And on a non-binding, simple majority vote. The results were like what, 52-48% for such a momentous decision? Should’ve required something like a 60% minimum, though they’d just have kept calling for the same vote every year.
The UK doesn’t have a referendum procedure for constitutional amendment, or a 2/3 supermajority in the legislature. It’s basically simple majority in the legislature for anything that might be called constitutional, as any act of Parliament can do anything other than binding future Parliaments.
There are other countries which do have 2/3 supermajority.
looks
Finland has a 2/3 requirement of legislators, for example.
Why? I mean, if you’re saying that the bar was set lower for specifically Brexit then for similar actions, I could understand taking issue with it in that one might feel that the higher bar should be used.
But why would there not being a supermajority constitutional amendment bar make not using one on Brexit more objectionable?
So, in all honesty, I probably wouldn’t say that the UK has a constitution – that is, there is no well-defined set of rules that are treated in any way different than the others.
The UK had a monarchy at one point, where the monarch had very real political power. Then real, codified constraints were placed on the monarch’s power, like the Magna Carta. The monarch could not just disregard these.
So in that sense, the UK was a constitutional monarchy, where political power resided in a monarch who was constrained in a very real sense by a constitution.
The problem is that the process of removing political power from the monarch continued, and today the monarch really has no political power at all.
The House of Lords has also been stripped of virtually all political power.
The UK today is basically run by a simple majority in the House of Commons. I have seen this described as an absolute republic (contrast with an absolute monarchy), which I think is a not unreasonable position to take. There is no rule that constrains the House of Commons other than that future Parliaments cannot be bound by the current Parliament. The House of Commons has overwritten Magna Carta text the same way they would any other law. It does not constrain how they may act. Because the monarch has no real remaining power, the old constitutional rules that did constrain the monarch are basically inert.
The British legal take is that they have an uncodified constitution. That is, they do have a set of rules, but they aren’t enumerated and the idea is that there is just some things that people would refuse to do because it simply isn’t done.
My problem is that I have a very hard time distinguishing between that and any state that doesn’t have a constitution. Surely there are also conventions in every country and situations where ultimately, a leader might be disobeyed.
And it’s hard to add a constitution within the current legal order to constrain future Parliaments, as the one rule is that they basically cannot do that. I think that you’d probably have to do a constitutional convention and get both Parliamentary and popular support and say that this is somehow “special” and permits binding Parliament.
My impression is that EU membership was going to be a way to basically bootstrap something akin to constitutional restrictions into place in the UK. Basically, the UK could leave the EU if Parliament wanted, so a majority in Parliament would be where sovereignty was vested. However, as long as they never actually exercised that right, in practice, EU treaty restrictions would be followed, and so that provides a practical framework to build on. The ECJ could say “this law of Parliament violates EU treaties”. Unless Parliament then said “okay, we’re ignoring EU treaties”, possibly via Brexit, then there can be long-running constraints on Parliament. But Brexit kinda nuked that.
I remember wondering on /r/ukpolitics whether there might be a constitutional convention as a result of Brexit, since I would think that Brexit would kind of force a reset on all that.
I also noticed some people in the UK writing things along these lines, that post-Brexit, suddenly a lot of constitutional issues become very prominent and that maybe it’s time to codify a constitution. Let me google up an example…
No one knew? I’m sorry but pretty much every single repercussion the UK is feeling right now was rather obvious when you take the time to think on it and consider the EU’s point of view as well. The only people who are surprised about stuff like being treated like every other outside country by the EU were the ones who didn’t think one second about it and wanted to believe the lies.
That it would be shitty was obvious. But exactly how shitty was impossible to nail down, and hence impossible to argue against effectively. Every different Brexiteer had a different idea of the outcome, which changed under any kind of pressure. They hid behind non-statements like “Brexit means Brexit”.
Why do you think it took so long and so much arguing to get to any kind of agreement afterwards? We knew they were going to trash a load of laws and retain some, but couldn’t know which because the Leave camp didn’t have a plan or a manifesto.
They had a bus, but we know how accurate that was. Or are you arguing that they should be allowed to blatantly lie in political campaigns and we should expect the populace to know in advance which ones are false? People are not that smart.
Should’ve required something like a 60% minimum, though they’d just have kept calling for the same vote every year.
This discussion came up back around Brexit.
While I can understand an argument in favor of stability – you don’t want to sit at 50% and have things waver back and forth – there are a couple issues.
First, for better or for worse, this is not really the international convention. In the referendums I’ve dug up for independence, the norm is plurality of votes. This isn’t quite independence, but it’s probably most analogous to it, especially given that one expects ongoing integration.
Second, it seems to me that to bias towards the status quo, one would have also needed to have also met that bar to join. In fact, there was no referendum at the time of joining, an issue which had its own controversy. If a 60% supermajority is required to leave, it seems to me that the same should be true of joining.
I think there is a strong argument for considering people who didn’t vote as accepting of the status quo, at. which point leave voters only accounted for about 30% of eligible voters.
My theory is a group motivated to change the status quo is far more likely to be mobilised to vote on that issue than a group in favour of maintaining the status quo, i.e. being forced to respond to that group. Because you’re trying mobilise a group to do nothing, there’s no impetus to the counter-movement. I think any vote like that is naturally biased towards the group seeking to change something, though it would be hard to quantify the extent of the effect and would only apply to specific single issue votes. I said this during the lead up to the Brexit vote, that more people in the country would prefer to stay, but the “leave” voter base would be over-represented at the ballot. I think the whole democratic system fails to function unless everyone is compelled to vote, because of weird effects like this.
Still can’t believe we voted to leave. Madness.
And on a non-binding, simple majority vote. The results were like what, 52-48% for such a momentous decision? Should’ve required something like a 60% minimum, though they’d just have kept calling for the same vote every year.
This is what gets me. Require 2/3 for constitution changes, but 1/2 to leave EU?
The UK doesn’t have a referendum procedure for constitutional amendment, or a 2/3 supermajority in the legislature. It’s basically simple majority in the legislature for anything that might be called constitutional, as any act of Parliament can do anything other than binding future Parliaments.
There are other countries which do have 2/3 supermajority.
looks
Finland has a 2/3 requirement of legislators, for example.
That makes it worse, to be honest
Why? I mean, if you’re saying that the bar was set lower for specifically Brexit then for similar actions, I could understand taking issue with it in that one might feel that the higher bar should be used.
But why would there not being a supermajority constitutional amendment bar make not using one on Brexit more objectionable?
Oh, okay, get you.
So, in all honesty, I probably wouldn’t say that the UK has a constitution – that is, there is no well-defined set of rules that are treated in any way different than the others.
The UK had a monarchy at one point, where the monarch had very real political power. Then real, codified constraints were placed on the monarch’s power, like the Magna Carta. The monarch could not just disregard these.
So in that sense, the UK was a constitutional monarchy, where political power resided in a monarch who was constrained in a very real sense by a constitution.
The problem is that the process of removing political power from the monarch continued, and today the monarch really has no political power at all.
The House of Lords has also been stripped of virtually all political power.
The UK today is basically run by a simple majority in the House of Commons. I have seen this described as an absolute republic (contrast with an absolute monarchy), which I think is a not unreasonable position to take. There is no rule that constrains the House of Commons other than that future Parliaments cannot be bound by the current Parliament. The House of Commons has overwritten Magna Carta text the same way they would any other law. It does not constrain how they may act. Because the monarch has no real remaining power, the old constitutional rules that did constrain the monarch are basically inert.
The British legal take is that they have an uncodified constitution. That is, they do have a set of rules, but they aren’t enumerated and the idea is that there is just some things that people would refuse to do because it simply isn’t done.
My problem is that I have a very hard time distinguishing between that and any state that doesn’t have a constitution. Surely there are also conventions in every country and situations where ultimately, a leader might be disobeyed.
And it’s hard to add a constitution within the current legal order to constrain future Parliaments, as the one rule is that they basically cannot do that. I think that you’d probably have to do a constitutional convention and get both Parliamentary and popular support and say that this is somehow “special” and permits binding Parliament.
My impression is that EU membership was going to be a way to basically bootstrap something akin to constitutional restrictions into place in the UK. Basically, the UK could leave the EU if Parliament wanted, so a majority in Parliament would be where sovereignty was vested. However, as long as they never actually exercised that right, in practice, EU treaty restrictions would be followed, and so that provides a practical framework to build on. The ECJ could say “this law of Parliament violates EU treaties”. Unless Parliament then said “okay, we’re ignoring EU treaties”, possibly via Brexit, then there can be long-running constraints on Parliament. But Brexit kinda nuked that.
I remember wondering on /r/ukpolitics whether there might be a constitutional convention as a result of Brexit, since I would think that Brexit would kind of force a reset on all that.
I also noticed some people in the UK writing things along these lines, that post-Brexit, suddenly a lot of constitutional issues become very prominent and that maybe it’s time to codify a constitution. Let me google up an example…
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The_British_Constitution_after_Brexit.pdf
This document uses the term “elective dictatorship”, which I suppose is sort of another way of writing “absolute republic”.
The problem is that no one knew what leaving like like, in part because the Leave camp danced around it.
If Leave had to campaign against the actual terms, the vote would have failed.
No one knew? I’m sorry but pretty much every single repercussion the UK is feeling right now was rather obvious when you take the time to think on it and consider the EU’s point of view as well. The only people who are surprised about stuff like being treated like every other outside country by the EU were the ones who didn’t think one second about it and wanted to believe the lies.
That it would be shitty was obvious. But exactly how shitty was impossible to nail down, and hence impossible to argue against effectively. Every different Brexiteer had a different idea of the outcome, which changed under any kind of pressure. They hid behind non-statements like “Brexit means Brexit”.
Why do you think it took so long and so much arguing to get to any kind of agreement afterwards? We knew they were going to trash a load of laws and retain some, but couldn’t know which because the Leave camp didn’t have a plan or a manifesto.
They had a bus, but we know how accurate that was. Or are you arguing that they should be allowed to blatantly lie in political campaigns and we should expect the populace to know in advance which ones are false? People are not that smart.
This discussion came up back around Brexit.
While I can understand an argument in favor of stability – you don’t want to sit at 50% and have things waver back and forth – there are a couple issues.
First, for better or for worse, this is not really the international convention. In the referendums I’ve dug up for independence, the norm is plurality of votes. This isn’t quite independence, but it’s probably most analogous to it, especially given that one expects ongoing integration.
Second, it seems to me that to bias towards the status quo, one would have also needed to have also met that bar to join. In fact, there was no referendum at the time of joining, an issue which had its own controversy. If a 60% supermajority is required to leave, it seems to me that the same should be true of joining.
I think there is a strong argument for considering people who didn’t vote as accepting of the status quo, at. which point leave voters only accounted for about 30% of eligible voters.
It’s insanity
My theory is a group motivated to change the status quo is far more likely to be mobilised to vote on that issue than a group in favour of maintaining the status quo, i.e. being forced to respond to that group. Because you’re trying mobilise a group to do nothing, there’s no impetus to the counter-movement. I think any vote like that is naturally biased towards the group seeking to change something, though it would be hard to quantify the extent of the effect and would only apply to specific single issue votes. I said this during the lead up to the Brexit vote, that more people in the country would prefer to stay, but the “leave” voter base would be over-represented at the ballot. I think the whole democratic system fails to function unless everyone is compelled to vote, because of weird effects like this.