Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill
bbc.com
bbc.com
If it had failed, how would the politicians have justified to their electors voting against their express intentions?
Sometimes the electorate requires protection from itself; the idea is not new (below History Stack Exchange answer references James Madison).
"It is arguably the most famous of The Federalist Papers [1]. Madison argues that society is undone by faction"
defined as
"a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.…"
"A faction can be a minority, but also a majority, and the majority can work against the good of the whole by abusing its power. The majority simply cannot be trusted not to oppress the minority, given the opportunity."
Emphasis mine.
The "Tyranny Of The Majority" [2] also comes to mind.
"American founding father Alexander Hamilton writing to Jefferson from the Constitutional Convention argued the same fears regarding the use of pure direct democracy by the majority to elect a demagogue who, rather than work for the benefit of all citizens, set out to either harm those in the minority or work only for those of the upper echelon. The Electoral College mechanism present in the indirect United States presidential election system, and the phenomenon of faithless electors allowed for within it, was, in part, deliberately created as a safety measure not only to prevent such a scenario, but also to prevent the use of democracy to overthrow democracy for an authoritarian, dictatorial or other system of oppressive government.[3] As articulated by Hamilton, one reason the Electoral College was created was so "that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."
Some failure scenarios are clearly hard to prepare for.
http://history.stackexchange.com/a/5568
If your claim is that article 50 is tyrannical then the Treaty of Lisbon itself should be changed to remove article 50. Barring that, I don't think there is legal standing to try and prevent article 50 from being triggered. It was put to a popular vote and the PM is respecting the will of the citizenry.
The public referendum was non-binding, and legally, can be ignored.
> My comment was addressing why politicians might override an electorate
I think in the in the current case a referendum was a fairly standard democratic procedure that everyone agreed on. No one questioned weather or not there should have been a referendum in the first place. Some people are just upset that there side lost.
So again in the current context there is little evidence of a 'tyrannical majority'.
I'm not saying that your points are not valid in the abstract. But in the current discussion of article 50 and Brexit I do not see much evidence that the process or result could credibly called into question.
Again, it was not a legally binding referendum. The government is free to throw the results out.
Politicians must be ready to sacrifice their political career to save the electorate from its own self-destruction. Simply because the people vote on something doesn't mean you give it to them.
That is probably part of the argument that was made to require a parliamentary vote. Which is conceivably a fair judgement.
But on the other hand what is the purpose of having a referendum to leave the EU if it is not intended to be enacted in law? It would be rather nonsensical to hold referendums that have no effect and could be discarded at will.
Nevertheless, as we saw the substantial majority voted to honor the referendum and a fairly small minority did not. That leads me to believe that the overwhelming sentiment is to honor the democratic vote and the will of the people.
The risk of denying the democratic majority is the risk of the 'tyranny of elite minority'. Its hard to decide which is the true injustice in an abstract fashion. Its very much a question of context and specifics.
By the time of the vote, people questioned whether they had enough information, and after various "promises" were withdrawn mere hours after the result was announced, further questioned what the plan was.
We still don't know the plan.
Yes they did. And there arguments were deemed insufficient by the majority of there peers and fellow citizens.
> We still don't know the plan.
Its a fair point. But In order to negotiate 'the plan' which will include various bilateral trade agreements and so on the PM has to have the authority to trigger article 50. And I believe the PM has to indeed trigger article 50 before the government can negotiate such agreements if they wanted to be perfectly legal about things. I seriously doubt that this would have passed if the insiders did not have a fairly material plan. I doubt that its entirely worked out but thats to be expected. And Its certainly not going to be released to the public at this point. That would compleatly undermine there negotiating position.
Politicians should ideally do the right thing or failing that do things that will get them reelected. Roughly 50% of the popular vote supported both the "leave" and stay options and the fraction of the electorate that votes based on "Has my life gotten better or worse since the last election" is much larger than the difference between the two sides so to get reelected MPs should vote as they think will most benefit the country.
1) obviously the UK was in the EU for the past years
2) people voted against this for 2 reasons. One, they're against the EU. Two, they're not happy with how their own lives changed under 1.
3) We should ignore the second argument and go against the will of the people because ... we're smarter and think that argument is wrong ? Because their lives got worse for other reasons, not this policy ?
I disagree. When push comes to shove the government is responsible for outcomes. If your policies can't produce good outcomes for everyone, they don't deserve to exist.
And frankly, the way the EU is being run, I would vote to leave as well. Not because I'm rightist, quite the opposite. Because I'm an actual leftist:
a) the EU is an extreme right government for an electorate that is decidedly NOT extreme-right (tax income, public losses, private profits, too big to fail, DRASTIC action against asset/wealth taxes, ...)
We need a leftist government.
b) the population is right : globalization is definitely one of the factors that made them worse off.
c) the EU's monetary policy is a fantasy. The EU wants to devalue it's currency over time by giving money to the banks and taking it away from governments. This is not what their rhetoric says, but they've been doing it for 15 years now, I find myself unwilling to accept the rhetoric. The EU is built on an economic policy of asset inflation and this is clearly non-negotiable (poor Greeks).
I want out.
d) So far, by staying out of the Euro, the UK has staved off the biggest dangers of the EU monetary policy, but this can't last.
And frankly, I suspect this is at least partially what happened in the US. Trump, the republican candidate, certainly appeared to be to the left, economically, of the democrat candidate at a time when lots of people got systematically worse off. Meanwhile Hillary was proud to show that Wall Street was on her side ... And her opponent Trumpeting mostly economic arguments : jobs, not capital. Production in the US, not globalization. Well, he got elected, she didn't. Must be racism ... right ? Perhaps. I submit that Trump got far more votes from his promise to tax income less and tax imports than is generally believed, especially on this site.
I think that partially the democrats have been hijacked by this immigration, tolerance, ... ideology. It has gone too far. Traditionally, of course, the right is pro-immigration (cheap labor, acceptance of very weak employment conditions, tolerant of outright abuse and exploitation), and the left is anti-immigration, because they're trying to improve the position of the poor in society. Improving that position through scarcity of course works.
This is something people are missing about the "alt-right" movement, it's not particularly right wing economically, it's certainly a different beast from the neo-cons. In Australia our equivalent is probably the one nation party, but they are to the left of our Labor party.
> I think that partially the democrats have been hijacked by this immigration, tolerance, ... ideology. It has gone too far. Traditionally, of course, the right is pro-immigration (cheap labor, acceptance of very weak employment conditions, tolerant of outright abuse and exploitation), and the left is anti-immigration, because they're trying to improve the position of the poor in society. Improving that position through scarcity of course works.
Yes, the left needs to go back to it's base and represent the working class. They've put for too much energy into playing wedge/identity politics and lost the working class to the likes of Trump.
The definition of "alt-right" has bifurcated. Originally, it meant non-GOP establishment (aka, GOPe), which is what I think you mean. The term was adopted by white nationalist groups, and that has been the primary definition used by the media.
Yes, and also his stance on TPP moved many Unions and there members to vote for him. He has already made good on that and scrapped TPP. A move that was applauded by Berny Sanders the Unions and many on the left.
The unions have been fighting TPP for many years and Trump scrapped it on his first week in office.
A simplifying example is that in a field and region that is labour intensive but having a scarcity of labour, labour agitates against immigration and free-trade.
It's a fairly convincing argument, though it references a trade model that is somewhat simplistic.
MPs have a huge advantage in that they have staff and experts willing to answer their questions, that makes a big difference. Direct democracy could work if, for every decision we rounded up everybody and forced them to sit through a day of debate on the issue but not with the way they're currently conducted.
One potential way to counteract this is through collusion by the MPs. If, for instance, all of Parliament were agreed that Article 50 was a terrible idea, but didn't want anyone to lose their seat over it, they could organize their votes such that they can all get out relatively unscathed. The ones from left-wing districts are probably okay either way, and then the conservatives just have to pick the handful that have the safest seats to be the nays that push it over the edge.
Frankly a triumph of correct process being followed, and an example of the real independence and effectiveness of different branches of government in the UK.
Parliament is the people, which is why it is sovereign. In the USA, so much power has been devolved to the executive branch (the President) by the people (Congress) that the President has increasingly become sovereign, and access to legal recourse increasingly difficult. One reason the USA is number 21 on the 2016 Democracy Index, and now in the "Flawed Democracy" category.
The EU courts can declare any bit of UK Parliamentary action 'unconstitutional'.
Within the EU, UK Parliament is not quite 'sovereign' :)
Here it is from the EU [1]
The EU courts and constitution have supremacy over UK Parliament - which is therefore 'not sovereign'.
Technically, you could say that Parliament has to ratify EU laws, which would mean it maintains a degree of sovereignty, but in practice, all softs of rulings made from the EU high courts override UK laws and alter policy.
[1] http://www.europeanlawmonitor.org/eu-legal-principles/eu-law...
Only in areas where the EU has competence, and these are explicitly enumerated in various treaties; by default, the EU has no competence, so it only has powers to legislate where those powers are explicitly agreed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_conferral
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3...
Yes. And that's a pretty long list that touches on nearly every level of governance.
In fact - that list is in some ways more pervasive that the Canadian governments ability to intercede in Provincial affairs.
Fun fact: Canada does not even have 'free trade' within it's provinces as the Federal government doesn't effectively have the ability to regulate it. Yet nobody would claim that 'Ontario' is sovereign.
It would seem you've provided evidence that the EU rules over a very wide area of governmental competences, making it rather difficult to claim that the UK remains sovereign.
This isn't even close to true. It doesn't cover:
- National security
- Healthcare policy and resourcing
- Welfare and pensions policy
- Education policy
...which, not coincidentally, are the highest budgeted functions of the UK government[1].
I should also include criminal justice and fiscal policy (seeing as the UK is non-Eurozone), and that the UK has competence over non-eu migration and asylum; this is politically important but not a large budget item on its own.
There are cooperation and collaboration elements of the above (particularly in the area of common defence), but that's not to say that the policies are EU competencies. For example, freedom-of-movement rules require that pensions must be paid by the country in which they were insured, even if the individual is paid that pension in a different country. However, one country might have a pensionable age of 60 where another is 67.
[1] http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/government_expenditure.htm...
The EU does not maintain operational competence over these areas, just as the Canadian federal government and the US federal government do not maintain competence over most areas either.
But just as in USA/Canada - the EU laws reign supreme, they create regulations, they coordinate policy.
So - not only are EU laws and court rulings override national laws and rulings - the EU does in fact regulate and manage those 'very large budgetary' elements, just as in other federal states, like the US and Canada.
The EU interdicts on Healthcare:
https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/health_en
The EU interdicts on Social Welfare:
http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=750
The EU interdicts on education:
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school_en
The EU has made several rulings with respect to services and access that have overridden national policy.
The EU will determine who can, and who cannot receive services, if services don't meet a minimum 'humanitarian' requirement, etc. etc.
If the UK for exampled tried to privatize it's healthcare system (not suggesting they should) - and make a US-style 'pay for it' type model - the EU would step in a major way.
Same thing for schooling and other services.
I'm sorry but I don't think you can say that since the 'EU does not maintain competence' in these areas, that they don't act like a federal state.
They still 'own' the show at the end of the day.
And to boot: the level of interdiction is only increasing. Within 30 years, many of those systems will be federalized at the EU level - or at least - have enough regulatory elements such that they de-facto run the show.
Markel and others have already called for an EU Army.
Parliament is in fact sovereign, and always has been. EU court decisions apply in the UK exactly to the extent that the UK government permits them to. e.g. When EU courts rule that UK prisoners have to be allowed to vote in UK elections, the government ignores that.
When it ascents to unpopular EU laws, it does so voluntarily, after having been involved in drafting them, something people would be wise to consider when imagining that "returning sovereignty" to the government will magically fix everything.
The ability to succeed from a union doesn't imply 'sovereignty'.
The State of Texas can legally leave the US Federation at any time.
It has been established that the Province of Quebec in Canada could withdraw from the Canadian Confederation.
Scotland and Catalonia could effectively exit their respective federal entities - not by any obvious legal recourse but it surely could happen.
And yet, federal law in each of those regimes applies.
'Following your logic to it's conclusion' - Holyrood, 'L'Assemble National' and the State of Texas are 'sovereign' entities?
Parliament is not sovereign in areas wherein it as agreed to absolve that authority.
It's hard to claim otherwise - there is a EU judiciary that can overrule local laws in more areas that it cannot, certainly the bulk of the important ones.
If governor of texas stops following federal law, then US has federal institutions which will arrest such governor. In that sense, Texas is not soverign, because it HAS to follow US federal law. It doesn't get any choice in that matter.
On the other hand, UK can just say they won't follow a certain EU law, and absolutely nothing will happen. EU won't come to arrest Theresa May, or send troops to occupy the house of commons until they agree to follow EU regulations. It's a voluntary union, with zero threat for not following regulations.
"UK can just say they won't follow a certain EU law, and absolutely nothing will happen"
Absolutely false.
The UK cannot 'pick and chose' what EU laws and regulations it wishes to follow.
If the UK does not wish to follow EU laws, ultimately, it has only one choice - Article 50.
This should be obvious without complex investigation: the UK's leading objection to EU participation was the lack of ability to control the migration of EU citizens across it's borders.
By your interpretation - the UK could have simply ignored the law - and put in controls for EU citizens?
What would have happened?
Would the 'EU police' have come in and 'arrested' the PM? Of course not - but the UK would ultimately be forced out of the Union given it breaks such a 'fundamental principle' of 'freedom of movement'.
The Gov. of Texas decided not to follow a Federal ruling, nobody would be arrested either - the issue would be fought in the political arena - and in the courts. And guess what? The US Federal government would ultimately win - and if Texas did want to 'implement ABC policy' - they'd have to secede.
It takes an exceeding amount of 'mental gymnastics' to not see the EU as a Federal Superstate - one that is gaining power every year as they legally move towards an 'ever closer union'.
'Ever closer union' is not an idea - it's legally part of the treaties, and is de-facto applied, as history quite obviously illustrate to us what direction things have been moving in for 70 years.
The United States was designed as a lose federation of states as well - and they envisioned a president having very limited power - and he did, for about 100 years. And look where we are now ...
It can, and it already does.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/opting_out.html
>>If the UK does not wish to follow EU laws, ultimately, it has only one choice - Article 50.
No, UK can literally just reappeal the act of parliment from 1972, without any referendum, and UK is fully out of EU immediately. Even the creator of the Article 50 said that he never thought anyone would use it.
"“I thought the circumstances in which it would be used, if ever, would be when there was a coup in a member state and the EU suspended that country’s membership,” he explained. “I thought that at that point the dictator in question might be so cross that he’d say ‘right, I’m off’ and it would be good to have a procedure under which he could leave.” He never envisioned that a British government might resort to it."
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/article-50-meant-dictato...
>>the UK's leading objection to EU participation was the lack of ability to control the migration of EU citizens across it's borders
I'd love to see the source on that, unless we consider Daily Mail to be giving out "leading objections". Most of the "leading objections" I hear about is the mythical "let's take back our laws" but when asked "which laws?" no one can name anything. Well, they can, but it's usually something like "EU doesn't allow us to fish in the north sea!" - well, yeah, and after brexit it still won't, because environmental protections are done through international agreements that will remain in force even without EU. Or the fact that UK has to listen to European Court of Human Rights - it still will, because it remains a member of Council of Europe, which again, has nothing to do with EU. Unless,of course, it decides to leave that, but not having to listen to ECHR is something that I would expect of Belarus, not a modern 1st world country.
>>By your interpretation - the UK could have simply ignored the law - and put in controls for EU citizens?
UK already brakes the EU law by requiring students/self-employed EU citizens to have private insurance during their stay in the UK in order to obtain permanent residence rights, despite the fact that it directly contradicts relevant EU regulations on that(namely - no country can require that EU citizen has private health insurance in order to stay in another EU country), it's just that no one has actually taken the Home Office to court over this. I would, but I don't have time or money to do this.
>>It takes an exceeding amount of 'mental gymnastics' to not see the EU as a Federal Superstate - one that is gaining power every year as they legally move towards an 'ever closer union'.
1) I never said that it wasn't.
2) You are saying it as if it's a bad thing. I'd love to have "United States of Europe", with no borders and one federal government. But that is currently not the case, and each country can still rule as they want - obviously that can mean they will be kicked out of the club, but it's the same as marriage - if you cheat on your wife, she will probably want divorce.
Due to acts of Parliament I disagree with morally I've lost hope in the democratic system of this country.
> "Due to acts of Parliament I disagree with morally I've lost hope in the democratic system of this country"
Democracy doesn't mean you get what you want, or that you can do whatever you want. It means accepting the will of the majority. Your right is to have your say at the next election. Why have you lost hope?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/14/secret-papers-roy...
Some, like Ken Clark, have been pro-EU for decades and simply believe Brexit is the wrong thing to do. He opposed the referendum. If you strongly believe something to be a terrible mistake, should you support it just because it's popular?
The UK isn't a direct democracy. We vote for the people who will make decisions on our behalf. I'm glad there are politicians who refuse to follow a marginally popular opinion because they believe it's wrong. That's their job.
I'm a remain supporter, but that doesn't mean I think the EU is perfect. I do think that we're better off in than out though. The sovereignty issue is a red herring because if being in the EU became intolerable, we can leave. I don't believe we're in a situation where the negatives of membership outweigh the positives.
Europe has been peaceful for the longest period in its history because our interests are so closely entangled. That's a good thing. Free movement is a good thing both for me personally and for the economy.
So in general, MPs should vote what they believe, and let their constituencies decide whether to return them for it.
Mostly it actually resembles having a field of candidates where many voters don't much like any of them (with an inevitable "Well you should just run for office yourself then!" retort when this is pointed out), who campaign based on a tiny number of issues that will utterly dominate the voting but that are invariably determined by what is prominent in people's mind during the relatively short electoral period, and who may then proceed to do whatever they like, even to the extent of completely reversing their stated pre-election positions on those major issues for no apparent reason, with at most a possibility of subsequently losing their job as much as five years later. In many cases, even that won't happen.
However, in almost all cases, issues outside the top 2 or 3 in election season don't count for much at all, even those that may significantly affect millions of people over the term of the next parliament and government. Sometimes, issues that come to dominate politics for several years -- such as the Iraq war, or the negotiations to come over what Brexit will look like -- will be mostly or completely unmentioned at election time. By the time the people have any say over those decisions at the next election, the country may already have been committed whatever the consequences or (un)popularity of the decision with the electorate.
If the Brexit referendum campaigns showed us anything, it was that any pretense of elected politicians somehow being better informed or better able to make good decisions than a lot of the voters could make for themselves is laughable. The biggest sources of misinformation during the campaign were almost all senior MPs, and those on both sides repeated half-truth after arbitrary prediction after outright implausibility. The best sources of objective information and considered opinions were mostly non-political experts, and the best arguments I heard for voting one way or the other invariably came from normal people who had used the multi-month campaign window to educate themselves and form their own opinions on the issues.
Of course politicians lie — they do it consciously and strategically. They do not believe their lies (unless they're also insane). When politicians speak, their aim is to persuade people, not to speak the unvarnished truth. Speaking the plain truth often has results that are directly contrary to their persuasive goals — so they lie, obfuscate, and misdirect. That's been the case for politicians of all stripes for all time and probably always will be.
But that doesn't mean the underlying goals aren't sound. Good leaders lie, bad leaders lie. Lying is not in itself proof of incompetence. Brexit is good or bad independent of whether politicians lie about it. If you understand that, you can assess the arguments of politicians, experts, and everyone else in the proper context.
The problem is that most people just choose the side that tells the lies that conform to their existing predjuduces, seek facts that confirm those predjuduces, and reject facts that contradict them — which is exactly what politicians are exploiting when they engage in persuasive speech, and why it's better that the populous at large don't make critical decisions. Telling the truth doesn't help.
That's not quite what I said, but the difference probably doesn't matter.
The principal argument for having a representative democracy rather than a direct one is that normal people cannot realistically be well enough informed on all major issues to make reasonable judgements in their own interests. No-one has enough time to be an expert on everything while still living a normal life and doing a regular job. Instead, normal people delegate decision-making authority to specialist people who do have the time to become better informed and thus have the potential to make better decisions on behalf of everyone else than the normal people could themselves.
Crucially, the normal people are supposed to delegate this power voluntarily, typically by holding elections to find a suitable representative, and this is the ethical basis for some individuals wielding more power than others in society. The point is not for someone to be "in charge" because they are somehow more important or worthy or otherwise better than everyone else. The elected representatives are there to make decisions on behalf of and in the interests of society as a whole, the same way you would consult a specialist lawyer on legal matters or a specialist accountant about your tax affairs.
However, I see little evidence that this is what actually happens in practice. If that's because politicians don't really believe or mean the rubbish they say, I have no sympathy. But in reality, having worked with various government representatives and MPs over the years, I see little evidence that most of them are any more competent or better informed in private than an interested but otherwise average member of the public either. Frequently there may be no suitable representative available to elect, which defeats the entire ethical basis for the system, and even with an apparently suitable candidate at election time, the system is hugely vulnerable to principal-agent conflicts of interest.
So on really big decisions, including the kind of issue where a referendum gets held after a multi-month period of debate that gives ample opportunity for everyone who cares to examine the issues and form their opinions, I see absolutely no ethical basis for making society as a whole defer to a small number of MPs. If people are smart and well-informed enough to choose good MPs in the first place, they're smart and well-informed enough to make a reasonable decision on a specific issue with several months of notice, and having done so, what basis is there for saying any elected representative -- who presumably campaigned on a range of issues and probably got elected with far less support than carries any referendum -- should be empowered to override the will of the people on a specific decision they have made?
My Labour MP supported Remain, and our area voted strongly to remain in the EU, but she has backed the bill, leading to a lot of angry people. It's a reasonably safe Labour seat, but with increasing numbers of young people moving here, I can see her struggling next election.
If you're a US tax resident or citizen then you're used to filling out onerous reporting documents (FBAR and possibly 8938 as well) on foreign assets. Real estate holdings has zero reporting requirements.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/london-prope...
If you don't need a mortgage, then you show up with a cashier's check or briefcase full of cash, sign papers in the name of an LLC or Limited Company and now you have a house in the anonymous shell companies' name and clean money.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted because you are correct: London salaries are pitiful even before you factor in the enormous cost of living there (I lived and worked in London for 4 years but did contracting as the salaries even 10+ years ago were and are a joke comparatively).
It's one reason I and many others work in the US instead.
No idea what Brexit will do to relative incomes. It depends on what happens with the pound, what the visa situation looks like and so on.
This makes you a pretty cheap labour, and if your hate against Romanian people can somehow be turned to motivation, probably a very productive one!
If you are formulating hatespeach against Eastern-Europeans, please be precise!
I made a pretty specific and narrowly tailored statement. Your postulate primarily neglects reality.
I don't know guys, I think you are attempting to censor reality by latching onto something that isn't even considered insensitive.
Disrupting free trade agreements like that disrupts cheaper labor. The same concept inflates the salaries within the United States as well with its limited visas and exiting trade agreements.
I see "standards of living costs are lower in those countries so it is rational to undercut the local workers" you see "he's saying they're beneath him". Are we really at an impasse? How deep in the gutter are your minds
What a disappointment, this country turned out to be.