UK Politics Mega-thread - Page 284

On March 01 2017 03:40 bardtown wrote:

Citation most assuredly needed.

The perils of extreme democracy


CALIFORNIA is once again nearing the end of its fiscal year with a huge budget hole and no hope of a deal to plug it, as its constitution requires. Other American states also have problems, thanks to the struggling economy. But California cannot pass timely budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50 states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and Hollywood—be so poorly governed?

It is tempting to accuse those doing the governing. The legislators, hyperpartisan and usually deadlocked, are a pretty rum bunch. The governor, Jerry Brown, who also led the state between 1975 and 1983, has (like his predecessors) struggled to make the executive branch work. But as our special report this week argues, the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from education to the regulation of chicken coops.

This citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California's finances, shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications. And they have impoverished the state's representative government. Who would want to sit in a legislature where 70-90% of the budget has already been allocated?

On March 01 2017 03:45 LegalLord wrote:
Yes, I do. And if we had a runoff they would still lose.

On March 01 2017 03:40 LightSpectra wrote:
I'm not saying the very idea of a referendum is wrong. It's just that the way the referendum was setup is preposterous.

- The 1975 referendum to join the EU passed with a 2/3rds majority, why does it only take a simple majority to exit?
- The question was merely "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" There is absolutely no room for nuance in there. How many people voted 'Yes' believing that the UK could stay in the single market and Schengen Area? How many people voted 'Yes' thinking it would be Cameron at the helm? How many people voted 'Yes' because they generally are dissatisfied with the EU but are now panicking at how the negotiations are turning out?
- The Leavers are overwhelmingly represented by older people that won't be alive for the long-term ramifications of exiting the EU, how is it fair that they get to bind the young to their decision that hurts the young more than themselves?
- The vast amount of misinformation right before the vote is also a cause of concern, most notably the aforementioned claim by Farage that Brexit would open up £350m a week for the NHS, which is now demonstrably false.

But yeah, I'm not saying it's solely the Conservatives' fault, everybody who voted for the proposed referendum is at fault here. However, the Tories could repent of that error by holding a second referendum on whether they accept May's negotiations for article 50.



Uh, yeah, that's absolutely true! Nobody congratulates the greatness of democracy for allowing Hitler to come to power.

Democracy is superior to aristocracy or monarchy, but it needs to be tempered with liberalism and republicanism and socialism, or else it's merely two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.

On March 01 2017 03:52 LegalLord wrote:

In a split vote, the most ideologically grounded tend to win. The introduction of the Soft Brexit option would probably siphon off more reluctant Remainers than "I didn't actually want to leave" Leavers.

As for the runoff, it would be exactly as-is. I wouldn't have been sure of it if not for empirical evidence of the victory for Leave here.

On March 01 2017 03:55 bardtown wrote:

Your bias is just seeping through every sentence. Briefly, for each of your points:

1 -A majority is a majority. Anything else is an arbitrary number.
2 -You do not ask the public for specifics on how to implement legislation. They are not legislators. You ask them broad, straightforward questions that parliament then enacts in detail. This is exactly how a referendum should be done. Contrast the UK referendum with the Italian referendum where nobody had a clue what the question even meant.
3 -I genuinely find any argument of this nature repulsive. The older people who voted to leave were the same people who voted to stay in the 1970s. They were far more informed as to the development of the EU during the intermittent period. Older people may have less time remaining to live in the country, but they have also invested far more time in the country already. Furthermore, the young did not turn out to vote in high numbers - for the most part because they did not feel sufficiently interested or informed and deferred to their elders.
4 -You're spreading disinformation right now. That was not a Farage figure, it was a Vote Leave figure. The campaigners were not representing the government - ergo, it was not a pledge. Also, there was just as much misinformation on the other side.

5 The UK is a monarchy, by the way. We do not want republicanism, and socialism is a result of democracy, not a prerequisite. What you are saying makes no sense.

On March 01 2017 03:56 LegalLord wrote:

I have seen very little to indicate that any Leavers wanted a soft Brexit, yes.

Any Leavers here want to step up and say they wanted soft Brexit? As of now our population is Hard Brexiteer 1, Soft Brexiteer 0, Remainers >1.

On March 01 2017 03:48 Plansix wrote:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

http://classroom.synonym.com/advantages-disadvantages-direct-popular-election-18191.html

http://www.economist.com/node/18586520



And there are so many more. It is well documented through the basic study of civics and US history that direct democracy has serious, currently unsolvable problems when it comes to decision making. Long term planning is the bane of direct democracy, but is required to effectively govern.

On March 01 2017 04:05 LightSpectra wrote:


I went ahead and added numbers to each point, to keep this orderly:

1. Congrats, you just vindicated every mob rule in the history of mankind. To keep this short, there's some things that are appropriate for a majority vote, and there's some things that should require a supermajority. If you disagree, feel free to prop up the corpses of every liberal theorist ever to fight them on it; nobody else cares, that's been a settled question for over a century.

2. By this logic, there never should have been a referendum! It should've just been left to the legislators to begin with!

3. The young don't turn out in droves in almost any country. I couldn't give you a full sociological account of why that's the case, other than because the retired have more free time to devote to politics than the young who are usually shuffled into long work hours at the beginning of their careers.

4. So now that there's been months to clear up all the misinformation, why not have another referendum? Now that voters actually know what they're getting themselves into, rather than just a vague proposition that most people voted for out of emotional protest than clearheaded policy?

5. The UK is a monarchy, but one that's been heavily formed by liberal republican values (like freedom of speech, habeas corpus, constitutional restrictions, legislative quorums, etc.). "Republicanism" doesn't just mean "head of state isn't dynastic", it also refers to all of the legal machinery in the government that prevents arbitrary dictatorships.

On March 01 2017 04:18 LightSpectra wrote:
Also, if you really, REALLY believed in democracy, you'd let London, Gibraltar, Scotland, and Northern Ireland secede -- right?

On March 01 2017 05:10 bardtown wrote:
Fresh off the press!

Dyson shrugs off Brexit fears with massive UK expansion plan
Technology group to open new 210-hectare campus as part of £2.5bn investment and plans to at least double workforce
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/28/dyson-shrugs-off-brexit-fears-with-massive-uk-expansion-plan?CMP=share_btn_tw

Happy to see one of the big business proponents of Brexit following through, especially in robotics and AI.

Also, if anyone in this thread is interested in learning more about English history and the organic development of its freedoms I really recommend the book The English and their History by Robert Tombs. It's a really good work and has an interesting take on how the way we perceive our history feeds back into the way we behave in the present. Definitely aids in understanding the (in my opinion benign) nationalistic streak to English politics.

On March 01 2017 04:13 bardtown wrote:
There is just as much misinformation now as there was then. Welcome to politics. What you want is to repeat the referendum until you get the result you want. Not going to happen.

Also, please don't attribute British parliamentary/legal concepts to republics inspired by those British systems. You're talking about concepts (like habeas corpus) that have their origins in British parliamentary democracy, and not in any republic. Republicanism draws from democratic values, not vice versa.

On March 01 2017 05:28 BurningSera wrote:


I cringed so hard, i am so glad you actually posted about dyson, Dyson doesn't make a single damn thing in the UK, fyi.

and didnt he move his head office to malta to avoid tax lol

On March 01 2017 05:35 LightSpectra wrote:


I'm not saying repeat anything. I'm saying there should be a separate referendum about a completely different matter, which is whether or not the peoples of the U.K. approve of PM May's deal for triggering Article 50 before it is activated. What's so wrong about that? Suppose people were overwhelmingly against it--surely you wouldn't be so anti-democratic as to deny them their sovereignty, right?

For that matter, if the only thing that counts is majority-votes, why would it even matter if the U.K. would "repeat the referendum until [they] get the result [I] want"? That's even more democratic than having just one referendum. I don't remember any part of the text of the referendum suggesting that the result would be permanently binding on the future no matter the variables.



Constitutional restrictions, legislative quorums, and most of those concepts are traceable back to ancient Greece and Rome. Habeas corpus is arguably English in origin, but that's still a republican value (i.e. a lawful restriction upon the power of government to prevent arbitrary dictatorship).

But this is all just quibbling about terms. If you don't like the term "republican" to refer to that kind of thing, call it whatever you like. Makes no difference to me. Let's just call it Begrenztenregierungprinzipien if you'd like.

In any case, democracy needs to be tempered by begrenztenregierungprinzipien or it's just mob rule. That's why in most countries, decisions of such massive importance aren't decided by simple majority plebiscites.

On March 01 2017 05:39 MyTHicaL wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2282809.stm

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2106379/Offshore-tax-British-engineering-champion-Sir-James-Dyson.html

A great patriot.

On March 01 2017 05:59 Plansix wrote:

That article is pretty non-specific to why they are suddenly opening a new campus in the UK. Did they get plum military contracts? Sweet tax deals? Why is May commenting on this business deal?