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Comment by shaqbert | Hacker News Reader

What hypocrisy to even consider bypassing the parliament in the first place. Thank god the Surpeme Court still stands up for the Parliamentary supremacy [1]. Have a non-binding referendum and then the government bypassing the parliament altogether would have really put the UK in a constitutional crisis and created lasting damage to the very institutional stability that is behind the success of UK governance.

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

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The failure lay with David Cameron's government, by not putting any legal effect in the bill that authorised the referendum. One paragraph was all it would have taken. 'If the referendum carries, the Prime Minister shall be authorised to invoke Article 50'.

Why didn't he? Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.

> Because Cameron never considered for a second he could lose the referendum. He was an idiot.

Was he an idiot? Or did he figure that, if he did lose the referendum, he needed to put as many obstacles between the result and the actual Brexit as he could?

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained with stupidity"

I don't think it's being attributed to malice in this case.

To be fair to him, if you had a world class propaganda operation working on your behalf most of the time, you'd be a bit mentally unprepared for what happens when you go against it as well. Poor boy probably thought he squeaked to (partial) victory twice on his policies or statesmanship or something ridiculous like that.

Or follow parliamentary custom and practice that a 2/3 or 75% majority is required to implement such a major change.

After all if companies and even the local allotment association have to get a 2/3 or 75 majority to change the rules surly a referendum should too.

FYI, the usual argument against that position is that the EU itself has made major changes since we joined and will surely continue to do so, so treating membership as status quo in that way is unwarranted.

Thats not the point ignoring eskine and may is

Where does Erskine May say anything about requiring such a supermajority under the present circumstances?

It seems likely that ministers were fully aware that they couldn't change the legal framework of the UK, the rights of UK citizens, as well as armfuls of other issues without an act of Parliament. That would suggest this was something of a delaying tactic.

that's why the first step to authoritharian rule is always dismantling the supreme court or the constitutional court; see e.g. turkey, hungary, poland.

Remainers tried to get a re-vote, or get the vote overturned/ignored, despite the validity of the referedum. Is that not also a 'step to authoritharian rule'?

I don't know why it would be. Putting the question a second time doesn't seem especially authoritarian. Running the country as the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be, rather than direct democracy where referenda have final say doesn't seem authoritarian either.

It does in the context that the original referendum had a lot of official enforcement of the 'right' way to vote, and a second referendum would no doubt be accompanied by even stronger marketing.

Also, there are small, random influences on the referendum - any close election can give the result you want so long as it remains close, and you keep doing it until you win.

> the representative parliamentary democracy it's supposed to be

What about the monarchy it was supposed to be? Representative parliament is supposed to be a compromise of practicality, not preference.

Not only a compromise of practicality. Mob rule and dictatorship of the majority are not pretty.

Obviously things are not that black and white. Parliament voted overwhelmingly to hand this decision to the people in the form of a referendum.

They voted to let people have a voice in it, not make the decision.

Yes, the key word here is "non-binding".

Unless the result was for staying in the EU, then it would be "the nation has decided".

Staying in the EU requires no changes to UK law. Leaving requires the repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act; an Act of Parliament can only be repealed by parliament (unless the referendum was made legally binding, which it was not).

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

During the debates on what was then the referendum bill, one MP after another, up to and including the level of government ministers, stood up and quite unambiguously supported the right of the people to make the decision. There was little if any hedging at that time. You can read the transcripts in Hansard, and you'll be hard pressed to find any MP who actually said what you just wrote, or anything like it.

In the official government leaflet, sent to all households at considerable expense and amid considerable controversy, the explanation was also quite unambiguous. There was nothing in there about just giving the government a hint either.

The legal difficulty seems to be that the enabling legislation for the referendum was poorly drafted and what was written didn't actually reflect what was being said during the parliamentary debates. Put another way, it's not clear that MPs were actually voting on what they thought they were voting on.

I'm a little surprised that Pepper v Hart didn't seem to come up during the resulting confusion, but given the profound constitutional implications, the lack of explicit provision in the enabling legislation for what should happen after the referendum seems to be the main reason for the Supreme Court's majority decision today.

Right. If you ask a question, you have to take the answer seriously. In a democracy, the voters' vote matters even if the result does not please the government in power.

It was explicitly a non-binding referendum. You can't change the question after people vote.

If it had been explicitly a non-binding referendum, we wouldn't be in this mess.

The problem was that the actual wording of the law that was passed wasn't explicit either way.

You can change it before they vote, by telling the voters that this election is a serious matter and their vote matters greatly. In that case the law doesn't force you, but your own statements require you to.

Would you say that the British political parties told the voters that the brexit referendum would decide the nation's future? Or did they say "we'd like to hear your advice and then we'll consider the matter"?

But also, we have established procedures for how things are done and who has the power to do what. We haven't given the government the power to trigger article 50, so it would be undemocratic for them to simply take it.

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