No, they haven’t actually been expelled from the party, but once the whip has been withdrawn you can’t stand for MP, so it’s in effect a deselection. The whip can be returned to them though, and given the amount of stink the rest of the party is making, including from many brexiteers, I think it will be before the election.
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I’m not sure if it’s innacurate reporting, but I thought that they had initially thought they were going to withdraw the whip, but have actually been expelled: https://www.ft.com/content/3aced59a-cf17-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f
I think there was some misinformation floating around, I saw David Gauke tweet this last night:
…so unless something has changed this morning…
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Not so much the press as Corbyn’s own words, actions, and close allies. I was enthusiastic about him in 2016, but not any more, I don’t think he’s fit for the job. I have no beef with most of Momentum’s fundamental political and economic positions.
(I don’t however agree with all those Labour members who believe that Boris Johnson is more fit for the job than Corbyn. That’s just bizarre.)
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Huh. Can’t say that I encountered that type of indentarians, though I won’t argue with your experiences, Mine’s different, the racist types, if at all, would favor some kind of Northern EU or, at best, a core EU based on the EEC sans Italy + Austria + the Nordics.
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The people who want a second referendum seem awfully confident that the results will be different.
Suppose it is, though. Suppose it goes 52-48 remain. Why would that referendum necessarily supersede the first?
Do we then need a tiebreaker referendum?
It’s not a sure thing, unless the choices on offer are: Remain, Leave with No Deal, Leave with Whatever Deal the Tories are Currently Offering. That would effectively split the vote enough for a Remain victory, especially since it’s impossible for the Tories to come up with a workable deal without crossing a bunch of red lines they put in place.
Given the shock and regret expressed by some who voted Leave in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 vote, and all the angst and chaos and exposure of the Leave campaign’s lies, even a two-question referendum would likely end up with a slight Remain majority.
Because it would be promulgated by the government as explicitly doing just that, which would only happen if said government wasn’t led by a hard Brexiteer. The worrying part is that Corbyn, despite his recent backpeddling on the issue, might still end up not supporting a People’s Referendum or try to arrange the questions in such a way that Leave has a better chance.
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The last referendum gave the government a mandate for leaving the EU, nothing else, it was purely advisory, and it was up to the government to decide how it was to go about leaving the EU. The referendum said nothing about what form of brexit was required, whether no deal was ok, whether the withdrawal agreement was what was required, or any other permutation. So the only way to decide those questions was to ask parliament, which is the ultimate authority according to the British constitution. Unfortunately parliament hasn’t been able to answer these questions so we are where we are.
If Britain was a proper modern democracy with a representative voting system, a written constitution, properly devolved regional government, no monarchy, etc. then maybe this could have been sorted out the first time with a simple and well constructed referendum, but it’s not, it’s a weird hodgepodge of cobbled together laws and anachronistic civic structures that are not fit for purpose in the modern world.
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A second referendum would supercede the first just as much as the first referendum had any meaning or authority. If you ask for chocolate ice cream and then just before it’s scooped you say, “actually vanilla” we don’t wonder which one you want, we take the second one. That ought to be a bad analogy but I think Brexit is basically just a flight of whimsy on the level of choosing a doughnut, and the referendum was conducted with all the gravitas of “one lump or two?”
Canada had a crisis with a separatist movement in the province of Quebec when I was young. Looking back on it, I remember how it was all “vote Yes” and “vote No” and no, “Let’s get together and talk about what people want to change and see whether leaving is the best way to accomplish that or whether there is some way to make everyone happy within the existing structure.”
I mean, I hear about Brexit ripping apart families and friends. There’s some deep pain and it’s coalesced into a proxy war over the imperialist fantasies of a few narcissistic posh boys. I think it’s time to call off Brexit and get some outside help to deal with the real issues. Because this no deal Brexit is not going to be the “getting on with it” that Johnson wants it to be. It’s going to basically take the current inability to make a deal and endless discussions and extend them indefinitely into the future. Unless someone thinks that, what, the UK will just not have a trade arrangement with the EU?
Oh, and exile Boris Johnson. For god’s sake.
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I am so strangely reminded of Barrayar right now.
It was a shit plan. It had all the cons of Brexit and remain, with few to no upsides. That’s why no one voted for it. If that’s the best deal they can get, just Remain already.
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It was a non-binding referendum. Even then, it should never have been based on a straight majority vote. It has become obvious that it is an onerous move to make, and should have required some kind of supermajority (60% or maybe even 2/3) to trigger Brexit.
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Oh I agree, but it was also pretty much the only agreement possible given the mandated red-lines from the Tory election manifesto. That left no-deal as the only other option for the Tories after it was rejected, but that wasn’t mandated in their manifesto either (it was only no-deal in the case the government couldn’t reach an agreement, which they did). Really if the Tories are going to be treating this as a confidence issue, anyone who voted against May’s deal should’ve had the whip withdrawn too.
Yeah, or maybe a requirement that it had a majority in each part of the UK. Weirdly there was talk of such options at the time, and it sounded like they could have been accepted by the eurosceptics, but Cameron never really considered them. It might have helped if the opposition had made more noises about it at the time, it’s remarkable how easily the referendum bill passed in the end, it’s maybe easy to say that now given how awful it’s turned out, hindsight being 20/20 and all, but coming from a country which regularly holds legally binding referendums and has an independent body which oversees them and makes sure they’re organised and implemented in a sensible manner really I expected better.
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Yeah, I think everyone who wasn’t full of delusional nationalistic arrogance knew that in advance, though.
It’s sort of like when California makes new emissions standards for cars and those basically become the emissions standards for all cars in the US because car models simply have to meet them. Most of the EU’s rules will apply to the UK whether the UK likes that or not. Brexit doesn’t really change that, it just changes whether the UK has a seat at the table when the rules are being made.
Brexit is going to be painful no matter what. May appeared to see Brexit as a catastrophe and simply felt like it was time to get on with the catastrophe. Like someone said, “Prime Minister, we’re going to have to amputate your leg next week for no reason” and while everyone else was flipping out about unnecessary amputations May started looking into the plans for the anesthetic.
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That reminds me of something.
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Careful with that. He was born in New York City. If naturalized, he would be eligible to run for president.
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There’s some nightmare fuel 
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Well, we are in the ‘the more insane and stupid something is, the chances of it happening go up’ timeline.
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Somehow, somehow, Boris Johnson would be an improvement over the current president.
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