It's not that difficult of an intellectual exercise to find parallels between one time and place and Weimar Germany.
Honestly this article is a bit intellectually dishonest by saying things like "It seemed as though nothing could go wrong" in Weimar Germany in 1920. There were outright revolutions going on at that time. Like large groups of revolutionaries and freikorps machine gunning each other in the streets of Berlin within 12 months of that election. Did people back then really feel like "nothing could go wrong?"
Paramilitaries and UK armed forces were fighting in parts of the UK relatively recently and that peace is under threat by a no-deal Brexit so I'm not sure that is the best analogy.
Well, the chief of the police of Northern Ireland seems to think there is an increased risk of paramilitary activity of there is a hard-Brexit causing a breakdown of the GFA:
A well researched but ultimately rather lazy article there the author posits "Is Trump really a Nazi?" with the answer "No, not really". There are a few items thrown in about the UK just to keep it looking up to date.
In general it is an good article on the political changes in the Weimar Republic but the interesting part is only in he last section where the author discusses the failing in democratic process which lead to the rise of Trump and Farage (Johnson is an opportunist and ultimately irrelevant). Farage should be give much more attention as he is the central character (at least in the press) that dragged British politics further to the right and capitalized on the prejudices of older people who are more motivated to vote that their younger, more liberal or left leaning counterparts.
Farage is deeply inspired by what is happening in the US. The changes in UK politics as it moves to a more presidential style still have a long way to play out. UKIP and the Brexit Party probably have a parallel with the Tea Party. In a sense the UK is about 10-15 years behind what is happening in the US. If there is any comparison to be made in what is happening in the UK with history then it should be made with the US. That would provide an interesting guide to how the whole Brexit mess is going to play out.
Parliament is dismissed regularly. The current dismissal is 4 days longer than normal (https://order-order.com/2019/08/28/boriss-prorogation-will-s...). The current length of sitting is the longest in a very long time (it's currently two years, it's normally one).
It's not clear what people who want to overturn the referendum would do in those four days that they couldn't do in the previous three years.
I supported Remain (here's me on HN trying to get support for Stronger In back in 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952724), but something like a million more people voted leave.
Comparing attempts to implement the referendum outcome to Hitler or Erdogan is bizarre and clickbaity. Flagged.
Of course a dismissal of parliament is nothing out of the ordinary, but you are ignoring the context.
The government is dismissing the parliament not because they want to solicit the voters' input in the form of new elections, but rather because they want to shut down the voters' objections against the no-deal Brexit (which arguably wasn't even on the ballot in the first place!) and paralyze the parliament until they can't prevent it anymore.
And expecting journalists or historians not to draw comparisons across successful or attempted end runs around a relatively democratic system is a little strange.
In practice, though, I suspect the number of leave-voters who didn't think a no-deal Brexit would be possible is a lot larger than the winning margin.
And then the leave voters believed the BS about the NHS too. The Referendum was ill posed and the voters were ill-informed, mostly through the fault of the government, the Leave Campaign, Billionaire donors and even Putin's involvement.
> I suspect the number of leave-voters who didn't think a no-deal Brexit would be possible is a lot larger than the winning margin.
A no deal must be possible to get a deal. Likewise the EU wants to sell its dairy, prosecco, and cars to the UK but wouldn't dream of accepting a terrible deal for the EU. It's possible the a punitive EU might sacrifice the EU and UK economy by refusing to provide a deal for a few months until the pain becomes too much. UK needs to plan for that.
> the BS about the NHS too.
The UK does send 300M to the EU. We get 150M back to spend as the EU desires, the rest is used by the EU outside the UK. Nobody disputes that, it depends whether you think it's OK that we get half it back, or that it's not OK the EU determines how we spend our money.
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Edit: rate limited, but to reply to the person below:
> Apparently some people flag/down-vote me because they don't like the facts.
Complaining about moderation should be done via email to thee admins and not comments per the HN guidelines. But OK, let's go through your facts.
> It's a fact that many Leave Voters did not expect a no-deal under any circumstances.
Yep agreed. It still needs to be on the table, as it does from the EU side.
> Even the excuse that they need that option to get a deal presupposes that they don't want a no-deal and don't expect it to happen.
Yep agreed. Long term I don't think the EU or the UK wants mutually assured destruction.
> The scenario of the EU trying to "torture" the UK with a few month of third-country status is even more absurd
It's consistent with some of the angrier statements from Jean Claude Juncker and other EU leaders.
> because that presupposes that the EU has no significant disadvantages from withholding a deal
Agreed, the EU has significant disadvantages from withholding a deal. That does not mean the EU will behave rationally or put the EUs (the organisation) self interest ahead of EU member states who wish to keep selling their product in one of the world's largest markets.
> rendering the "leverage" of the no-deal option void.
That doesn't follow. The EU wouldn't agree to a deal that harmed the EU, so they'd also prefer WTO if that was all Britain offered. Likewise the opposite.
> And even then this argument is still wrong: There is no requirement for a no-deal option to have lots of leverage in the negotiation
Why? How can you negotiate a desirable outcome if you cannot walk away and must agree to any deal offered?
> and even with the no-deal on the table the UK didn't get anywhere near the deal they wanted, proving the leave-campaign to be extremely naive or outright liers.
Is that determined yet? Negotiation is still ongoing.
> And no, the leave-campaign never acknowledged or promoted, before the referendum, that the UK is getting half of it back.
Yep agreed.
> They explicitly stated, time and time again "let's put that money into the NHS". Which was impossible back then and oh, look! it's still not possible today.
It would be possible to put the entire 300M into to the NHS, as the UK would control how the money is spent. But it would not be desirable to.
> But Putin, who also financed and supported the leave campaign, likes all those options.
Even many Leave-voters say they feel duped by the NHS claims and other things. Nobody prevents parliament to put 150m additionally into the NHS right now, the EU has never had any say in that!
It's really strange that some people want to push through a catastrophic brexit against the current will of the majority for "nationalistic" reasons and to strengthen the UK, but they don't have a problem that Putin clearly wanted this to happen.
Do these people really think Putin wants Brexit because it's good for the UK?
> Nobody prevents parliament to put 150m additionally into the NHS right now, the EU has never had any say in that!
The fact that we're giving 150M to other countries that doesn't come back to us prevents it.
The biggest issue with Leave.EU found by the Electoral Commission was around spending limits. Wikipedia isn't a reference, but because I'm lazy:
> On 19 July 2019, this was quashed by the High Court as the fine given by the Electoral Commission was found to be erroneous of fact, erroneous of law and was perversely unreasonable by the test of Wednesbury unreasonableness.
You can't just switch between 350m and 150m at will. 350m was the number promised, and it was a lie.
And even the 150m is at best misleading, because the EU is spending the money in the common interest of all member states. Disparities in the common market are not to the UK's benefit. And Britain already got a remarkably good deal on those costs because of all the whining.
The next deal, in 10-20 years when the changed demographic is begging for reentry in the EU will be a lot less favorable and maybe the UK actually has to pay its fair share of the burden?
It's a fact that many Leave Voters did not expect a no-deal under any circumstances. Even the excuse that they need that option to get a deal presupposes that they don't want a no-deal and don't expect it to happen.
The scenario of the EU trying to "torture" the UK with a few month of third-country status is even more absurd, because that presupposes that the EU has no significant disadvantages from withholding a deal, rendering the "leverage" of the no-deal option void.
And even then this argument is still wrong: There is no requirement for a no-deal option to have lots of leverage in the negotiation, and even with the no-deal on the table the UK didn't get anywhere near the deal they wanted, proving the leave-campaign to be extremely naive or outright liers.
And no, the leave-campaign never acknowledged or promoted, before the referendum, that the UK is getting half of it back. They explicitly stated, time and time again "let's put that money into the NHS". Which was impossible back then and oh, look! it's still not possible today. By my standards that's clearly a lie.
But Putin, who also financed and supported the leave campaign, likes all those options. Total Chaos in No-deal Brexit is probably his favorite option, though.
This submission has been flagged killed. I suspect that your multiple replies to several different comments may have contributed towards this automated or manual action.
For 'the voters' I think you mean MPs. The voters haven't had a vote either way on this point and opinion polling has not exactly been either consistent or reliable on it. The MPs who are upset at this seem not to want an election for some reason.
Also, they're not dismissing parliament, but suspending it.
I don't know any poll where "No Deal" had a majority. Do you?
The voters now have a lot more information. They know the NHS claims were lies. They know which billionaires funded Leave. They know Putin had a hand in it. They know that the EU won't agree to the pie-in-the-sky one sided fairy-deal the Leave-voters have been promised for a few years now.
Why not hold a new referendum with more information and more precise choices?
We all know the answer to that question though, rich powerful people getting richer and more powerful don't want plebs getting in the way of their plans.
I suspect the "rich and powerful" people will actually get hurt. Not as much as the less rich, but still.
The UK government doesn't have any of its ducks in a row, deal or no deal. They almost certainly will have a recession, they will almost certainly lose a good chunk of their financial industry. It's just a fact of life if you are on an island and suddenly choke your ports.
The alternative to virtually closing those ports (for lack of resources in screening) is to do no screening and just accept the EU standards. Now without having a say in those standards. Good luck...
This prorogation is significantly longer than usual (see: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-parliament...). It is usually for less than a week and this is for up to 34 days. The Government has failed to give a reasonable justification for the extra duration. Every complaint about "blocking" remainer MPs makes clear the real reason. Trying to block a no-deal Brexit of course does not entail overturning the referendum result as no-one was proposing no-deal during the referendum.
That said, I agree with you that Parliament doesn't seem capable of much. Personally I think too many MPs are caught up in their own importance and should have recognised the need for something like citizens' assemblies long ago. If Macron can organise them after some protests why are we still stuck where we were three years ago?
I'm not sure that demonstrating that Major used prorogation to avoid scrutiny of a scandal really changes much. So we're agreed that PMs prorogue Parliament for abnormally long periods when they want to avoid awkward questions? Why might Johnson be doing that now? Why risk all of these negative headlines to avoid just four sitting days?
Of course, it's also absurd that Parliament has carried on with its usual summer and conference recesses as if nothing important is happening.
I suspect because the last few days before the deadline will be the peak of negotiations, because the decision of whether to leave the EU was decided by a referendum in 2016, and because referendums should not be overridden by MPs.
Prorogations are routine. Prorogations to suspend Parliament to stop it doing things inconvenient to the executive really aren't. As with so many things with Brexit, it puts us beyond the conventions of Parliamentary government.
I agree that it's not a Reichstag fire situation. For American readers the closest analogy is probably with FDR's court packing plan: within the law, but an attempt to end-run another branch of government and take its power away.
Nevertheless, opponents (including within his own party) saw that as corrosive to good government and stopped it. I think they were right to do so. The line between that (and the Johnson situation) and the 'soft authoritarian' democracies with executive-dominated institutions is not all that wide.
Perhaps a technical point but we don't have 'parliamentary government'. The House of Commons is not, and never has been 'the government' (ie the executive). It is a check on what the government can do, as is the Lords - the government cannot change the law, raise taxes or raise a standing army without their consent.
Although its not a phrase associated with Westminster (its more closely associated with former Dominions when they became self governing) it might be better described as 'responsible government' ie the government is held responsible by Parliament.
This tension between Parliament and the Crown has been a part of the UK's (and before that, England's) constitutional settlement since Magna Carta in 1215, and arguably before that.
Differing technical vocabularies, I think: I meant Parliamentary as opposed to presidential or semi-presidential (the two other main categories of Western-style democracy in political science). Americanists in particular see our insistence that Parliament is not part of government quite bizarre - they include the judicial branch too.
You're absolutely right that Parliament hasn't governed directly for a long time (arguably not since the civil war, and that was itself a highly unusual period where some questionable constitutional innovations happened). It's also the case that the question of whether the Crown can govern without constraint from Parliament has been settled in principle for centuries: it can't. The Commons has had to repeatedly assert this over the years, and it looks like they're going to do so again.
What happens "regularly" is irrelevant, given the extraordinary circumstances. And it's not a matter of "overturning" the referendum -- Parliament could just pass a new Brexit deal and reopen negotiations. If BoJo wants a no-deal Brexit he should seek parliamentary approval for it.
Seeing this article taken seriously and comparisons made in the comments between Boris and Hitler are revolting. At worst he's using a legal trick to make sure the peoples will is fulfilled - what a monster.
You want to know about a really undemocratic act in central Europe? The German parlament passed a law they weren't allowed to (because the necessary number of people weren't present). The opposition complained, but were shut down. Yes, that really happened. But it's okay because it was done by the good guys. No turmoil about that.
Yes we do. It's uncodified (meaning not all in one document) and in very small part unwritten but we still have one.
This is politically controversial but not in the grand scheme of things a big deal in my view. The anti Brexit groups have been playing hardball with legal and constitutional 'innovations' for some time and now the pro Brexit camp are responding in kind.
It's also worth noting that John Major used this very device in 1997 to avoid scrutiny over the Cash for Questions affair and it's also been used for political purposes recently in Canada.
The rhetoric of the anti Brexit side in the media over this is doing Johnson's work for him - he wants a 'people vs the establishment' election (and he'd likely do very well with that) and people who lost the referendum screaming 'coup' plays right into that narrative.
Boris Johnson is the embodiment of establishment and elite himself.
Voters did not have a chance to vote on what he is doing. It's virtually certain that a majority of voters didn't want this at the time of the referendum, nor do they want it right now.
Beginning with the multiple lies from Johnson and his ilk, and not ending with giving false hope on an extremely beneficial and one-sided deal with the EU.
The question of the referendum was ill posed and completely botched, even without mentioning that Russia also "lend" a hand to the Leave campaign.
By definition however, we do. From Google: "a body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed."
Most people know what I meant. Many may even have figured out that it was a light-hearted jest about the UK's current - yes - constitutional and political struggles.
To be clear, yes they do have some kind of unwritten constitution.
I really don't like the system they arrived at, however they arrived at it. Voting is imbalanced, Elites are more hereditary than in most democracies, and it's harder to enforce what I believe of as Human rights (see surveillance etc). On top of that the political discussion and media is more nasty than most, also.
> I really don't like the system they arrived at, however they arrived at it. Voting is imbalanced, ...
The election of representatives in the UK may be flawed and imbalanced, I agree. But in this case they held a referendum, which cannot in any case be considered as "flawed", the Brexit option won clearly, and now the government has the democratic duty to fulfill the choice taken in the referendum.
Of course the referendum was flawed. The Leave campaign was lying and there was foreign influence. And the question on the ballot was the wrong one.
Most leave-voters don't and didn't want the no-deal total chaos they are getting now.
There is no absolute "duty" to implement any referendum. If the referendum had any other outcome, wouldn't the Leave campaign have lied, bullied and cheated their way to another referendum a few years later?
It's not democratic to ram through your political agenda on the back of a referendum a few years ago, against what the voters want. It's even less democratic to fail to even ask what the voters want now.
The leave-campaign wasn't noted for moderate calm-headed journalism, nor were the boulevard magazines which created the sentiment against immigrants and the EU in the first place ever calm-headed and moderate.
Seen from the outside, both sides of this political dialogue sound equally bigoted and ridiculous. This is sad because (as an european who doesn't want the UK to leave), the "remainer" bigotry is a relatively recent phenomenon that seems completely unnecessary, and even contrary to the cause it deems to support.
Can you substantiate "bigotry" or are you satisfied with just dropping the insult?
There is no refutation that the current Brexit plans will result at best in temporary Chaos and a recession, at worst a permanent damage to the UK economy. Banks are already leaving. EU Academics are leaving in droves. Companies in the UK are holding back investments.
So the small part of the Remainers' predictions which haven't come true already are quite on track to coming true in the near future.
> Can you substantiate "bigotry" or are you satisfied with just dropping the insult?
The title of this article on Prospect Magazine is a crystal clear example of that. I agree that brexit will probably have bad economic consequences. Yet, openly calling the brexiters "nazis" is an insult to intelligence and an example of bigotry, besides being really counter-productive. Imagine that you are a "moderate" brexiter, not fanatically sure about it. Then you see an army of journalists that call you a nazi because of that. Will this steer you away from wanting the brexit?
You may have a read a different article. The one I read does not call the Brexiteers "Nazis" and does not reveal any political bias. It's just that stating the facts makes it look like you are against Brexit, because, well, it is a total mess.
Honestly this article is a bit intellectually dishonest by saying things like "It seemed as though nothing could go wrong" in Weimar Germany in 1920. There were outright revolutions going on at that time. Like large groups of revolutionaries and freikorps machine gunning each other in the streets of Berlin within 12 months of that election. Did people back then really feel like "nothing could go wrong?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssYACBz8gzs&t=17s