Parliament to May: you offered to rid us of your incompetent, shoddy, so-called leadership by resigning if we passed your deal; now consider how bad your deal is if we’d rather keep you on as PM.
I am a UK citizen but because I live overseas (a virtually guaranteed “stay” vote from all of us) was denied the opportunity to vote in the referendum.
It’s hard to know whether my home or adopted home has a more dysfunctional political system at this point.
That’s funny, I was just thinking it might finally be starting to grow on me. The meme, not mouths growing out of my eye sockets.
I mean, the whole Brexit thing could have been over and done with if they, I dunno, had made the referendum require a 60% majority. Why such massive things are done with simple majorities, I do not understand. 51% of the population can vote to pee on the other 49% for chrissakes.
So refreshing to see a forum discuss The Idiocy without a swathe of “will of the people get over it” trolls. Why is this? Usually they arrive and post first, almost as if they were being paid.
They stopped coming two years ago. Their Lexit scripts weren’t working on us.
Taking executive decisions by referendum is
NOT DEMOCRATIC
– this whole spectacle should be the clearest imaginable demonstration of that – but I cannot deny that the failure of nearly everyone to understand this fact is a sign that democracy has, indeed, failed.
I’m not going to spend hours detailing where I think the blame lies, because I am 40 now and need to take care not to give myself a massive aneurysm. The short version would be “the Conservative Party, and the shitty, shitty voters who keep electing them”.
Leaving without any agreement, accepting the existing withdrawal agreement, or (arguably) revoking article 50 could all be done unilaterally. The other options (Common Market 2.0, Norway Reloaded, EEA 95 Plus! etc.) would obviously be contingent on the response of the EU and other parties involved, but the EU has certainly not rejected any of them (and have signalled openness to some).
The EU has rejected the idea of renegotiating the Withdrawal Agreement, at least barring a radical change of course on the UK end. However, most of those alternative approaches are not to do with the Withdrawal Agreement, but rather the accompanying Political Declaration, which sketches out the basis for (years and years of) negotiations after the formal exit. The UK Parliament has committed to accept or reject both documents as a pair, but as far as the EU is concerned the WA could be accepted without the PD.
While the UK remains a member of the EU, it cannot arrange new trade deals with the EU, Efta, Burkina Faso or anyone else (that’s the whole point of being in the EU). The WA establishes a transition period during which things carry on as now, and it’s during that period that the UK would negotiate a customs union, or a Norway-like arrangement, or whatever. The only people who have serious problems with the WA itself are those who still hope to abort this horseshit altogether, and the clutch of Tory shitheads who feel that its contingency measures for avoiding violence in Ireland (“the backstop”) are tantamount to a flagpole wedgie from Hitler.
While the former group (representing at least half the population) are hyper-traitors who should be muzzled, the latter (representing the inbred 18th-century version of 8chan) are the first and only people Theresa May listens to when making decisions, since they represent her fingernail grip on power The Will Of The People.
Anyway.
If the UK somehow ended up with a valid government, and committed to some less-shitty course of action, it is unlikely that the EU would ultimately stand in the way, whatever bitchy comments might be made. It’s not like the EU has been unable to get over silly referendum setbacks in the past.
Situations where 95% would vote to pee on the other 5% are more common, so I don’t think a threshold is the answer.
If it were left up to The (contextless, unprioritised) Will Of The People, it would still be illegal for me to be gay, and my fellow prisoners could still be hanged. I would very much like to hear Theresa May’s thoughts on that.
I honestly don’t understand the situation anymore; If the parliament thinks she made a proposition that is acceptable, she’ll reward them by resigning and going away. If they find her to be useless and incompetent, she’ll punish them by sticking around?
I think even captain Yossarian would be stumped here. By any amount of logic it should be the other way around, so is it opposite day or what am I missing?
She wants a deal.
There’s only a deal if parliament says okay.
If she steps down, they’ll probably end up with some fully anti-deal PM.
So the only way she sees that they’ll get any deal, is if she handcuffs herself to the steering wheel until they commit.
If they don’t commit, she’s not giving up the car.
She’s essentially holding her own position as a hostage, and her own party can’t meet the barest minimum of the demand.
Isn’t the whole “Dear Leader must defy all petty legalism in order to fulfill their divine mandate as exclusive interpreter of The General Will” shtick a classic among the more ruthless or cynical governancers?
Nearly 6 million are saying it. (@Jim_Campbell)
It will make no difference, but I get some relief from my fury by watching this tick over. It has added a million or so in the last week alone. I want to be watching when it gets to 5,999,999 and then…
I agree. When it happens let it be a total shitshow (and I live here).
But apart from Corbyn being unelectable, if it happens and when it IS a shitshow (inevitable), Labour might win an election and end up taking all the blame for it being a shitshow. I cannot believe I am almost advocating the election of another Tory govt, merely to make sure they absolutely own it and suffer the consequences. But they and their ilk will just blame the EU. “It would have been fine, if only the evil EU had not interfered and made it a shitshow”.
Yet again this is the warring tory psychodrama between different factions with the entire country caught in the middle, if this whole process hasn’t convinced everyone she’s a raging authoritarian through and through then nothing will. The way tory MPs talked about her “duty to the country” and “falling on her sword” after that cabinet meeting made me fucking wretch, we’re in this mess because of her and her appeasement of the extremists in the tory party and she couldn’t even fall on her sword without making a pig’s ear of that as well.
Then you had the shambles of wednesday when finally finally we’d get to find out what MPs do support and they end up voting down everything? Everything! So now they’re talking about more indicative votes based on those which lost by the least margin… at the moment it feels like the country is so weary that they think we’ll accept anything to stop this train sliding into the abyss.
ETA: I had to share this since it reminded me of the thread on bbc political bias but in this case the victorian extremist aka jacob rees-mogg did get quite the grilling on newsnight last night (starts about 5 minutes in)…
Oh yeah. Kinda like how Obama got blamed for the recession that started under bush and trump takes credit for the recovery that started under Obama. Sigh. Seriously fear another recession is around the corner by the way. Probably just in time for whoever replaces trump to get blamed.
It appears that Teresa is the only person ever to fall on their own sword.
And miss.
