Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38833883

by gfmio • 9 years ago

68 74 9 years ago

H4CK3RM4N• 9 years ago

This will have huge implications for tech industry in the UK with drawing employees from the EU becoming a lot harder, as a result of uncertainty over visas if nothing else.

elastic_church6• 9 years ago

such that London software engineering salaries will no longer be comparably pitiful to America's?

branchless2• 9 years ago

Take housing costs into account in London and many places are better:

http://i.imgur.com/mNsk5oD.jpg

cletus2• 9 years ago

Upvote.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted because you are correct: London salaries are pitiful even before you factor in the enormous cost of living there (I lived and worked in London for 4 years but did contracting as the salaries even 10+ years ago were and are a joke comparatively).

It's one reason I and many others work in the US instead.

No idea what Brexit will do to relative incomes. It depends on what happens with the pound, what the visa situation looks like and so on.

untog2• 9 years ago

That's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that a lot of multinational companies will leave London, driving down demand for developers (and, well, everyone else)

tetraodonpuffer• 9 years ago

Leaving the pros/cons of brexit out: if there was a plebiscite where the electorate voted in favor of something, and if we assume that politicians are supposed to be representing the electorate, shouldn't it have been pretty straightforward that the corresponding bill would pass largely unchallenged?

If it had failed, how would the politicians have justified to their electors voting against their express intentions?

toomuchtodo3• 9 years ago

how would the politicians have justified to their electors voting against their express intentions?

Sometimes the electorate requires protection from itself; the idea is not new (below History Stack Exchange answer references James Madison).

"It is arguably the most famous of The Federalist Papers [1]. Madison argues that society is undone by faction"

defined as

"a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.…"

"A faction can be a minority, but also a majority, and the majority can work against the good of the whole by abusing its power. The majority simply cannot be trusted not to oppress the minority, given the opportunity."

Emphasis mine.

The "Tyranny Of The Majority" [2] also comes to mind.

"American founding father Alexander Hamilton writing to Jefferson from the Constitutional Convention argued the same fears regarding the use of pure direct democracy by the majority to elect a demagogue who, rather than work for the benefit of all citizens, set out to either harm those in the minority or work only for those of the upper echelon. The Electoral College mechanism present in the indirect United States presidential election system, and the phenomenon of faithless electors allowed for within it, was, in part, deliberately created as a safety measure not only to prevent such a scenario, but also to prevent the use of democracy to overthrow democracy for an authoritarian, dictatorial or other system of oppressive government.[3] As articulated by Hamilton, one reason the Electoral College was created was so "that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."

Some failure scenarios are clearly hard to prepare for.

http://history.stackexchange.com/a/5568

[1] http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

generic_user5• 9 years ago

Article 50 is part of the Treaty of Lisbon. Any member state can trigger article 50 and leave the EU. The time to debate whether or not article 50 was in some way a tyrannical or unjust was during the crafting of the law. So we can assume that it was deemed acceptable and agreed by the member states.

If your claim is that article 50 is tyrannical then the Treaty of Lisbon itself should be changed to remove article 50. Barring that, I don't think there is legal standing to try and prevent article 50 from being triggered. It was put to a popular vote and the PM is respecting the will of the citizenry.

mbroncano• 9 years ago

On a related note, it doesn't say much of the representative nature of the chamber that the vote doesn't reflect the split hair referendum result.

untog2• 9 years ago

Of course not - the parliament is based on constituencies, not direct representation. Much like we saw in the US last year, it is possible to win a majority in a UK election while losing the popular vote.

mcguire2• 9 years ago

52% to 48% is "split-hair"? In England it was 53.4% to 46.6%.

http://www.bbc.com/news/politics/eu_referendum/results

Symmetry2• 9 years ago

In the US popular opinion says that Congress should raise domestic spending, lower taxes, decrease the deficit, and pay for this by lowering foreign aid to 10% of the budget. Foreign aid is actually 1% of the budget.

Politicians should ideally do the right thing or failing that do things that will get them reelected. Roughly 50% of the popular vote supported both the "leave" and stay options and the fraction of the electorate that votes based on "Has my life gotten better or worse since the last election" is much larger than the difference between the two sides so to get reelected MPs should vote as they think will most benefit the country.

throwaway91111• 9 years ago

Arguably, it's better to elect flawed but representative people. How else are people to learn?

candiodari2• 9 years ago

So what you're saying is:

1) obviously the UK was in the EU for the past years

2) people voted against this for 2 reasons. One, they're against the EU. Two, they're not happy with how their own lives changed under 1.

3) We should ignore the second argument and go against the will of the people because ... we're smarter and think that argument is wrong ? Because their lives got worse for other reasons, not this policy ?

I disagree. When push comes to shove the government is responsible for outcomes. If your policies can't produce good outcomes for everyone, they don't deserve to exist.

And frankly, the way the EU is being run, I would vote to leave as well. Not because I'm rightist, quite the opposite. Because I'm an actual leftist:

a) the EU is an extreme right government for an electorate that is decidedly NOT extreme-right (tax income, public losses, private profits, too big to fail, DRASTIC action against asset/wealth taxes, ...)

We need a leftist government.

b) the population is right : globalization is definitely one of the factors that made them worse off.

c) the EU's monetary policy is a fantasy. The EU wants to devalue it's currency over time by giving money to the banks and taking it away from governments. This is not what their rhetoric says, but they've been doing it for 15 years now, I find myself unwilling to accept the rhetoric. The EU is built on an economic policy of asset inflation and this is clearly non-negotiable (poor Greeks).

I want out.

d) So far, by staying out of the Euro, the UK has staved off the biggest dangers of the EU monetary policy, but this can't last.

And frankly, I suspect this is at least partially what happened in the US. Trump, the republican candidate, certainly appeared to be to the left, economically, of the democrat candidate at a time when lots of people got systematically worse off. Meanwhile Hillary was proud to show that Wall Street was on her side ... And her opponent Trumpeting mostly economic arguments : jobs, not capital. Production in the US, not globalization. Well, he got elected, she didn't. Must be racism ... right ? Perhaps. I submit that Trump got far more votes from his promise to tax income less and tax imports than is generally believed, especially on this site.

I think that partially the democrats have been hijacked by this immigration, tolerance, ... ideology. It has gone too far. Traditionally, of course, the right is pro-immigration (cheap labor, acceptance of very weak employment conditions, tolerant of outright abuse and exploitation), and the left is anti-immigration, because they're trying to improve the position of the poor in society. Improving that position through scarcity of course works.

GeneralMayhem2• 9 years ago

The most important reason to organize your government as a republic instead of a direct democracy is that voters can't always be trusted (a) to put the best interests of the nation as a whole ahead of their own, or (b) to even know what their best interests are. "That was clearly a really self-destructive/evil/illegal/otherwise terrible idea once we spent more time thinking about it" is a perfectly fine justification in an ideal world. In reality, of course, it would probably be very difficult to explain satisfactorily to the electorate, especially the stereotypical Brexit/Trump "low-information" voter.

One potential way to counteract this is through collusion by the MPs. If, for instance, all of Parliament were agreed that Article 50 was a terrible idea, but didn't want anyone to lose their seat over it, they could organize their votes such that they can all get out relatively unscathed. The ones from left-wing districts are probably okay either way, and then the conservatives just have to pick the handful that have the safest seats to be the nays that push it over the edge.

aryehof4• 9 years ago

In the UK, Parliament is sovereign. The Judiciary are independent, and only make rulings based on current law and precedent. Some sought clarification that the current Government (executive branch) could not invoke Brexit without regard to Parliament. The Courts decided that was the case according to current law, precedent and convention. The Government then put it to Parliament that they be given the power, that passed, meaning if put to the Courts again, they would have to now find in favor of the Government.

Frankly a triumph of correct process being followed, and an example of the real independence and effectiveness of different branches of government in the UK.

Parliament is the people, which is why it is sovereign. In the USA, so much power has been devolved to the executive branch (the President) by the people (Congress) that the President has increasingly become sovereign, and access to legal recourse increasingly difficult. One reason the USA is number 21 on the 2016 Democracy Index, and now in the "Flawed Democracy" category.

edblarney6• 9 years ago

"In the UK, Parliament is sovereign."

The EU courts can declare any bit of UK Parliamentary action 'unconstitutional'.

Within the EU, UK Parliament is not quite 'sovereign' :)

Veen3• 9 years ago

MPs represent constituencies in parliament. Many constituencies voted overwhelmingly to remain, which is why some MPs, especially on the labour side, felt they couldn't vote for the the bill.

Some, like Ken Clark, have been pro-EU for decades and simply believe Brexit is the wrong thing to do. He opposed the referendum. If you strongly believe something to be a terrible mistake, should you support it just because it's popular?

The UK isn't a direct democracy. We vote for the people who will make decisions on our behalf. I'm glad there are politicians who refuse to follow a marginally popular opinion because they believe it's wrong. That's their job.

flukus3• 9 years ago

So your happy for MP's to cede your sovereignty rather than risk a popular vote? Because that's how Britain ended up in the EU in the first place.

toyg• 9 years ago

For all the arguments from brexiters about democracy, this vote was yet another travesty. Somehow a narrow 52% majority of votes became 70%+ in Parliament. And of course the few millions of EU citizens living here went completely unrepresented, again.

What a disappointment, this country turned out to be.

KitDuncan• 9 years ago

You are looking at this the wrong way. This vote wasn't supposed to represent the exact percentage of the referendum, just wether or not they want to overule the referendum, which 70% did not want to do, even though many of those MPs did not support the Brexit.

EnderMB• 9 years ago

Whether you agree with Brexit or not, I think it's safe to say that the way MP's voted will be looked at with as much scrutiny as those that voted for the Iraq war.

My Labour MP supported Remain, and our area voted strongly to remain in the EU, but she has backed the bill, leading to a lot of angry people. It's a reasonably safe Labour seat, but with increasing numbers of young people moving here, I can see her struggling next election.

Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

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