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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but construction in general operated in a far different regulatory environment.

Imagine King Charles today proposing a 990 000 square foot structure in Hyde Park. Get Design. Build structure. How hard could it be?

Today there are more voices. Queen Victoria simply decreed, and it was done. Today building the structure would be fast. Getting permission to build it would take decades (even for the King) and cost a fortune.

Savehydepark.com would be a domain in seconds.

The mulberry harbours were built in a day with scant regard to the views of the locals.

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Victoria didn't decree anything. There was a commission set up by the government a year or two before the Great Exhibition to oversee things and the purchasing of land and funding for construction was subject to parliamentary debate and approval.

Your comment about the Mulberry harbours is quite baffling. Are you seriously suggesting that a modern day military operation on the scale of Overlord would be subject to local consultations?

> Victoria didn't decree anything.

I think there is a tradition in the UK to assign all government actions to be by the crown. As if the crown takes decisions on everything and everyone else just recommends.

… No, insofar as anything like that exists it’s the _crown_, not the person, but no, no-one really thinks of it like that.

> Queen Victoria simply decreed, and it was done

People seem to get incredibly confused about British constitutional history… No she didn’t, don’t be silly, she wasn’t a dictator. About the only European monarch who could got around decreeing stuff left right and center in this period was the Russian tsar; there just weren’t that many absolute monarchs left.

You’re correct that they didn’t have, like, modern planning law, but it was nothing to do with Victoria.

>Opponents of the scheme lobbied strenuously against the use of Hyde Park (and they were strongly supported by The Times). The most outspoken critic was Charles Sibthorp; he denounced the exhibition as "one of the greatest humbugs, frauds and absurdities ever known"

(reaction from 1851, wikipedia)

> The mulberry harbours were built in a day with scant regard to the views of the locals.

One lasted just weeks before it was destroyed in a storm. The other did better, and was used for 10 months.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_harbours

> Savehydepark.com would be a domain in seconds

Right... https://www.savewimbledonpark.org/

We retain the capacity in the UK to do just that.

Parliament sits above the courts as effectively the Supreme Court of the UK, where everybody's interests are notionally represented (the current mis-named 'supreme court' is really just the Court of the United Kingdom). The King, via the Ministers of the Crown, could propose a building as a Bill in Parliament. If Parliament then passes that as an Act, then it will happen and nothing can stop it from happening. Including using the Army to detain and remove protestors if necessary. All it needs is the relevant sections in the Act.

Recovering this power is why Brexit was so important. With it we can build the green infrastructure we need as we built the railways - via dictatorial Acts of Parliament that brook no opposition.

Now all we need are MPs prepared to use that power to save us from oblivion.

Are you unfamiliar with the process known as judicial review?

While the above poster is a little overenthusiastic, there is no judicial review of acts of Parliament. Judicial review seeks to challenge whether a public body reached a decision lawfully, and acts of Parliament are always lawful provided they are passed in the property manner

https://davidallengreen.com/2023/01/courts-and-politics-and-...

>Recovering this power is why Brexit was so important.

Yet public infrastructure in Britain still costs 2-3 times what it costs in continental Europe. It strikes me that blaming the EU was a very convenient excuse.

To some extent that explains the current disarray of the Tory party. Almost since the UK was brought into Europe (by the Tories, mind you!), the British right, and parts of the left, have adopted a position of simply blaming Europe for everything (including entirely imaginary things; see euromyths). After Brexit, this is an increasingly implausible platform, so you see a casting around for new scapegoats (I’m pretty much convinced that’s where the Tories’ newfound obsession with trans people comes from, say), and new fantasies (see Liz Truss’s great economic plan).

That power existed before the referendum too. The leave campaign was full of intentionally vague statements that were emotionally charged but lacked any factual substance.

Our “sovereignty” hasn’t changed. The NHS didn’t get any additional funding. Trade deals have gotten worse not better. The whole thing was just smoke and mirrors.

Literally the only thing the referendum was sincere about, was David Cameron’s desire to consolidate votes and reduce the number of his own MPs leaving for other right-wing parties.

He succeeded at that, but its cost the economy literally billions.

It didn’t before. Any individual could appeal to European law via Judicial Review to overturn an act of parliament where it fell into the EU treaty ambit - particularly if they were European.

Now we’re out of the EU that option no longer exists and we can now pass legislation that cannot be stopped by the courts

> Recovering this power is why Brexit was so important. With it we can build the green infrastructure we need as we built the railways - via dictatorial Acts of Parliament that brook no opposition.

Like, for example, the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act, which passed in 2017 and was pootling through parliament from 2013? i.e. almost entirely before even the Brexit referendum, and definitely before Brexit?

Have you skimmed through the Act?

It was passed, deliberately, with thousands of pages of legalese, riders, caveats, opt-outs, etc…

Very different from a one page Act that would delegate supreme power to some HSR committee with the power to destroy anyone who resists.

Mate, Britain can't lay 80 miles of rail track, brexit or no brexit

Brexit was, and always will be utter folly.

I see it's 2024 and fantasies are still going strong amongst brexiteers.

… I mean, if whoever proposes it never wants to be elected again, then sure. However, the EU in no way stopped the UK from doing that; common sense stops it from doing that. It would simply be politically untenable.

The UK has a severe problem with NIMBYism; not being in Europe wouldn’t just make that magically go away. In practice, the UK leaving the EU will likely hurt infrastructural development; doing so has damaged the British economy, and the UK now simply can’t afford it (big, forward-thinking infra work is about the first thing to get defunded when budgets are tight, generally, and the British budget isn’t just tight, it’s a black hole).

Yet they would get elected again - since if it passed through Parliament it has the support of the majority of representatives and if it was done properly the consultation would have happened ahead of the decision.

Once the decision is made the minorities objecting to it can be cleared out of the way - because they have already had their say in Parliament via their representatives.

Also budgets in the U.K. are never tight and we can always afford anything we have the people to do.

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