fuzzy wrote:I don't know how so many people have convinced themselves of the logic of a 2nd vote
It's easy. You believe the first vote was marred by illegal funding and by lies and misinformation and ignorance. Therefore, only a second vote now that we know what Leave-with-no-deal entails can possibly be valid and representative of the true views of the nation. If we vote Leave again on those terms, there can be no doubt of the result and the nation can move on. Otherwise half (or more likely now over half) of the country will always feel the benefits of EU membership were stolen illegally and duplicitously from them.
Both the main English parties in Parliament voted for the referendum and stood for election supporting the result of the referendum so if we are denied the outcome of our vote we have all been lied to on a massive scale. Why should anyone support democracy again.
Lies were told on both sides, Project Fear anyone?, and the Remain supporting leaflet sent out by the government was illegal as any government electoral publications should be neutral or give the views of both sides. All the crap we hear from Remainers on illegality is just an excuse to disenfranchise the majority who voted.
Parliament has just agreed that no deal is better than a bad deal so we should continue accordingly.
PS_RalphW wrote:Corbyn mat not want a second referendum, but the polls are indicating that if he does not offer one, Labour will lose a huge amount of support from remainer voters at the next election, whenever that is. One analysis described it as a catastrophic policy by Corbyn, because Labour would suffer far worse than Tories in marginal seats.
What the people inside parliament are currently doing is historically alarming. These MPs voted for the holding of the EU referendum. They promised to respect the result of that referendum. After the referendum they voted to trigger Article 50 and start the process of our leaving the EU. And last year, a vast majority of them were returned to the Commons on the basis of manifestos that said we would leave the EU, including the Single Market and the Customs Union. If Labour now backtrack on all of this – by blocking a No Deal Brexit, extending Article 50, or agitation for a second referendum – then they will stand exposed as liars and anti-democrats, as betrayers of the public, of their own party promises, and of the historic responsibility of parliament to embody the will of the people.
But, more importantly, you f***ing jokers who cheer that betrayal along are anti-democrats as well. And yet, you harbor the laughable delusion that there will not be a price paid for this. Or, at least, that it can be politically "managed"
Labour seem to be doing everything they can to get an election. It does seem rather cynical, but you'd expect the Opposition to do that. If they did get an election I doubt they'd be punished in the way you hope, any more than those who lied in the referendum campaign will ever be punished.
The biggest political punishment I've ever witnessed was the Lib Dems being wiped out for coalition with the Tories. I can't see Labour supporters being upset by what Corbyn is doing to the extent that they support anyone else (except maybe a few dribbling to the Lib Dems but there's no sign of that in the polls). In fact I suspect most Labourites would feel it a betrayal if Corbyn didn't respect their party conference vote to go after a GE followed by a second referendum if they couldn't get a customs union etc.
kenneal - lagger wrote:
Parliament has just agreed that no deal is better than a bad deal so we should continue accordingly.
But they haven't yet agreed that No Deal is better than any deal, or that No Deal is the only option left. So the arguments go on for now.
Honestly if you want No Deal, I wouldn't be too worried at this stage. All this stuff about May being secretly still a Remainer at heart... as a remainer I just don't see any evidence for that. She promised Brexit and she's determined to deliver it, and I suspect that it'll be with No Deal if necessary. The only thing that can stop her is parliament taking control of business and instructing her to try to delay or cancel A50. And I can't see an A50 delay if May still wants a hard Brexit.
I hate all this waiting though. May must have been planning the next move for weeks if not months. She surely can't really have expected to get the deal through? Can she?
I’d sanction another referendum if ‘No Deal’ and ‘Remain’ were the options. I don’t remember any talk of a deal in the referendum campaign. I thought Leave meant Leave. Can anyone point to campaign literature or interviews where a deal was ever discussed?
We are being set up for a "people's vote" where the result of the first referendum, is going to be engineered out of existence with no possibility of a repeat performance.
This is a coup d'etat by the political class against the people. Get ready for a developing soft totalitarianism to keep the people in check from now on in.
For a lot of people in this country, nothing is now off the table.
I can't see the tories going for a second referendum (without an election). Too unpopular within the tory party itself.
Personally I think she will finally run out of options on Monday. She can't fix her deal, there's nothing the opposition can do to help her, but if she veers in either direction - towards no deal or towards an even softer brexit or referendum - her cabinet and party will split. GE is the only way out, and I think she'll call it herself.
A general election will not fix anything. The same remain/leave split in each party in parliament will still exist and whomever wins will be in precisely the same position as May is in right now. The only way that is avoided is if both parties campaign on Brino, Which will calm Remain MP's in parliament down, but enrage the people who put them there. At which point, we are likely to see the first UKIP MP's or similar.
The ONLY way out of this is to follow the instructions of the people and LEAVE the EU.
Tom Luongo wrote: There’s no question Theresa “The Gypsum Lady� May has made a mess of Brexit negotiations. She allowed a terrible deal to be negotiated by a staff that never wanted to leave the European Union in the first place.
It has been my contention that she did this on purpose, in effect, working for Brussels, the British bureaucracy and aristocracy whose goal is to undermine the will of the people.
With the latest bit of drama it has become clear that both she and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn not only have come to terms with a deal-less Brexit but that their opposition within both parties can now only make things as difficult as possible as we wend our way towards March 29th.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
UK very likely to seek confrontation on the Irish backstop
UK commentators are pretty clear. The no deal Brexit is off the table. German commentators have travelled in the exact opposite direction. The reason is that they tend to take codified law, like Art. 50, literally while the Brits treat it as an essay contest challenge.
We believe that the risk of a no-deal Brexit remains elevated. Theoretically, there may be a majority for a softer Brexit, either around Labour's customs union or a Norway model. The two are not the same. The customs union precludes trade deals, but allows an independent immigration policy. Norway allows some limited trade deals, but requires freedom of movement, tempered only by an emergency break. The trouble is that both, and especially the customs union, could end up splitting the Tory party. We see no way that May could end up supporting a second referendum or a customs union. A large Brexit party would emerge immediately taking a majority of Tory voters and MPs with them.
After yesterday's confidence vote, May invited Jeremy Corbyn for talks, but he declined with the argument that she must first take no-deal off the table. The very notion of "opposing no-deal" is a metric of the sophistry in the UK debate, given the legal reality of Art. 50. David Allen Green is spot on with his remark:
"A precondition that the automatic operation of law is off the table before discussing possible alternatives to the automatic operation of law is quite a precondition, if you think about it."
So what should we expect from the process going forward? First, we observe that support for a second referendum is faltering. Only 71 Labour MP's came out in favour of it at a rally yesterday. Owen Jones, the Labour activist and Guardian columnist, writes that a free vote among Labour MPs on this issue would split the party right down the middle. Corbyn is opposed, so is Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary. John McDonnell is on the fence, some like Keir Starmer are in favour. And as David Aaronovitch points out in his Times column, Corbyn is surrounded by four people - all from the hard Left, and all pro-Brexit. They are the Cerberus guarding Corbyn's door.
We don't think that May would go for a customs union. She is more open to the Norway Plus option, precisely because it is mostly aspirational. On closer inspection, it is less attractive than her own deal, but there is probably no harm in opening up the political declaration to allow it as an alternative outcome if parliament so wishes.
Her initial direction of travel, however, is going to be a different one. May and her team will first try to win the 118 Tory MPs who voted against her deal, plus the DUP. In order to do, she will need to get a material concession on the backstop. She will go to Brussels to confront the EU with a clear choice: time limit with a legal force, or no deal.
There is another option we considered yesterday, and for which there seems to be some corroborating evidence. If there is no agreement by the end of March, and a no-deal Brexit beckons, could the EU agree to a long-extension - until the end of 2020 - and fold the transitional period into this framework? Informal trade talks would happen, the withdrawal agreement would be kept, minus the parts on the transition. The Ireland question would be dealt in the trade agreement. There are many reasons to think that the EU will not, and should not, go down this road. But we noted a story from Bruno Waterfield in the Times who said that EU officials were examining the legal aspects of a long delay. One other reason that speaks against it are the European elections. The UK would probably have to take part, and dispatch its MEPs to Brussels and Strasbourg, and strengthen the populists.
A more realistic scenario is that May will simply run down the clock, and confront MPs with the choice we always expected to come at the very end of the process - deal versus no-deal. No third options. Anand Menon seems to think so too. He writes that if the UK were to leave with a deal, then sure this withdrawal agreement will be part of that deal. He does not believe that the EU will water down the backstop. We are less sure on this specific point than he is because the EU has more scope to provide legal guarantees than it has done so far. But we agree with his conclusion that British MPs are only now beginning to grapple with the complex issues and the choices that confront them. The vote has no doubt damaged the deal, but it is too early to say that it is dead.
And finally, we would like to draw our readers' attention to a wonderful analysis by Daniel Finkelstein in the Times. He noted that both camps, but especially the Brexiters, have succumbed to a socio-psychological phenomenon known as "group polarisation". He points to a study on opponents to President Charles de Gaulle in the late 1960s, who started out as moderate critics but ended up radicalising each other through mutual reinforcement. We think this explains the radicalisation in the UK debate quite well, on both sides. Both Leavers and Remainers are taking irrational risks. A no-deal Brexit would not only constitute the ultimate defeat of Remain but would probably make a later campaign for re-entry much more difficult than May's compromise Brexit. And as we argued, the Brexiteers have irrational fears about being trapped in the Irish backstop forever so much so that they are incapable to see beyond it. This group polarisation has been going on for a long time, which is why we cannot be certain that even an eleventh hour compromise stands a chance of success.
Peace always has been and always will be an intermittent flash of light in a dark history of warfare, violence, and destruction
One of the clearly stated aims of BREXIT was to 'Bring back control and to get away from all those unelected EU Bureaucrats.......'
So, it's a bit rich for Brexit supporters to complain, now that our elected MPs are expressing their opinions and trying to exert their control....
Or is it only welcome when they like their opinions ??
Remember, all these MPs have all been democratically elected.
Many with a majority more than 52-48 - total votes; 32,204,124
Only slightly less than the votes in the Brexit referendum - 33,551,983
That's the beauty of our Electoral System...
