Brexit is off ?

i cannot tell whether this is a about legal 'process' or actually a challenge to the process. I think it is the former, and probably pretty irrelevant.

It is slightly hard to fathom how the elected representatives of the people could decide to give the decision to the people, and then be required to discuss and vote to enact the result. However I am not a lawyer.

Brexit, in its full unfolding horror I suspect will not be delayed.

Bruce

If the Supreme Court upholds the High Court ruling,  I wonder where that leaves the Attorney General.  Jeremy Wright has been in post since 2014 & therefore advised the both previous government on the referendum & the present government on the  brexit processes;  I don't see how he can remain.  

A little premature to think that I suspect.  An early election perhaps and will we see labour voters voting Tory or UKIP because they want to leave and vice versa.  I could see this being very bad indeed for labour

I am beginning to think that the winners from all that's happened this year (Brexit result, Corbyn, 2 party shambles in the USA, the rapid transformation of Theresa) will be the Liberal Democrat party...

My take on it is that we are in uncharted constitutional territory. Parliament passed an act for the referendum. In UK, referenda have no constitutional significance and are, in theory, advisory (at best). However, for Parliament to invoke a referendum and then ignore the result would be nonsensical. In particular, the Government information for the referendum said that it would implement the people's decision.

Although we have had referenda before, this is the first time that the result has gone against the wishes of parliament and government. Not only that, nobody anticipated a Leave vote and there was no preparation or thought put into what might happen if the vote did go that way.

Yes it appears to me, without having a good understanding of UK constitution and laws that this looks like a joke and it is confusing many. In or out, I do hope that there should at least be some certainty in it.

An act of Parliament was needed to hold the Referendum. Result is advisory and another Law is required to implement Article 50, therefore it has to go before both houses, for discussion and acceptance into law.

Meaningless but Interesting pie chart, :- 

That works out as 26% voted for Brexit, so when people tell you 52% voted to leave you can correct them.  

BigH47 posted:

An act of Parliament was needed to hold the Referendum. Result is advisory and another Law is required to implement Article 50, therefore it has to go before both houses, for discussion and acceptance into law.

That works out as 26% voted for Brexit, so when people tell you 52% voted to leave you can correct them.  

For your first point, that is what I said in my post above but please note my comments on the Government saying it would implement the people's decision and on the insanity of parliament invoking a referendum and then ignoring the result. Frankly, if this were in an episode of 'The Thick of It' or 'Yes Prime Minister' it would be really funny but, in real life...

For your second point, it is standard practice to exclude non-voters from any percentage results. What else can you do? I assume that those who can't vote covers children, those in prison, the insane and peers; if you really want to big the number up you can add in the dead and the unborn as well.

Maybe this is a bit closer the mark.    

Also interesting to ponder that if the youngsters had bothered to vote, the result might be a bit different.  But the popular blame for brexit is put on the older age groups

Actually, at 72.2% the turnout was very good. I wonder how these match up to GE non-voting for the young. I like to think that if Cameron hadn't screwed up the negotiations and/or had conducted a decent campaign the result would have been a bit different.

PeterJ posted:

Actually, at 72.2% the turnout was very good. I wonder how these match up to GE non-voting for the young. I like to think that if Cameron hadn't screwed up the negotiations and/or had conducted a decent campaign the result would have been a bit different.

Actually Cameron shot himself in the foot with the younger voters. In their desperation to exclude as many young voters as possible in the GE, the Tories pushed through new voter registration procedures against the advice of the Electoral Commission, who had advised against implementing the new procedure before the 2015 election. Very large numbers of young voters, including students, who had previously been registered by their institutions, thus fell of the electoral register - amounting to maybe 800,000. This is probably a trick the Tories picked up from their Republican friends in the US who are very experienced in fiddling with voter registration processes to exclude groups like African Americans who are likely to vote Democrat.

The age distribution above seems to me to show a relatively even age distribution amongst the remain voters with the leavers skewed very much towards the older voter. 

Clive

Your analysis is a bit selectively skewed Clive.  Apart from the fact that more of the 25-34 band didn't vote meaning its not all students & tricky tories that are to blame.   If the same percentage of remain & leave by age band was carried into the abstain areas of each age band,  18-24 = 26% remain & 10% leave .... 25-34 = 36% remain & 22% leave,   the result might well have been different.   

Mike-B posted:

Your analysis is a bit selectively skewed Clive.  Apart from the fact that more of the 25-34 band didn't vote meaning its not all students & tricky tories that are to blame.   If the same percentage of remain & leave by age band was carried into the abstain areas of each age band,  18-24 = 26% remain & 10% leave .... 25-34 = 36% remain & 22% leave,   the result might well have been different.   

Interesting, I've just had another look at your chart. Apart from the 18-24 'outlier' the proportion of each age band voting Remain is remarkably consistent in a fairly tight range between (I would estimate) between 33% and 36%. What the key effect in the Leave vote is that the proportion increases with age band but it is eating into the Abstain 'vote' and not the Remain vote (which remains a fairly constant proportion).

I would like to see Malcolm Tucker conduct a post mortem into this with some of the key members of the Remain campaign.

Mike-B posted:

Your analysis is a bit selectively skewed Clive.  Apart from the fact that more of the 25-34 band didn't vote meaning its not all students & tricky tories that are to blame.   If the same percentage of remain & leave by age band was carried into the abstain areas of each age band,  18-24 = 26% remain & 10% leave .... 25-34 = 36% remain & 22% leave,   the result might well have been different.   

Hi Mike,

Sorry - I'm not sure what you mean by your third sentence - are you suggesting that if all the abstentions were turned into votes on the same basis as the active votes by age band were actually cast, the 18-34 age group would have at least counterbalanced the older age bias towards leave?

Anyhow, I was having a dig at Cameron and the Tories as I think that voter exclusion in that way was disgraceful. So I wasn't really trying to argue that the result would have been different without the gerrymandering (and I think it would primarily be the 18-24 group affected), just that it didn't help Cameron's aims and seemed part of his constant short term thinking. As indeed I don't think the Tory remain campaign factored in the ferocious newspaper support for leave. To decide the effect of the exclusion of the estimated 800,000 voters would require more analysis of the voting stats. For example, if those excluded your voters included a significant proportion of students, would they be less likely to abstain than their registered cohort? Anyhow I don't think the estimated 800,000 would have been enough to change the outcome even if they had all voted, and for remain!

Clive

Cdb posted:

 

 

Hi Mike,  Sorry - I'm not sure what you mean by your third sentence - are you suggesting that if all the abstentions were turned into votes on the same basis as the active votes by age band were actually cast, the 18-34 age group would have at least counterbalanced the older age bias towards leave?

Hey Clive,  yes thats what I'm saying,  but its all hypothetical musings.  I would also add that many of the the abstain group are  "can't be bothered" & probably have no strong leanings one way or the other,  so if forced to vote they would most likely opt for the status quo  (remain) 

I don't think Bexit is off but the path towards it now looks to very different from the one planned by the current government.

I don't know the motivation of those who brought the case to the High Court. I see some ministers have suggested those motives might not be what the plaintiffs say. But the motive is largely irrelevant to the judgment given and the consequences.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Conservative party have made something of a horlicks of the whole thing. The original idea to have a referendum seems ill-thought through; the drafting of the bill for the referendum, which explicitly says the result is 'advisory', now looks loose and lacking enough foresight about the process should the result of the referendum produce a 'leave' result; and current ministers don't seem to have taken full account of the legal basis for the referendum before committing HMG to its current exit plan.

As I've suggested on the other 'sleeping-walking' thread, I can see the prospect of a constitutional and parliamentary log-jamb in the months ahead. I also think the chances of an early general election have now increased.  What with growing dissent on this topic among Conservative MPs, HMG could easily lose its majority in the House of Commons. And then there's the prospect of any Bill getting through the House of Lords.  

Bit of a mess really, and one that seems to be getting worse. 

To answer the original question, unfortunately BREXIT is not off.

However, there now remains hope that some sanity will be adopted in negotiations for BREXIT now that an obstacle has been put in the path of the right wing clique in the Tory Government attempting to force through what has become known as a "Hard BREXIT".

As far as I am concerned, the referendum produced a catastrophic result for the United Kingdom and Europe in that the United Kingdom will leave the EU. I don't think that this can be avoided, catastrophic as I believe it to be, and despite the fact that I believe the 'Leave' campaign got lucky, and by chance inherited the perfect storm that delivered them a result on the day that was both unexpected and, in my view unrepeatable were the referendum to be held again.

Importantly though, the referendum result most definitely did not give Theresa May's Government the right (from a political, legal or moral perspective) to insist that BREXIT means a 'hard' Brexit, resulting in the UK pulling out of the single market. The leave campaign was fought on two main fronts - immigration (largely the focus of UKIP), and regaining sovereignty from Europe. Those who voted to leave, and who won by a small majority (don't forget this - the rest of us also have some right to have our views aired) fell into 3 broad camps.

1. Those who wanted the UK to reclaim National Sovereignty, and who were nervous (rightly or wrongly) about the prospect of an increasingly federal Europe Legal System

2. Those who were opposed to the idea of immigration - a mix of those who were of the opinion (rightly or wrongly) that people in the UK were losing out in the jobs market because of 'uncontrolled' immigration, and those who are of a racist disposition, and have made no secret of their views. 

3. Those whose opinions encompassed both of the above.

Those people who voted to remain almost certainly encompassed the idea of the single market and freedom of movement of people within the EU. I suggest that a significant number of those people who voted to leave because they felt the UK should reclaim sovereignty were not opposed to the idea of retaining a single market and freedom of movement. Of course, we now know of at least one Tory MP on the Brexit side who feels strongly enough about this to resign his position in the Government.

Perhaps the only relatively sane outcome of this will be that although we leave the EU, thus satisfying those who voted to reclaim UK sovereignty, we may end up with a Brexit that retains the advantages of the single market and freedom of movement of peoples within Europe.

Of course, Theresa May's Government will do their best to force through a 'Hard BREXIT', achievable only by preventing Parliament from having its say (now that is really unconstitutional, or would be if we had such a thing as a constitution), and of course such an aspiration may also be thwarted by the EU itself which may just decide that they are tired of us and our constant bickering.

Still, at least there is now some hope on the horizon.          

Mike-B posted:

Maybe this is a bit closer the mark.    

Also interesting to ponder that if the youngsters had bothered to vote, the result might be a bit different.  But the popular blame for brexit is put on the older age groups

makes me laugh - they have no idea of these stats really -certainly the majority of the younger voters around these parts i know voted to leave - and i know a few said they were irritated by pollsters contacting them and  I know at least one said she was a remain when actually she voted to leave - in the thinking that the pollsters would leave her alone.... in fact it was the next generation up - and mostly civil servants, teachers, and the like that voted to remain. Again not scientific and based on my extended circle of friends and acquaintances and their families which could of course be completely unrepresentative - and my part of East Anglia  could completely off the spectrum... - but food for thought - but I saw the biggest difference between public sector and private sector - rather than age.

I don't think we can assume based on personal local experiences that its true of other areas.  The stat's are representative of the country as a whole,  yes I agree that its variable,  but taken over the whole country I have no doubt that they are +/- within a reasonable margin a good indicator.   My local area was extremely polarised remain/leave including some shocking apathy (IMO) with the younger group.  Whereas other regions I travel to on frequent basis in UK, SW, Midlands & NW had very different indicators,  but I noted the younger people throughout were tending to be less than bothered.  

PeterJ and others I did say it was a probably meaningless pie chart. I just use it against the "52% of the population voted to leave" exiteers. I suppose the lies might as well carry on. One today was PM was elected by the British electorate, I suppose you could just spin that as a fact./

Mike - you well could be right.. I tell you what I do find fascinating - it appears looking at much debate written and on the television - there appears a coming together of many of the upper classes and working classes and seem to be polarising against the metropolitan liberal 'elites' .. it certainly is interesting to observe... the referendum has appeared, for now, to disrupt if not overturn the established  class wars and divisions ... and it increasingly appears now the liberal metropolitans  vs everyone else divisions  ..professional sociologists - of which I have a fare few in my extended family - will be finding this fascinating..

Agree fascinating,  all other opinions are off as it seems no matter what you find another opinion - I have been watching this weeks High Court brexit stuff from USA & not surprising some other politics have been grabbing attention in these parts.  But now sitting in BA's ORD lounge I'm (again) seeing a similar multi polarised viewpoint, 3 brits all seemingly in senior positions are "at it" over in/out  (& free BA G&T's are not helping)     My experience with two groups of peeps  I'm associated with locally, music & agro/science, nothing political at all but very diverse & more or less a 50/50 split & I do not see any class/education/employment trends in the groups.  

BigH47 posted:

An act of Parliament was needed to hold the Referendum. Result is advisory and another Law is required to implement Article 50, therefore it has to go before both houses, for discussion and acceptance into law.

Meaningless but Interesting pie chart, :- 

That works out as 26% voted for Brexit, so when people tell you 52% voted to leave you can correct them.  

 

Lies, damn lies and statistics, ... as children/minors under the age of 18 don't (usually) vote in national elections and referenda ...isn't that graph in the context you use slightly mis leading   and the turnout nationally was one of the highest there has been for a long time, and I read that an estimated 2m people extra voted who had never voted before despite being entitled to.. of course we don't know which way they voted .. I guess it was representative of the end result .. for me however that is a great victory for democracy and the will of the people... nearly every British adult has a voice.. use it with your vote to be heard.. I applaud every remainer/brexiteer who voted...

Why fight the rearguard action? Wouldn't it better for all sides if the Brexit, inevitable as it is, continued as swift as possible? The sooner the UK are out the sooner they will realise the giant blunder they made and the more probable is a reunion in our lifetimes.

I agree we should crack on as soon as possible and embrace the world instead of relying on just  little Europe and also allows us to vote on removing EU abominations  such as zero hour contracts sooner rather than later