Can we have a vote of no confidence in the parliamentary process and the version of democracy that we have?
It is a failed system.
You only think that because it’s not currently delivering the policies you favour.
No. I have thought is is a failed system for a long time. A very long time. There is something fundamentally flawed in the process, in the system. The current shitshow is merely some of the worst examples of what this produces.
The fundamental flaw is that people don’t all think or believe the same things. That’s not procedural or systemic, it’s human.
Then again, I am an anarchist at heart.
I favour one man, one vote. Especially if I can be the one man who has the one vote 😁
We should do it the ancient Athenian way and choose government officials by lot.
It couldn't possibly be worse than what we have now. After all, 100% of the general public aren't (I presume) lying, corrupt, ambitious, self-serving incompetents, whereas 100% of the current cabinet give every indication of being all of those things.
Oddly, I was also contemplating discworld earlier. A certain real-life politician reminds me of Mr Slant - the undead lawyer who keeps losing parts of his body.
Which RL Polly Titian? Do tell! (Or at least give us a hint.......)
The late Sir Terry would probably have found the current brouhaha not only entertaining, but conducive to producing another Discworld novel. Discworld is, AIUI, a sort of satirical mirror of our world, so....
Oddly, I was also contemplating discworld earlier. A certain real-life politician reminds me of Mr Slant - the undead lawyer who keeps losing parts of his body.
Mr. Slant manages to keep himself together quite well. It's poor Reg Shoe who keeps falling to bits, I think.
It's certainly true, though, that Terry P. the author would have revelled in this fiasco, though I'm sure that Terry P. the man would have hated it.
Oddly, I was also contemplating discworld earlier. A certain real-life politician reminds me of Mr Slant - the undead lawyer who keeps losing parts of his body.
Mr. Slant manages to keep himself together quite well. It's poor Reg Shoe who keeps falling to bits, I think.
It's certainly true, though, that Terry P. the author would have revelled in this fiasco, though I'm sure that Terry P. the man would have hated it.
rofl. I'm glad I paid a visit here just as you guys were getting into Discworld.
I was going to do a Zoe Lyons joke I heard on the News Quiz, referring to the day Britain is scheduled to leave the EU as B-day.
I was at the pub with my Irish mate yesterday and after two pints and a glass of red we began talking about Brexit and its effect on Ireland. I'm afraid to say he was overcome with national passion and started wishing a version of the Potato Famine on the English. I was very upset with him.
Simon, I'm sorry to say that your Irish friend may get his wish.
The current suggestion is that when Treeza loses next week's vote, and potentially also loses an immediate vote in confidence in the government, she can simply call an election for early April, with us 'safely' out of the EU with no deal, and all the problems dumped on an incoming Labour administration.
I'm fairly sure Srg Colon would think that Brexit was some kind of hot curry* available in darker corners of Ankh Morpork of a Saturday night, probably served by someone with the surname Dibbler. Or Dhblah. Or something similar.
If Br***t were the subject of a Jack Chick tract (as we appear to be into Fantasyland at the moment), maybe the situation would be saved by some kind of deus ex machina moment.....
....suggestions on a postcard, please.
(Or perhaps not, if the Hell Hosts are getting restless)
Fascinating scenes in the House as the Speaker backs ordinary MPs against the Executive. Bercow is obviously having the time of his life as the House tells Treeza that if (when?) her deal fails next week, she has just three sitting days to come back with another proposal which - thanks to a motion passed last December - will be amendable by MPs.
Why are some Tories furious about this? Didn't they want Parliament to 'take back control?'
The govt lost another vote, to force a plan B vote, if May loses her main vote. What caught my eye in the Guardian report was this, "given her reluctance generally to allow MPs a say in this process ..." It's hard to believe I'm reading this correctly, the PM wants to stop MPs having a say? What are we living through?
The govt lost another vote, to force a plan B vote, if May loses her main vote. What caught my eye in the Guardian report was this, "given her reluctance generally to allow MPs a say in this process ..." It's hard to believe I'm reading this correctly, the PM wants to stop MPs having a say? What are we living through?
I think the word you're looking for is 'insanity'.
The govt lost another vote, to force a plan B vote, if May loses her main vote. What caught my eye in the Guardian report was this, "given her reluctance generally to allow MPs a say in this process ..." It's hard to believe I'm reading this correctly, the PM wants to stop MPs having a say? What are we living through?
I think the word you're looking for is 'insanity'.
No - corruption. At the highest level. Combined with incompetence. Combined with arrogance.
Is there anything in life you can touch and not made a complete Horlicks of? Is there any political situation that you can't make worse? Is there any minor unimportant story that you can't somehow attach to the media frontpages for weeks?
You can't properly organise a traffic jam at Dover. Yes, that Dover, the one which had 30 mile tailbacks a few years ago. You can't properly organise a ferry service, focussing unnecessarily on an imaginary service at Ramsgate (where even the most optimistic capacity is far less than 10% of the total daily traffic across the channel) and ignoring the actual, practical realities.
I sincerely hope that if there is a complete debacle in March, as expected, that you are so fired from government that you don't touch the ground until 2020.
I'm sure you are nice to your kids and speak respectfully to old ladies. But, seriously, just stop making bad things worse, can't you?
Ceci n'est pas un gouvernement (this is not a government, in French to mirror the surrealist/dadaist Rene Magritte's ceci n'est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe)). This is a rather poor satire on government, so obviously exaggerated for bitterly comic value that someone needs to cancel the current series as soon as possible and return us to something that, at very least, is a more realistic satire on the concept.
More seriously, the whole experience convinces me more and more that there are seriously terrible things happening, in plain sight and elsewhere, which only the speed at which the scenes in the current shitshow succeed each other prevent us from seeing. This is beer and circuses in its most concentrated, cynical form: playing at goverment used to distract us from a bloodless, corporate, exploitative coup. You can be sure that the doors opened by Mandelson, allowing large corporations into the most intimate parts of government, have never been shut since.
I'll have to do a little research, but there was a story a little while after nice Mr Blair left Downing Street about the access to no. 10 Mandelson arranged to his lord and master. There's another combination (Mandelson/Blair) that makes the skin crawl on recollection.
Grayling, ghastly and incompetent as he is, is only one of a cabal of equally untalented members of the government; who can forget Jeremy Hunt's tenure in charge of Health?
But the real blame goes to Treeza, who has appointed these fuckwits and then kept them all in post regardless of one balls-up after another, presumably because she needs people around her who are even less able and honest than she is. If possible.
Mrs May is due to make some point about 'everybody' accepting the referendum in Wales establishing the Assembly even though the referendum result was very close.
Investigations (aka someone looking in Hansard) show that not only did Tories vote against establishing the Assembly in a HoC debate despite that referendum result, it was official Tory policy to abolish the Assembly all the way until 2005.
It's an amazing thing, fact-checking, isn't it? It show that Tories are total liars.
Are we surprised? When several prominent supporters of leaving the EU had stated during the 2016 campaigning that a narrow result of 52:48 should lead to a further vote as it wouldn't be conclusive? These people are not democrats, they only accept the votes of the people when those results happen to align with their own opinions.
Saying something that you know to be false - because you must know how you previously acted on the issue if you are going to be bringing it up in a speech - is surely the most grubby political act in decades. Just shut up and go away now, Mrs May, you've spent any goodwill anyone had for you yonks ago, and now you are just trying to pass off lies as truth.
I sincerely hope that if there is a complete debacle in March, as expected, that you are so fired from government that you don't touch the ground until 2020.
thing is, he won't need to touch the ground - he'll just parachute into a cushy job for whichever lobbying group/industry that he's been trying to help as a politician, just like the rest of them do.
These people are not democrats, they only accept the votes of the people when those results happen to align with their own opinions.
I find it hard to accept that comment when I strongly suspect that if the referendum vote had been 52-48 in favour of remaining you’d have been backing it to the hilt and saying leavers had been defeated for ever and ever amen, but as it ended up being opposed to your own opinions you’re refusing to accept its validity.
You don’t get to criticise others for only agreeing with democracy when it delivers the result they want when you’re actively doing exactly the same thing.
You have to forgive people for being incredibly stupid enough to vote against not only the interests of the greater good but also their own... before you can hope for them to listen to reason.
But you also have to try and understand all the factors that would drive them to do so to have any chance of getting them to listen at all.
(Also, at this point the "greater good" is in dispute by manifestly not stupid people. I'm a Europhile but I think it would make better sense to adopt May's deal than reject it in the hope of a better deal or no Brexit, because I'm very uncertain that pursuing either of these two options will actually lead to a "greater good", or at least a "not terminally bad").
These people are not democrats, they only accept the votes of the people when those results happen to align with their own opinions.
I find it hard to accept that comment when I strongly suspect that if the referendum vote had been 52-48 in favour of remaining you’d have been backing it to the hilt and saying leavers had been defeated for ever and ever amen, but as it ended up being opposed to your own opinions you’re refusing to accept its validity.
You don’t get to criticise others for only agreeing with democracy when it delivers the result they want when you’re actively doing exactly the same thing.
And you don't get to criticise people based on what you think they would do in different circumstances but haven't actually done.
These people are not democrats, they only accept the votes of the people when those results happen to align with their own opinions.
I find it hard to accept that comment when I strongly suspect that if the referendum vote had been 52-48 in favour of remaining you’d have been backing it to the hilt and saying leavers had been defeated for ever and ever amen, but as it ended up being opposed to your own opinions you’re refusing to accept its validity.
You don’t get to criticise others for only agreeing with democracy when it delivers the result they want when you’re actively doing exactly the same thing.
No actually we can perfectly legitimately criticise the results of a poll as stupid. Voting in the Tories in 2017 was stupid. People affected by Tory policies but who voted for them anyway were foolish. Just because something came out of a democratic act does not make it impervious to criticism.
As to the vote. I doubt we'd have heard the end of it if there had been a narrow win for Remain. Because leaders of Leave said at the time that they'd campaign for a second referendum if they lost narrowly.
Finally, one doesn't need to back the status quo "to the hilt because it is the status quo.
After the referendum about
proportional voting - soon after the LD entered the coalition government - the result was almost instantly forgotten. Not because the majority instinctively support FPTP, but because it is the status quo.
After the referendum about
proportional voting - soon after the LD entered the coalition government - the result was almost instantly forgotten. Not because the majority instinctively support FPTP, but because it is the status quo.
Or because those of us who wanted a change in voting systems accepted that we had lost that one, and we needed to work again to winning the public to a different approach. Something which - oddly enough - the current parliament seems to be doing pretty well.
And that too was a very poor referendum, serving only to satisfy a promise while returning the result Cameron wanted. Some of us have been arguing for a more democratic voting system for a long time, and we will continue to argue and campaign for it.
OTOH, leaving the EU is just a manifestly stupid thing to do. I will continue arguing and campaigning against doing stupid things.
After the referendum about
proportional voting - soon after the LD entered the coalition government - the result was almost instantly forgotten. Not because the majority instinctively support FPTP, but because it is the status quo.
Or because those of us who wanted a change in voting systems accepted that we had lost that one, and we needed to work again to winning the public to a different approach. Something which - oddly enough - the current parliament seems to be doing pretty well.
And that too was a very poor referendum, serving only to satisfy a promise while returning the result Cameron wanted. Some of us have been arguing for a more democratic voting system for a long time, and we will continue to argue and campaign for it.
OTOH, leaving the EU is just a manifestly stupid thing to do. I will continue arguing and campaigning against doing stupid things.
Sometimes, I think, history suggests that political leaders are right to make hard choices, to take the unknown hard way rather than the known comfortable way, to look beyond the immediate and to risk plunging the country into chaos.
But I've seen nothing to suggest that this is one of those times nor those kinds of leaders.
The benefits are so nebulous, the arguments are so stupid, the pain is so obvious and predictable.
Rationally, I think (if I was an MP) I would agree that the draft deal is the best compromise that we are going to get - albeit still worse than the status quo and only delaying the potential onset of chaos - but if there are rabid headbangers in the HoC who would destroy the draft on their own for their warped vision of the future, then fuck it, I'd be doing whatever was available to prevent Brexit from happening at all.
It might yet go to no-deal, but at least I could tell future generations that I'd done absolutely everything to try to stop it.
I am with Eutychus on this, this deal should be agreed, as it's the best we're going to get. We are here now, bungled negotiations by Theresa May and all. Bungled because the red lines meant there was very little manoeuvre by anyone and this arbitrary deadline has painted us further into a corner of her making.
There have been a handful of Labour MPs saying that they feel they have to vote for this deal as their constituency voted 79% to leave and this is the best deal going, and that is a reasonable position to take.
However, I wish the buggers would stop lying. Those pro-Brexiteers who are interviewed saying everything is in place and it's all OK - really? When there are secondments across the civil service to get enough people into the Department for Brexit - partly because Davies and Raab made such a cock up of running that department. And those secondments are getting less voluntary.
It is also arguable as to whether the UK has a democracy anyway. The FPTP system is not true democracy as a significant proportion of the electorate has no vote. The only electors whose vote counts live in the marginals. For those of us living in safe seats, it doesn't make a happorth of difference what we vote. And this is what has led to the farce of this referendum, with votes being cast willy-nilly, as protest, to leave the EU but with no idea what that actually meant.
That referendum should have required a supermajority - 60% or more to change the status quo. And if there is a second referendum that requirement should have been in place. And that's Cameron's disastrous referendum in the first place.
I am with Eutychus on this, this deal should be agreed, as it's the best we're going to get. We are here now, bungled negotiations by Theresa May and all. Bungled because the red lines meant there was very little manoeuvre by anyone and this arbitrary deadline has painted us further into a corner of her making.
There have been a handful of Labour MPs saying that they feel they have to vote for this deal as their constituency voted 79% to leave and this is the best deal going, and that is a reasonable position to take.
However, I wish the buggers would stop lying. Those pro-Brexiteers who are interviewed saying everything is in place and it's all OK - really? When there are secondments across the civil service to get enough people into the Department for Brexit - partly because Davies and Raab made such a cock up of running that department. And those secondments are getting less voluntary.
It is also arguable as to whether the UK has a democracy anyway. The FPTP system is not true democracy as a significant proportion of the electorate has no vote. The only electors whose vote counts live in the marginals. For those of us living in safe seats, it doesn't make a happorth of difference what we vote. And this is what has led to the farce of this referendum, with votes being cast willy-nilly, as protest, to leave the EU but with no idea what that actually meant.
That referendum should have required a supermajority - 60% or more to change the status quo. And if there is a second referendum that requirement should have been in place. And that's Cameron's disastrous referendum in the first place.
I think the deal is actually pretty good. Being in the backstop seems to me to be a good position for NI - and given that neither side could unilaterally withdraw, the UK could/should continue in that position as long as possible.
But the brouhaha about British sovereignty and willy-waving by Irish unionists (& mates) means that this has completely been lost behind the smokescreen of incandescent hatred of the RoI.
These people are not democrats, they only accept the votes of the people when those results happen to align with their own opinions.
I find it hard to accept that comment when I strongly suspect that if the referendum vote had been 52-48 in favour of remaining you’d have been backing it to the hilt and saying leavers had been defeated for ever and ever amen, but as it ended up being opposed to your own opinions you’re refusing to accept its validity.
You don’t get to criticise others for only agreeing with democracy when it delivers the result they want when you’re actively doing exactly the same thing.
Conversely, September 2014 gave a referendum result different to the way I voted. At the time I organised a party to celebrate the functioning of democracy. Those of us who support Scottish Independence recognised that we had put in the work to define what we would like to see as our future status and relationship with other nations running to 670 pages (which started "if you vote 'yes' you will be voting for ...", with the support of Parliament we'd put that to the people of Scotland and got a clear answer. If you go back to the day or two after that vote and read the relevant threads you'll see that I immediately joined with the vast majority of people supporting independence, stating that we'd keep on working for independence (eg: trying to hold the UK government to the promises they'd made about devolving additional powers to Holyrood, campaign to support Scottish interests within the UK, maintain a functioning and mature Parliament at Holyrood, etc) while recognising that it would be a generation before the next vote.
I have never considered the 2016 vote to be something to celebrate. It was such a stupid question to ask, because those advocating change were fundamentally too lazy to do the work of describing what future status they would seek let alone ensure Parliament would support that before putting it to the people, and rather than 670p of documentation that starts "if you vote leave you will be voting for ..." we had a slogan on the side of the bus, and that was factually inaccurate.
I would support a properly conducted democratic decision to leave the EU, rather reluctantly, but if the will of the people was to leave the EU that would settle it. I would, of course, retain the right to work towards rejoining the EU in the next generation. That wouldn't, at this stage, be the "People's Vote" (even though that would be a big step in the right direction), because we need to start with the major parties to draw up their own policies of what they would try to seek from negotiations and put those to the people in their manifesto for the next general election, and probably a decade of Parliamentary discussion to refine that to something which could be supported by a large majority in the House. That's not going to happen in the month we have left, nor under any extension of the Article 50 process.
I would love us to withdraw A50 already but there are too many people, stirred up by the gutter press, who will be outraged that they did not get the Brexit they were promised. That would result in outrage at the lack of democracy in going against the people's vote - democracy in the UK being a joke or not.
Withdrawing A50 would need a much longer process to get agreement of the electorate who believe they've had their say and don't see why we're still in the EU. And withdrawing A50 is a once only thing, the can has been kicked down the road so far towards this arbitrary exit date that there is no time to have those slow careful discussions.
I would love us to withdraw A50 already but there are too many people, stirred up by the gutter press, who will be outraged that they did not get the Brexit they were promised. That would result in outrage at the lack of democracy in going against the people's vote - democracy in the UK being a joke or not.
Withdrawing A50 would need a much longer process to get agreement of the electorate who believe they've had their say and don't see why we're still in the EU. And withdrawing A50 is a once only thing, the can has been kicked down the road so far towards this arbitrary exit date that there is no time to have those slow careful discussions.
I don't give a shit about the fascists and racists. If they are stirred up because they can't destroy this country - then good.
Comments
The fundamental flaw is that people don’t all think or believe the same things. That’s not procedural or systemic, it’s human.
I favour one man, one vote. Especially if I can be the one man who has the one vote 😁
It couldn't possibly be worse than what we have now. After all, 100% of the general public aren't (I presume) lying, corrupt, ambitious, self-serving incompetents, whereas 100% of the current cabinet give every indication of being all of those things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Vetinari
So much easier to comprehend, and to deal with.....
The late Sir Terry would probably have found the current brouhaha not only entertaining, but conducive to producing another Discworld novel. Discworld is, AIUI, a sort of satirical mirror of our world, so....
Mr. Slant manages to keep himself together quite well. It's poor Reg Shoe who keeps falling to bits, I think.
It's certainly true, though, that Terry P. the author would have revelled in this fiasco, though I'm sure that Terry P. the man would have hated it.
You are quite right. My memory is going.
IIRC, Reg Shoe is Constable Shoe, a faithful member of that most ethnically-variegated police force, the Ankh-Morpork Watch.
Our current government's* anti-anyone-foreign-brown-or-different policy would not go down too well with Captain Vimes, I fancy.
/end of tangent/
(*I use the term 'government' loosely, as I'm sure you realise).
It stands to reason.
I was going to do a Zoe Lyons joke I heard on the News Quiz, referring to the day Britain is scheduled to leave the EU as B-day.
I was at the pub with my Irish mate yesterday and after two pints and a glass of red we began talking about Brexit and its effect on Ireland. I'm afraid to say he was overcome with national passion and started wishing a version of the Potato Famine on the English. I was very upset with him.
The current suggestion is that when Treeza loses next week's vote, and potentially also loses an immediate vote in confidence in the government, she can simply call an election for early April, with us 'safely' out of the EU with no deal, and all the problems dumped on an incoming Labour administration.
She's certainly nasty enough to do it.
I'm fairly sure Srg Colon would think that Brexit was some kind of hot curry* available in darker corners of Ankh Morpork of a Saturday night, probably served by someone with the surname Dibbler. Or Dhblah. Or something similar.
*Probably mostly made of swede and raisins.
....suggestions on a postcard, please.
(Or perhaps not, if the Hell Hosts are getting restless)
Zzzzzzz
God help us.
Why are some Tories furious about this? Didn't they want Parliament to 'take back control?'
I think the word you're looking for is 'insanity'.
Jesu, mercy. Mary, pray.
No - corruption. At the highest level. Combined with incompetence. Combined with arrogance.
Mere insanity would be less problematic.
Shitshow. The word you're looking for that is ... (Is the same in German and probably many other European languages)
It's now perfectly proper to call Labour party Brexit policy as "bollocks" on the floor of the HoC.
Oh that he listened to his own reasoning: the things he is coming out with about Brexit are also complete Bollocks.
Thank you - yes, that'll do nicely.
I wonder if it's now OK to use it in the House of Toddlers? Little kiddies do so love to pick up Naughty Words....
Chris Grayling - pinhead.
Is there anything in life you can touch and not made a complete Horlicks of? Is there any political situation that you can't make worse? Is there any minor unimportant story that you can't somehow attach to the media frontpages for weeks?
You can't properly organise a traffic jam at Dover. Yes, that Dover, the one which had 30 mile tailbacks a few years ago. You can't properly organise a ferry service, focussing unnecessarily on an imaginary service at Ramsgate (where even the most optimistic capacity is far less than 10% of the total daily traffic across the channel) and ignoring the actual, practical realities.
I sincerely hope that if there is a complete debacle in March, as expected, that you are so fired from government that you don't touch the ground until 2020.
I'm sure you are nice to your kids and speak respectfully to old ladies. But, seriously, just stop making bad things worse, can't you?
More seriously, the whole experience convinces me more and more that there are seriously terrible things happening, in plain sight and elsewhere, which only the speed at which the scenes in the current shitshow succeed each other prevent us from seeing. This is beer and circuses in its most concentrated, cynical form: playing at goverment used to distract us from a bloodless, corporate, exploitative coup. You can be sure that the doors opened by Mandelson, allowing large corporations into the most intimate parts of government, have never been shut since.
But the real blame goes to Treeza, who has appointed these fuckwits and then kept them all in post regardless of one balls-up after another, presumably because she needs people around her who are even less able and honest than she is. If possible.
Mrs May is due to make some point about 'everybody' accepting the referendum in Wales establishing the Assembly even though the referendum result was very close.
Investigations (aka someone looking in Hansard) show that not only did Tories vote against establishing the Assembly in a HoC debate despite that referendum result, it was official Tory policy to abolish the Assembly all the way until 2005.
It's an amazing thing, fact-checking, isn't it? It show that Tories are total liars.
As shown by their own fucking words.
thing is, he won't need to touch the ground - he'll just parachute into a cushy job for whichever lobbying group/industry that he's been trying to help as a politician, just like the rest of them do.
I find it hard to accept that comment when I strongly suspect that if the referendum vote had been 52-48 in favour of remaining you’d have been backing it to the hilt and saying leavers had been defeated for ever and ever amen, but as it ended up being opposed to your own opinions you’re refusing to accept its validity.
You don’t get to criticise others for only agreeing with democracy when it delivers the result they want when you’re actively doing exactly the same thing.
(Also, at this point the "greater good" is in dispute by manifestly not stupid people. I'm a Europhile but I think it would make better sense to adopt May's deal than reject it in the hope of a better deal or no Brexit, because I'm very uncertain that pursuing either of these two options will actually lead to a "greater good", or at least a "not terminally bad").
And you don't get to criticise people based on what you think they would do in different circumstances but haven't actually done.
No actually we can perfectly legitimately criticise the results of a poll as stupid. Voting in the Tories in 2017 was stupid. People affected by Tory policies but who voted for them anyway were foolish. Just because something came out of a democratic act does not make it impervious to criticism.
As to the vote. I doubt we'd have heard the end of it if there had been a narrow win for Remain. Because leaders of Leave said at the time that they'd campaign for a second referendum if they lost narrowly.
Finally, one doesn't need to back the status quo "to the hilt because it is the status quo.
After the referendum about
proportional voting - soon after the LD entered the coalition government - the result was almost instantly forgotten. Not because the majority instinctively support FPTP, but because it is the status quo.
Or because those of us who wanted a change in voting systems accepted that we had lost that one, and we needed to work again to winning the public to a different approach. Something which - oddly enough - the current parliament seems to be doing pretty well.
And that too was a very poor referendum, serving only to satisfy a promise while returning the result Cameron wanted. Some of us have been arguing for a more democratic voting system for a long time, and we will continue to argue and campaign for it.
OTOH, leaving the EU is just a manifestly stupid thing to do. I will continue arguing and campaigning against doing stupid things.
Sometimes, I think, history suggests that political leaders are right to make hard choices, to take the unknown hard way rather than the known comfortable way, to look beyond the immediate and to risk plunging the country into chaos.
But I've seen nothing to suggest that this is one of those times nor those kinds of leaders.
The benefits are so nebulous, the arguments are so stupid, the pain is so obvious and predictable.
Rationally, I think (if I was an MP) I would agree that the draft deal is the best compromise that we are going to get - albeit still worse than the status quo and only delaying the potential onset of chaos - but if there are rabid headbangers in the HoC who would destroy the draft on their own for their warped vision of the future, then fuck it, I'd be doing whatever was available to prevent Brexit from happening at all.
It might yet go to no-deal, but at least I could tell future generations that I'd done absolutely everything to try to stop it.
There have been a handful of Labour MPs saying that they feel they have to vote for this deal as their constituency voted 79% to leave and this is the best deal going, and that is a reasonable position to take.
However, I wish the buggers would stop lying. Those pro-Brexiteers who are interviewed saying everything is in place and it's all OK - really? When there are secondments across the civil service to get enough people into the Department for Brexit - partly because Davies and Raab made such a cock up of running that department. And those secondments are getting less voluntary.
It is also arguable as to whether the UK has a democracy anyway. The FPTP system is not true democracy as a significant proportion of the electorate has no vote. The only electors whose vote counts live in the marginals. For those of us living in safe seats, it doesn't make a happorth of difference what we vote. And this is what has led to the farce of this referendum, with votes being cast willy-nilly, as protest, to leave the EU but with no idea what that actually meant.
That referendum should have required a supermajority - 60% or more to change the status quo. And if there is a second referendum that requirement should have been in place. And that's Cameron's disastrous referendum in the first place.
I think the deal is actually pretty good. Being in the backstop seems to me to be a good position for NI - and given that neither side could unilaterally withdraw, the UK could/should continue in that position as long as possible.
But the brouhaha about British sovereignty and willy-waving by Irish unionists (& mates) means that this has completely been lost behind the smokescreen of incandescent hatred of the RoI.
Forget that shit. Just withdraw A50 already.
I have never considered the 2016 vote to be something to celebrate. It was such a stupid question to ask, because those advocating change were fundamentally too lazy to do the work of describing what future status they would seek let alone ensure Parliament would support that before putting it to the people, and rather than 670p of documentation that starts "if you vote leave you will be voting for ..." we had a slogan on the side of the bus, and that was factually inaccurate.
I would support a properly conducted democratic decision to leave the EU, rather reluctantly, but if the will of the people was to leave the EU that would settle it. I would, of course, retain the right to work towards rejoining the EU in the next generation. That wouldn't, at this stage, be the "People's Vote" (even though that would be a big step in the right direction), because we need to start with the major parties to draw up their own policies of what they would try to seek from negotiations and put those to the people in their manifesto for the next general election, and probably a decade of Parliamentary discussion to refine that to something which could be supported by a large majority in the House. That's not going to happen in the month we have left, nor under any extension of the Article 50 process.
Withdrawing A50 would need a much longer process to get agreement of the electorate who believe they've had their say and don't see why we're still in the EU. And withdrawing A50 is a once only thing, the can has been kicked down the road so far towards this arbitrary exit date that there is no time to have those slow careful discussions.
I don't give a shit about the fascists and racists. If they are stirred up because they can't destroy this country - then good.