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Comment by Maxatar | Hacker News Reader

Yes, of course Parliament will need to vote on this, but the Prime Minister of the UK has approved it and unlike in the US., in the UK votes are predominantly along party lines so it will pass.

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> Yes, of course Parliament will need to vote on this

Not the case. The executive makes treaties. Parliament can scrutinise them but has no general ratification or veto role. See https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... .

The Parliament being sovereign, it can pass an act about anything. It could certainly pass an act forbidding the government from ceding territory to a foreign power. However, since the current government holds a majority in parliament, in practice it won't happen.

Parliament can pass basically any laws it likes, so it could certainly do that. But that would never happen unless there was a total breakdown of MP party discipline. Hard to see that happening outside of a brexit-type constitutional impasse.

My point was that there is no constitutional requirement for parliament to ratify treaties.

It has a veto role in the text you cite (I mean, its described as an infinitely renewable 21-day delay, but that's functionally a veto, especially since the government is subordinate to and can be dismissed by Parliament during the delay, and replaced by a more cooperative government; treating the UK as if it had coequal executive, legislative, and judicial branches like the US is an error; in the UK, Parliament is supreme and the executive and judicial powers are subordinate to and contingent on its support. The government’s power usually isn’t opposed by Parliament not because the government is equal or more powerful, or has true independent powers that the Parliament can't check, but the reverse—“the government” is established from the leadership of the Parliamentary majority, and they are absolutely dependent on continued support from Parliament, so they don't, outside of the most exceptional cases, do anything that doesn't have at least tacit support of the majority of Parliament in the first place, so there is nothing to have conflict overm)

My point was that there is no constitutional requirement for parliament to ratify treaties.

Yes, it can delay a treaty. It could even pass legislation preventing a treaty from having legal effect. But that would require a extraordinary breakdown in parliamentary party discipline.

Can I visit the world you're in, where votes in US Congress aren't predominantly along party lines?

Yeah, the real difference is that in the US, there is a separate election for president. In the UK, as in many other countries, the party that wins parliament gets to form the government (and determine the prime minister or whatever the title of the de facto head of the executive is). In some countries this is complicated by multiparty systems where coalitions are required, but the general idea of aligning the legislative and executive branches in this way is fairly common.

The US system is far more dysfunctional — we have the Senate, which ensures that there isn’t an opportunity to conduct a vote along any line!

The real lever of power in congress is the parliamentary process in the Senate.

I’m not so sure. A system in which a party that wins only 34% of the vote is given a near supermajority in the legislature and control of the executive seems pretty dysfunctional to me.

In the US Senate, 80% of the votes represent 46% of the population.

Wyoming has more sheep than people, but they are represented on the same basis as California, Florida, etc.

I think right now that's not as much of an issue as the 80/46 numbers suggest. If, say, the Democrats had 80/100 votes just from representing that 46% of the population, that would be bad. But that's not how the two parties distribute right now. Big states can be Democrat (California, New York) or Republican (Texas, Florida). Small states can be Democrat (Vermont, Delaware) or Republican (the Dakotas).

The Republicans do end up with a small (up to 5%) advantage in the Senate but that's it. Nothing remotely close to the Labour party getting a near supermajority in the Commons from 34% of the vote. It's simply much much worse in practice than the situation in the United States.

And it can be approved with a bare majority?

Bare majority, and with our whipping system and current parliament (massive one party domination) it will go through with ease. It has to go through the House of Lords too, and the current government don’t have a real majority there but they’re extremely reticent to oppose the democratically elected house so it’ll likely sail through there too.

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