Brexit court defeat for UK government | Hacker News Reader

Brexit court defeat for UK government

bbc.com

27 pointstbarbugli20 comments

I'd love to see what happens if the British parliament denies this. It will be enlightening about the future of all nations to see if this upsets those who have made their voices heard in the popular vote or if people with just roll over and take it.

This is a fun right from a political-science perspective.

I agree to some extent, but shouldn't some decisions require more than a simple majority?

Definitely, but if it only takes a majority to do something, it should only take a majority to undo it.

Arguably, no. That means the current population isn't really in charge--some anointed holy men who wrote in the supermajority requirement get to override the wishes of the current population.

But is it a bad thing for the population to not be fully in charge? Isn't the point of "tyranny of the majority"[1] that sometimes the majority can/will make the wrong decision?

Part of electing representatives, to me, is that I hope the would make the tough calls and do the right thing, and not the popular thing. Can not part of representation (if it could be made to work well) be to defer to a person's wisdom? Certainly, the majority of the population is not even remotely qualified in the area of computer encryption, for example — should they, with no knowledge of the subject — be making decisions on how to legislate it?[2]

(It's for reasons like this that I'm interested in forms of government where you can delegate your vote on topics to someone with more expertise or trust in that area; my hope being that it results in better decision-making than what a simple majority is capable of.)

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

[2]: Though sadly, in the US at least, I don't think our form of representation adequately handles niche issues like that.

> But is it a bad thing for the population to not be fully in charge? Isn't the point of "tyranny of the majority" that sometimes the majority can/will make the wrong decision?

People have very different opinions on this. I think if you're going to take away peoples' natural freedom and subject them to the yoke of government,[1] it is a moral imperative that they, not holy men, control that apparatus.

[1] Which I think is necessary--I have no anarchist leanings.

Not in a democracy where the government is ruled by the demos, not the state or an elite. If Brits hold in their minds, which many do, that their government is to serve the people then the majority is the most important factor.

I wouldn't. Overturning a high turnout national referendum result would probably result in violent riots.

All else equal, that seems like the lesser of two evils in this case.

No it will not. Perhaps if it was high turn out and a clear majority but 48/52 is very close and ignoring the result would likely anger leave voters who were overwhelmingly older people. Hardly the type to riot.

We are not a country accustomed to, or we'll prepared for, referendums on complex subjects (I don't know of any that are except Switzerland, which is built on them). If the question were posed again tomorrow, the results might be significantly different.

I don't think we'd necessarily benefit from a massive u-turn, but I think many leave supporters are disgruntled at what it has now been revealed they were convinced to vote for.

So maybe riots, but also quite possibly not, and not necessarily (as it was put elsewhere in the thread) because people are just rolling over and taking it...

As a rule, the British don't like to riot. You typically get one or two stand-out riots a decade, but they're rarely for political reasons. (The Poll Tax riots were an exception.)

I can imagine a lot of people threatening riots and outright civil war, but the British right isn't organised enough to do much except march around being loud and annoying and picking a few fights with foreigners.

It certainly isn't intelligent enough, or well-armed enough, to have any hope of winning an actual civil war.

That's the point. I'd like to see if that happens. I'd bet that nothing violent would happen and if that's the case I see a sad, sad future for all the current democracies in the world.

The only case worse would there being riots, and the government rolling in and declaring some form of martial law while no other nation lends a hand or steps in to sanction the ruing government.

This would prove that either a) the citizens of most western nations will no longer fight for things they believe in, or b) they can no longer fight for what they believe in and no one will aid in defense of the values that western people hold. That's a scary state of affairs.

In my opinion either of those outcomes prove it's ok for any ruling class to bully around the majority and that no one, not even in the international community, will provide them any faults for doing so.

Well there is no legal requirement to adhere to the result.

This isn't a legal issue but instead an extremely serious social/political issue. This is a microcosm of the history and future of politics. You have a majority that want one thing, and a ruling class that doesn't necessarily share the interests of this majority--or any of their subjects for that matter.

Now I don't have any valid opinion as to if the decision to leave is a good or bad one but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm interested in is a direct refusal to adhere to the requests of the majority. If the British people show their government, and the international community at large, that this is an acceptable practice then I think there will be many side effects that cannot be fully understood from our perspective. It's basically a free check to any political organization to blatantly act against the wishes of a majority of it's population. If they can do that without recourse then there will be a stigma of non-compliance that will follow in reference to the wishes of the populous of that country.

It's not a questions as to if it's legal to do it. It's a question as to the precedence it sets for the government to ignore the wills of the people.

More curious to see what happens if the PM makes the call, but the court says it doesn't count. Does the EU decide it counts or not?

Article 50 - i.e. notice to leave - has to be triggered in accordance with constitutional requirements.

The court ruling is clear notice that triggering A50 without parliamentary approval is unconstitutional.

What happens next is debatable, but the whole subject is a mess of pointless suicidal confusion, so it's really a battle between pragmatists and extremist ideologues.

Don't worry, they can appeal to the European courts.

For those wondering, Brexit will still happen but Parliament may decide to force the government to aim to remain in the single market. They will do this to prevent a cataclysmic economic shock, but in years to come the Brexiters will gloat about how well it all went and people will forget that it was Parliament and remainders that forced sanity upon the process, rather than referenda and populists.

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