU part and extremely unlikely to happen. Article 50 explicitly calls out that the formal intention to leave must be given in accordance to the constitutional rules of the leaving nation. The UK supreme court just clarified those rules.

Well, the pound goes up and down. Surely, rule of law is more important than currency fluctuations.

if currency swings outside of sane levels the rule of law collapses. nothing is forever.

Why would EU say that? The referendum wasn't even binding in the UK, why would EU say that it is for them?

Plenty of statements made by the Prime Minister and others since the referendum could conceivably be interpreted as Article 50 invocations if the EU wanted to go down that road.

They won't, of course, because an acrimonious Brexit is in nobody's interests.

Brexit is in nobody's interests, and yet here we are.

Well, clearly it's in interest of Rupert Murdoch, since his newspapers keep calling supreme judges "traitors of the people" and spewing nonsense about how UK is going to be some sort of paradise after leaving EU. So there must be a group of ultra-rich people for whom brexit is beneficial in some way.

Probably because Murdoch thinks dividing countries from each-other makes them easier to manipulate. He's rather like Putin in that respect.

They're literally saying it will be great for them and terrible for the rest of us. I doubt it'll make a blind bit of difference though.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/brexit-guy-h...

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