Totally! This is what’s so fascinating and terrifying about the situation. There isn’t actually any “conservative” side anymore, because keeping things the way they are is simply impossible. Instead there’s just different factions who all want to radically break normalcy in different ways.
Yeah. Even the affects which keep people locked in this cycle are escalating. What used to be apathy and resentment is spiking into panic and rage. This is scary but also unstable. It can’t go on like this and there’s no going back. Something’s got to give.
We’ve seen some constitutional change creeping in already.
Cabinet ministers abandoning collective responsibility, campaigning against their own policies, and not being punished.
Accepting an advisory referendum as binding.
Ignoring electoral defects in the “now binding” referendum because it was only advisory.
The prime minister ignoring her duty to resign after her premier policy was voted down by the biggest margin in history.
Twice.
Cabinet ministers abandoning collective resposibility, voting against their own policies and not being punished.
The government tabling a motion again after it has been strongly defeated.
Twice.
Ironically, the thing which worried Brexiteers most this week, the chance of Parliament taking control of the agenda from the government, used to be a standard part of the constitution, and it’s only a problem now because the government has a minority in the house. If the government had a majority it would control Parliament and therefore control the agenda anyway. Instead, we have a massively unpopular agenda being forced through by a minority government.
Can I like this a million times please? A perfect summary of the craziness.
The last point is key because it was already presaged several months ago when the Speaker chose an amendment that it was argued was undermining the authority of the Executive to set the agenda despite the fact that a coherent Government wouldn’t need to be worried because it should always be able to defeat such an amendment.
The idea that yesterday was a series of “free votes” was a giveaway. Either they should have been free votes from the very start of the process - which would have made much more sense, and would almost certainly have resulted in a strongly supported compromise rather than the struggle to get anything over the line that we are seeing now* - or they are all whipped. Trying to have it both ways is where the farce really shows. (And yes, I include Labour in this too.)
*in some ways, I think the most appropriate outcome would be for May’s Deal to finally be accepted by a majority of, say, three. Because that would reflect the nonsense that was the Referendum result so perfectly - we change the entire destiny of our country on the basis of no real mandate.
One of the things that was recently highlighted for me in a Samantha Bee summary of Brexit so far was that they invoked Article 50 right away when they really didn’t need to. After the leave vote the first thing should have been broad public consultations to find out a list of what people want and what people don’t want, something there could be actual consensus around. There’s a good argument that you shouldn’t leave the EU on a bare majority with large regions voting the other way. But even if you take the slim majority as a final verdict, they could have moved forward so much better.
0 is the interesting one. My MP is a minister (not a particularly big one…) so collective responsibility means that there’s basically no point in a card-carrying Pirate Party UK constituent lobbying him.
Though I’d also like to see the whip abandoned. Or abandon the notion of constituency. Either an MP works for a specific region, or they work for the party.
A lot of people seem to like the idea of a constituency member representing them, and it does have pros. You can actually write to your own MP and ask him to raise a point, that sort of thing.
In the Japanese Diet they have a hybrid system in which voters live in a constituency and elect a representative, and there are additional members who are elected proportionally.
I’ve often thought this might make a good model for reform of the House of Lords, but there are drawbacks too.
Also the system in the German Bundestag. 298 deputies are elected in first-past-the-post constituencies, the remainder are elected from party lists so the distribution of seats matches the proportion of the vote each party got.
My favourite is probably the system in Baden-Wurttemberg where there are no party lists- instead, the proportionally-distributed seats are given to the best-performing losing candidates from the relevant party.
