Zompist Bboard Again

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:49 pm - MV3 remains unconstitutional.

Does this offer a way out? If Parliament accepts the deal then, can it subsequently repudiate it on the basis that accepting it was unconstitutional? I must say that the back stop seems to invite bad faith.

Richard W wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 5:43 pm

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:49 pm - MV3 remains unconstitutional.

Does this offer a way out? If Parliament accepts the deal then, can it subsequently repudiate it on the basis that accepting it was unconstitutional? I must say that the back stop seems to invite bad faith.

I doubt it because MV3 doesn't ratify or implement the treaty, those things would happen afterwards. The reason for the vote is that TM had to promise one to parliament prior to ratification to keep her government together a while ago.

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 4:49 pm Everyone, rejoice! All problems have been solved! There's no longer any need to worry! A glorious future awaits Britain!

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... new-guinea

Well that certainly is helpful for my plan to run away to Melanesia for a year or two (though I'll more likely find myself in the Solomons given my college's connections).

Speaking about Melanesia, I heard that some MPs want to make a resolution regarding Indonesia's oppression of West Papua. Anything coming out of that?

What was the party breakdown on the No-Deal vote? All I can find is the overall total, 321 votes to 278. Though this was taken as a great victory for Some Deal, that's an awful lot of votes for No Deal. Surely they weren't all Tories?

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:38 pm What was the party breakdown on the No-Deal vote? All I can find is the overall total, 321 votes to 278. Though this was taken as a great victory for Some Deal, that's an awful lot of votes for No Deal. Surely they weren't all Tories?

Almost all of them were. 265 Tories voted against, 10 DUP, 2 Labour, 1 independent. 17 Conservatives and everyone else voted for the motion, i.e. against no deal. A few Tories, including government ministers, chose to abstain

So basically there's a massive majority within the Conservative party not to rule out no deal... but unfortunately they don't have a majority and 17 of them voted against their colleagues, with another small chunk of the Conservative vote abstaining.

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:38 pm What was the party breakdown on the No-Deal vote? All I can find is the overall total, 321 votes to 278. Though this was taken as a great victory for Some Deal, that's an awful lot of votes for No Deal. Surely they weren't all Tories?

See:

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/live-experienc ... 194c4a.png

265 Conservative, 10 DUP, 1 Independent and 2 Labour.

The Labour were Stephen Hepburn and Kate Hoey. I don't know Hepburn, but he's, symbolically enough, the MP for Jarrow... (and chairman of the all-party group on shipbuilding and ship repair)

Hoey's a former Labour minister, an original Blairite. She's a libertarian - she's advocated for the removal of gun control, the abolition of the BBC, tighter controls on immigration, the withholding of devolution from Scotland, stronger penalties for cannabis use, 'welfare reform', withdrawal from the Good Friday Agreement, the election of DUP candidates to Parliament, Boris Johnson, fox hunting, and the taxation and tight regulation of bicycle riding; she was chairman of the pro-fox-hunting Countryside Alliance for a decade, at a time when it was actively campaigning against the Labour Party, and she was described by Stonewall as the least-gay-friendly of all Labour MPs. She's consistently been one of the most hardline Brexiteers, for decades (even though her own constituency voted 78% Remain), and has campaigned alongside Farage. She voted for the government last year in a vote they only won by four votes to reject soft brexit. She's been repeatedly condemned by her local party and will almost certainly be deselected. She will presumably at some point join TIG, at which point we'll all lament how Corbyn's antisemitism and radical communism are destroying the party by driving out these rational, moderate voices...

[oh, I see her local party has actually called for the whip to be withdrawn but Corbyn refused. The vote against her was 42-0; 2,300 local members were invited to share their views, and not a single person defended her. And oh yes, I see that this DID spark a round of lamenting the authoritarianism of Red Corbyn*]

The independent was Lady Hermon, who used to be UUP before they allied with the Conservatives. She's also Blairite in orientation - she used to vote similarly to New Labour, but won't support Corbyn. I'm not sure what happened here, as she's actually spoken out against No Deal in the past. I assume this is in some way a strategic vote... or else she just walked through the wrong door...




*there was one slight provocation from Corbyn, to be fair. Even back in 1989, Hoey was deeply unpopular with her local party, who refused to nominate her as their candidate. Instead, they wanted to nominate a black woman, Martha Osamor. Osamor was an activist - she led Britain's first civil rights march, and at the time was serving as a local councillor; Hoey, on the other hand, was a well-paid advisor on educational matters to Arsenal Football Club, so represented the direction the party was eager to move in. The Labour National Executive refused to allow Osamor to be selected, and instead imposed a shortlist of their prefered candidates (i.e. Hoey); when the local party refused to select someone from the shortlist, the NEC removed their powers and directly imposed Hoey as their candidate, which she has remained ever since despite the unrest of the local party. Hoey opposed Corbyn's rise to power, and I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Corbyn then had her nemesis Osamor made a Lord (Baroness Osamor of Tottenham and Asaba).

[less pleasantly: Osamor's daughter was actually an MP, who Corbyn put in his shadow cabinet. Unfortunately, she plagiarised a lot, and she funnelled taxpayer's money to her son, a convicted drug dealer, without disclosing his profession, and then lied about it, and then threatened to 'smash [a journalist's] face in' with a baseball bat. It's almost as though nepotism wasn't a great system for selecting the political class...]

Whatever else you can say about Corbyn, I think his general support for the local parties and their freedom to choose their local candidate is important and a good thing. The fact that many on the right wail that Corbyn is "threatening" them with deselection just shows that, for some bizarre reason, they expect immunity from the membership whose support and volunteer work they then demand to get them elected. So far as I can tell, Corbyn has never threatened any of them with forced deselection, he's juat refused to beat the local parties into submission the way Blair would have done.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:49 pm Well, we've now voted to postpone Brexit.

Some issues here:

- we haven't postponed Brexit. MPs have commanded the Prime Minister to seek a postponement from the EU. The EU don't have to say yes. And MPs can't force the PM to try as hard as possible to convince them. The PM may now be ringing up EU leaders and begging them to refuse her own request...

- the PM gets to choose how long that postponement is. She says that if MPs accept Meaningful Vote III (This Time Its Meaningful) she'll seek a postponement until June; if they refuse, she'll make it be much longer (if the EU let her)...

- if MV3 is rejected, it's not clear what happens. Since the PM won't put forward any alternative plan, and MPs won't take charge (an amendment to do that lost by two votes; it's not clear how a negotiation with the EU using the PM as a proxy who opposed Parliament's policies would really work anyway), it's hard to see how this can ever end.

- MV3 remains unconstitutional.

On the note of MV3, TL;DR News on YouTube briefly covered the vote to postpone Brexit, and stated that a fourth amendment to the motion was put forward which would have prevented May from bringing her deal to the Commons for a third time, falling in line with Erskine May. However, it appears the signatory to the amendment (I think?) chose to withdraw it saying that they didn't think it needed to go to a vote, so it didn't (and the other three amendments were voted against as well, so it was just a simple "postpone or not" vote). Did I miss something? Why would you not want to put "this is probably unconstitutional" to a vote?

On a similar note, I think the second(?) amendment (the Benn amendment) was quite interesting, given the fact that it lost by only 4 votes. From what I could understand, it could have changed the way that the Commons and the Government interact with each other. However, is this a long-term change MPs actually want, or is it more short-term political manoeuvring, trying to take over the Brexit process?

chris_notts wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:09 pmAlmost all of them were. 265 Tories voted against, 10 DUP, 2 Labour, 1 independent. 17 Conservatives and everyone else voted for the motion, i.e. against no deal. A few Tories, including government ministers, chose to abstain.

Thanks, Chris & Sal. OK, wow, that's more Tories than I expected, given that 235 voted for May's deal. It seems kind of contradictory...

Lots of Tories want to have Brexit. They don't want No Deal, but they think that if it's off the table, and it's just a choice between Her Deal and No Brexit, we might end up with No Brexit (or a long delay leading to an eventual brexit on much softer terms). They weren't voting for No Deal, just voting to not rule it out. I think most of them are bluffing, but some of them aren't.

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On the Benn amendment - I haven't followed the details, but it's the latestt iteration of the Cooper-Bowles thing (see earlier in this thread). On the one hand, most people supporting it don't particularly want to take back power from the government in the long term. In particular, the Labour leadership certainly doesn't, because they might be the government some day. On the other hand, restoring democracy has been a backburner for a long time, and occasionally flares up - Labour went through a phase of this at the end of their reign, but managed to fob the backbenchers off with fairly minor concessions.

In theory, it needn't be a radical long-term change. But once it's done once, it may be done more easily next time. And the longer the chaos goes on, the more the idea of backbenchers taking back more control becomes more appealing.

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On the Bryant amendment - your thinking is indeed why the amendment was suggested. If MPs were to put it on record that they considered MV3 unconstitutional, that would be a massive blow to the government - the Speaker would be virtually forced to prohibit it.

But there's two problems. First, does anyone really want to be on record preventing a democratic vote that will, we're told solve Brexit? Probably not. Well, some people probably do, but I suspect none of the party leaderships do, so they may have pressured Bryant to drop it.

More pressingly, though: what if MPs voted down the motion? If MPs put it on record that they consider MV3 constitutional and they would like to express their opinions on the PM's motion in order to exercise their democratic duty as the voice of the people... then the Speaker would be virtually forced to allow it. The Speaker is only interpreting Parliament's rules, after all, and Parliament can rewrite those rules at any time, including implicitly. And politically, Bercow may be a bloody-minded man who knows his days are numbered, but even he probably wouldn't relish being the one man defying both the Will of the People and the Will of Parliament to impose his own wishes on the nation single-handedly, particularly when the future of the nation is at stake!

Much better for everyone to keep quiet now, and let Bercow independently decide not to allow it. Then everyone can nod their heads and explain to their constituents "we had no problem with another vote of course, but the Speaker told us the rules don't permit that, and it wouldn't have been appropriate for us to interfere in his decision-making". Don't stick your head over the parapet when it's somebody else's job to do that for you...

Now, if Bercow lets MV3 go ahead, then somebody might try to voice a vote to pressure him to change his mind...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 8:52 pm Lots of Tories want to have Brexit. They don't want No Deal, but they think that if it's off the table, and it's just a choice between Her Deal and No Brexit, we might end up with No Brexit (or a long delay leading to an eventual brexit on much softer terms). They weren't voting for No Deal, just voting to not rule it out. I think most of them are bluffing, but some of them aren't.

The Tories were instructed to vote against the motion as amended - a three-line whip. That's why Salmoneus has remarked that May's authority is in tatters.

Richard W wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 10:05 pm

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 8:52 pm Lots of Tories want to have Brexit. They don't want No Deal, but they think that if it's off the table, and it's just a choice between Her Deal and No Brexit, we might end up with No Brexit (or a long delay leading to an eventual brexit on much softer terms). They weren't voting for No Deal, just voting to not rule it out. I think most of them are bluffing, but some of them aren't.

The Tories were instructed to vote against the motion as amended - a three-line whip. That's why Salmoneus has remarked that May's authority is in tatters.

But, as someone remarked recently, the only thing we can be sure of about the near future is that Theresa May will, nominally at least, remain in charge.

Nick Boles has resigned from his local Conservative association after they tried to deselect him. He says he wants to keep the Conservative whip if it's offered on acceptable terms... I assume this means he's effectively a Tory-minded independent going forward, since what can the whips threaten him with? Being kicked out of the party that effectively already pushed him out?

The strong and stable majority is one down...

Oh, that's interesting!


This takes us back to our discussions a couple of years ago about Labour, and the fact that in UK politics there are effectively two sets of parties, defined in unrelated ways, which just happen to almost always coincide - the Party, qua formal organisation, and the Parliamentary Party qua parliamentary faction. The former was invented to support the latter, and to make people feel involved in the latter, but has very little direct control over the latter. So, with Corbyn, the issue was the the Official Party has a set of rules that defines its leader, but the Parliamentary Party is not obliged to follow them.

In this case, the issue is that the two parties have different ways of defining membership - you're a member of the Official Party if you pay a certain fee to the Party, and you're a member of the Parliamentary Party if you agree to obey the whip; and in each case the Party can reject you, but in different ways, by different bodies. In practice, these two memberships always go together - why would you join the official party if you don't intend to take the whip, why would you take the whip of a party you aren't a member of, etc. But they don't have to! Boles may well be a member of the parliamentary party now, but not the official party.


This may also connect to a (now largely theoretical) difference between the two major parties. Labour is a national party; the Tories aren't. The Tories, at least in theory, are an umbrella organisation of local groups, called Conservative Associations. This used to be important: the Tories were much less organised and more democratic. Over time, the two parties have become more similar, and more professional. But still, in theory, Labour members are members of the Labour Party first, and members of the Labour Party who live in a particular area are by default members of their local party. In contrast, Tories are members of their local Conservative Association first, and membes of the national Conservative Party as a result of the affiliation of their Association.

This makes it ideologically easier for someone to leave their Association while claiming to still be a member of the Party - Boles can say he has an issue with the local association, not with the party as a whole. It would be harder for a Labour MP, because they would have to formally leave the national party.

Do the Conservative associations have the right to secede? Is this a voluntary confederation? For example, could an association sever its links with the national party and associate with another national party, say, UKIP, while retaining its existing legal structure, local assets etc.?

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2019 4:22 pm In this case, the issue is that the two parties have different ways of defining membership - you're a member of the Official Party if you pay a certain fee to the Party, and you're a member of the Parliamentary Party if you agree to obey the whip; and in each case the Party can reject you, but in different ways, by different bodies. In practice, these two memberships always go together - why would you join the official party if you don't intend to take the whip, why would you take the whip of a party you aren't a member of, etc. But they don't have to! Boles may well be a member of the parliamentary party now, but not the official party.

Wasn't there also the special case of the SDLP Westminster MPs, back when the SDLP still had Westminster MPs, who would take the Labour whip?

Some interesting links reposted from Naked Capitalism:

How the backstop deal was done - and why Cox blew it apart
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-co ... -deal-cox/

The Prime Minister of Humiliation
http://www.spiegel.de/international/eur ... 58101.html

The Fake News Nazi - Corbyn, Williamson And The Anti-Semitism Scandal
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/aler ... -nazi.html

chris_notts wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 2:20 pm
The Fake News Nazi - Corbyn, Williamson And The Anti-Semitism Scandal
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/aler ... -nazi.html

Having skimmed the Wikipedia article on Media Lens, I'm not going to click on that link. Let me guess, it's all about how Corbyn and his followers are completely blameless, and the fact that they look to many people like a bunch of bigots and friends of bigots is just the result of a relentless media propaganda campaign against them?

Seriously, Chris Notts, do you really not see how all that Corbynite talk of "Our great leader is totally great and has never done anything wrong, and all the claims that he's a bigot are the result of a relentless media campaign against him by evil worthless biased journalists" looks like to someone who's used to following American politics? Especially if you literally use the phrase "fake news"?