If the law as set by the MPs in Parliament that we have elected and if the law as according to "international law" are in conflict then what does "the rule of law" mean?
Does it mean following the law as set by MPs elected to Parliament - or does it mean following "international law".
As a sovereign country laws set by MPs we elect must be supreme.
It means following the law set by Parliament as Parliament is supreme under the UK constitution, in any case even if the ICJ ruled against the UK as the UK is a permanent member of the UN Security Council it could veto any sanctions being imposed on it following an ICJ judgement.
Even if breaking international law is not advisable legally there is not much can be done against the UK government because of it though it might affect future Treaty negotiations
Anthony Browne MP (who?) Just put it a Stakhanivite shift on R5L for the government. Hope it was noted by the higher ups. Who appear not to be keen on peeping out the trench.
1. This government has a cavalier contempt for the rule of law and most aspects of our democratic system - Lewis yesterday, attacks on judicial review, prorogation of parliament, attacks on the Civil Service, dodgy procurement policies and so on. Cyclefree articulates these issues much better than I can.
2. The great British public really couldn't care less, and these things have no, or only a marginal, impact on government popularity.
3. There are still enough (just) Tory MPs to be concerned about this, so regardless of the public disinterest the government is storing up problems for itself, and I wouldn't be surprised if serious fractures emerge soon within the Conservative Party (Big G/HYUFD/Philip T seem to be falling out, for example).
4. While each individual event counts for little, the cumulative effect of all this will lead to government unpopularity as a negative narrative builds. Covid is not about to end any time soon, but the transition period is. Coping with these events would be a struggle for a competent government with a talented Cabinet. For this one, it's just too much.
5. I'd expect Labour to have a significant lead in the polls by March 2021.
6. I reserve the right to change this prediction at any time - events, dear boy.
With Brexit over, no Corbyn, a feeble economy, and parlous public finances, the Cons have a big challenge to retain power next time. I'm not sure that keeping the "culture wars" thing on the go (which is all they have left) will be enough for them. It could be that even in 2024, after a decade of Tory government, the Red Wallers & Co continue to prioritize the patriotic purity of the Last Night at the Proms over their wallets but I doubt it myself.
Boris had better perform at PMQs in less than half an hour's time ... the knives will be out today alright!
I wonder if Sir Keir will go easy. There's an argument now for Labour keeping Boris in place. I think they'd fear Rishi as a replacement far more.
I think Rishi Sunak is massively overestimated. He, like most of the cabinet, is as lightweight as his boss, though at least he does have an appearance of attention to detail and clearly is not lazy like Johnson is. He would be better at PMQs, but then let's face it, anyone can see (except Johnson's fanboys), so would any old muppet.
Interesting shifts on PB. As first ultra-Brexitism and then even more assertiive Boris-ism has got underway, all these posters seem to have either completely or partly decoupled from the government recently :
MaxPB, DavidHerdson, Richard Nabavi, TheScreamingEagles, CasinoRoyale, CarlottaVance and BigG.
Still loyally fighting the government's corner are reliable stalwarts Philip, HYUFD, contrarian and a couple of others.
Fine, I am happy to stand with the 40% of voters still voting Tory on the latest poll, the fact PB has a comfortable Starmer Labour/LD majority amongst posters now combined with the TUD and MalcG Nats in Scotland it seems does not change the fact that in the country there is much more support for Boris even if only a small minority on here back him
May's backstop would have avoided anything like that as a possibility.
Yep. There was a very good reason why she insisted on that approach rather than the EU's original proposal which is what Boris went back to. As was noted at the time, it was a quite a coup for the British negotiators. All thrown away in the short-term interests of the career of Boris Johnson.
It was not a coup.
EU: We want control over NI. May: That's unacceptable! Have control over the whole of the United Kingdom instead.
Some "coup"
No, because it was a backstop, specifically designed to give both parties a strong incentive to agree a deal. The EU wouldn't have wanted it to persist because it would give the UK full access to the Single Market without having to pay anything and with only limited level-playing-field provisions, and the UK wouldn't have wanted it to persist for the reason you give. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a better solution than Boris's - not perfect, but better - for the reasons which the government belatedly now seems to have got round to trying to understand.
I don't care what the EU would have wanted or not wanted.
What matters is the UK. What the UK wants or doesn't want and the UK having the power to determine that democratically.
If you can not change the law at an election then you have ceased to be a democracy. That is why international law is subordinate to domestic law.
Good for you for sticking to your guns on this. Personally I don't have the time and inclination to enter into prolonged debate lasting days with the cacophany of contrary voices on here, but I'm grateful that you have.
We have got where we are because in 2019 the EU clearly sought to exploit the deadlock in parliament to impose the worst possible terms on the UK in the hope that we would either fold or eventually have second thoughts about Brexit altogether. Johnson was stuck with that parliamentary limbo when he took over, in a position of political weakness in which he needed to sign up to something within weeks in order to stand a chance in an election needed to break the deadlock. But now it is clear that the EU is still trying to exploit to the full an agreement reached under maximum duress in order to compromise further the UK's negotiating position. Meanwhile Johnson is not constrained by the political limbo of 2019 and still has nearly four months rather than a few weeks to prepare to cope in the absence of a free trade agreement. So the UK's negotiating position should be stronger, but for the existence of a clause in the agreement which the EU thought they could rely on. Now, to their surprise, the EU have found that they can't rely on that clause and that there are limits to the extent to which they can play the UK, and I think the UK's position is stronger as a consequence. So that's good in my book. What remains to be seen is what the EU does next. I have little doubt that there will be some form of fairly extensive trade agreement in place between the UK and EU by the middle of 2021, and that the settlement as a whole will be better for the UK than that which the EU was until now prepared to concede.
As for all the huffing and puffing about international treaties, the point is that the UK is acting reasonably under absolutely extreme circumstances after years of having had its nose placed to the grindstone by a political union seeking to humiliate us. Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
As I understand it the key features of Covid-19 that make it difficult to control are that the half of cases which are asymptomatic are still infectious, and even those cases that develop symptoms are infectious for a day or two before the onset of symptoms.
Consequently, to identify those people who are infectious, so that they can be isolated and the chain of transmission broken, it is necessary to test people who are asymptomatic contacts of a known case. Ideally, in a test and trace system that was working quickly and effectively to break transmission, a large majority of people would be tested who did not have symptoms.
This morning the Health Secretary of England has said that testing is only for people with symptoms.
We're back to rationing of testing because the epidemic has defeated our half-arsed attempts to contain it. Rationed testing of people only with symptoms is only able to prevent about one quarter of the spread of the virus. It's woefully short of the proactive test and trace that we need to keep the virus under control.
The government has failed.
I believe Hancock was suggesting that people who self-refer for a test should only do so if they have symptoms.
People may still be asked to take a test by Track and Trace even if they don't have symptoms.
LBC is full of people claiming to have got a test by falsely claiming symptoms (including at least one of the presenters). I got mine last week. by dint of the priority given to users of Prof Spector's app coupled with reporting minor symptoms I actually had but was sure had nothing to do with the virus. Getting a test is easy - but if you believe some of the calls to LBC there are some people doing it repeatedly
My result came back so quickly that they don't appear to be struggling with capacity
Anthony Browne MP (who?) Just put it a Stakhanivite shift on R5L for the government. Hope it was noted by the higher ups. Who appear not to be keen on peeping out the trench.
It'll be a good test of loyalty and ability to spin for new recruits to defend the Gov't on this one. Wonder if our very own @Tissue_Price will be told to bat for them on the airwaves at some point
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
Precisely.
Changing UK law rather than breaking it is democratic and following "the rule of law".
Anybody would think you are Boris fanboy
I am.
But do not put the cart before the horse, I was on this website saying the exact same thing two years ago when I was opposing Theresa May's government and Theresa May's backstop and Boris was just a backbencher. I am entirely consistent.
I am a fan of Boris, because I am a fan of what he is doing - I am not a fan of what Boris is doing because I am a fan of Boris.
The last bit is a complete nonsense. Johnson could do anything and you would support it.
We know that because you support him literally breaking the law.
I do not support him "breaking the law", I support him changing the law. If the law is changed then the law is not broken - what part of that are you struggling to understand?
I do not respect "international law" and never have. I respect domestic law and I want him to change that.
I have opposed Boris where his politics diverges from mine. I opposed him voting for Theresa May's deal at the Third Meaningful Vote for instance. They do not here.
"International law" is a misnomer because everyone's framing for this comes from domestic criminal law. It's much more like contract law, where you absolutely can breach a contract, and doing so is not a criminal offence, provided one accepts the penalties that go with breaching the contract.
Businesses have to breach contracts from time to time. It happens, and if the cost of performing the contract would be greater than the cost of breaching it, then breaching is the correct move.
However, if the CEO of a company signs a deal with the company's largest customer, and enthusiastically informs the shareholders that it's a great deal for the company, then less than a year later comes back with the news that he's going to breach the contract because it is too onerous to perform, then the shareholders might want to know what the hell he thought he was playing at.
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
“if we get away with it” - said every crook ever.
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. ...
Perpetuity is a long time, but the EU might have had a reasonable expectation that we would honour our obligations for more than nine months.
That is an entirely fair argument, but its also about politics. If you're accepting the principle that the UK Government is sovereign and can change the law, then this all boils down to just politics - and all is fair in that.
Your Billy Bunter fanboy blinkers make you unable to see that as a country we are meant to stand for the rule of law . Brexit and the populist numpties that have promoted it (yes, Boris Johnson) has further demeaned and demoted us in the eyes of the world. Brexit supporters are, for the most part, nationalists, but they definitely are not patriots.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
One curiosity of the 538 projection is that the probability distribution is very flat - as noted by @Richard_Nabavi yesterday. So, if you look at the probabilities for every Electoral College Vote score, and consider those for which there is at least a 1% chance, there are 11 different ECV scores above that probability threshold, and they exist in the range [279, 416] (where these are Biden's number of ECVs).
The 279 scenario would probably see Biden winning the Clinton 2016 states + PA, MI, WI, NE-2 The 416 scenario would be something like the 279 scenario + AZ, FL, NC, GA, OH, IA, OH, TX, ME-2, MT On the one hand, that feels like a very broad distribution, but then it doesn't even include a Trump victory within its bounds.
The 538 model is currently almost schizophrenic in its split between the projection based on the fundamentals - the economy and incumbency - and the polls. The former would give Trump victory with his 2016 states + NV, MN, NH (326). The latter would give Biden victory with 2016 + AZ, NE-2, WI, MI, PA, NC, FL (334)
I'm really not sure how the 538 model gives so much probability to the 416 scenario. It would seem to require Trump's polling situation to deteriorate from where it is now and/or there to be a systematic bias in the polling that downweighted Biden's support.
I seem to have convinced myself that the 538 model is unduly bullish about Biden's chances.
Britain is going to go bananas this Friday and Saturday. Just a feeling.
The government keep repeating the same mistakes. If you are going to "lockdown", you announce such that it comes into effect pretty much immediately i.e. Boris on the telly at teatime tonight, rules as a midnight this evening.
Giving people one final big weekend, when you are clearing wanting to restrict things because the numbers are already looking bad, is like the logic of a child who thinks that if they eats the sweets from the box and carefully rearrange the ones left nobody will notice.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. ...
Perpetuity is a long time, but the EU might have had a reasonable expectation that we would honour our obligations for more than nine months.
That is an entirely fair argument, but its also about politics. If you're accepting the principle that the UK Government is sovereign and can change the law, then this all boils down to just politics - and all is fair in that.
Your Billy Bunter fanboy blinkers make you unable to see that as a country we are meant to stand for the rule of law . Brexit and the populist numpties that have promoted it (yes, Boris Johnson) has further demeaned and demoted us in the eyes of the world. Brexit supporters are, for the most part, nationalists, but they definitely are not patriots.
Oh dear someone let Nigel out of his box. Find his pills quick.
No spinning that lot. But would support @Pulpstar 's view that OH is a value loser for Biden backers.
Yet again though Biden is clearly ahead by less in the swing states he needs to win overall than the national popular vote (bar Michigan and Wisconsin which alone do not get him to 270 and he is doing worse than nationally in Minnesota, a Hillary state) and the 6% national popular vote lead for Biden is actually less than the current 7% RCP average national Biden lead
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
The main institution that administers and upholds international law is that if you start going back on the promises you made to everyone else, everyone else starts going back on the promises they made to you. For such a vaguely enforced system, it's surprisingly robust, especially between democracies.
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
They never said "we are breaking the law" - if you're going to put words in quotation marks then try to get the quotation right.
I have said they're not breaking domestic law, which is fine with me. Sovereignty and democracy are more important concepts than international law.
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this Richard. My concept of Parliamentary sovereignty must be different from yours. Passing an Act of Parliament is not law breaking, it is law making and Parliament has the absolute right to do that even if it puts us in breach of international obligations that we as a country have undertaken.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
Precisely.
Changing UK law rather than breaking it is democratic and following "the rule of law".
Anybody would think you are Boris fanboy
I am.
But do not put the cart before the horse, I was on this website saying the exact same thing two years ago when I was opposing Theresa May's government and Theresa May's backstop and Boris was just a backbencher. I am entirely consistent.
I am a fan of Boris, because I am a fan of what he is doing - I am not a fan of what Boris is doing because I am a fan of Boris.
The last bit is a complete nonsense. Johnson could do anything and you would support it.
We know that because you support him literally breaking the law.
I do not support him "breaking the law", I support him changing the law. If the law is changed then the law is not broken - what part of that are you struggling to understand?
I do not respect "international law" and never have. I respect domestic law and I want him to change that.
I have opposed Boris where his politics diverges from mine. I opposed him voting for Theresa May's deal at the Third Meaningful Vote for instance. They do not here.
"International law" is a misnomer because everyone's framing for this comes from domestic criminal law. It's much more like contract law, where you absolutely can breach a contract, and doing so is not a criminal offence, provided one accepts the penalties that go with breaching the contract.
Businesses have to breach contracts from time to time. It happens, and if the cost of performing the contract would be greater than the cost of breaching it, then breaching is the correct move.
However, if the CEO of a company signs a deal with the company's largest customer, and enthusiastically informs the shareholders that it's a great deal for the company, then less than a year later comes back with the news that he's going to breach the contract because it is too onerous to perform, then the shareholders might want to know what the hell he thought he was playing at.
I think that is a much better analogy and I agree wholeheartedly.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
a national curfew is a “minor change”?
There is no curfew, as of Monday I can still go to Church, go to work, go to school, go to the pub with 6 others, go shopping wearing a mask, go to a restaurant with 6 others, play organised football or cricket, go to the gym and go to a wedding or funeral with 29 other attendees
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this Richard. My concept of Parliamentary sovereignty must be different from yours. Passing an Act of Parliament is not law breaking, it is law making and Parliament has the absolute right to do that even if it puts us in breach of international obligations that we as a country have undertaken.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
Really funny to see you posting that just a few minutes before a quote from the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee saying they are indeed bothered by this.
Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
Really funny to see you posting that just a few minutes before a quote from the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee saying they are indeed bothered by this.
Mandy Rice Davies Applies.
There are no votes in the US saying you're not backing Ireland, even if you're not bothered by the UK standing up for its own sovereignty.
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this Richard. My concept of Parliamentary sovereignty must be different from yours. Passing an Act of Parliament is not law breaking, it is law making and Parliament has the absolute right to do that even if it puts us in breach of international obligations that we as a country have undertaken.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
I can only assume because Lewis and the Government lawyers understand the basis of international law better than you or I.
I suspect the Supreme Court may well agree with them in so far as it confirms they are breaking international law.
May's backstop would have avoided anything like that as a possibility.
Yep. There was a very good reason why she insisted on that approach rather than the EU's original proposal which is what Boris went back to. As was noted at the time, it was a quite a coup for the British negotiators. All thrown away in the short-term interests of the career of Boris Johnson.
It was not a coup.
EU: We want control over NI. May: That's unacceptable! Have control over the whole of the United Kingdom instead.
Some "coup"
No, because it was a backstop, specifically designed to give both parties a strong incentive to agree a deal. The EU wouldn't have wanted it to persist because it would give the UK full access to the Single Market without having to pay anything and with only limited level-playing-field provisions, and the UK wouldn't have wanted it to persist for the reason you give. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a better solution than Boris's - not perfect, but better - for the reasons which the government belatedly now seems to have got round to trying to understand.
This is an honest question - do you think the trade negotiations would have gone differently with May's deal?
With May's deal and May in charge of the negotiation and with a parliamentary majority, yes, certainly. We'd be there by now. This disaster all stems from the 2017 election, where voters having chosen to leave the EU took away the government's ability to do so coherently.
Blaming the voters again....
Absolutely I blame the voters. They were the ones who decided on this mess.
Intrinsically the problem is that binding referendums are not very compatible with a representative democracy. They force a divisive dichotomy on a situation that requires consensus building. Scotland is another example.
No spinning that lot. But would support @Pulpstar 's view that OH is a value loser for Biden backers.
Yet again though Biden is clearly ahead by less in the swing states he needs to win overall than the national popular vote (bar Michigan and Wisconsin which alone do not get him to 270 and he is doing worse than nationally in Minnesota, a Hillary state) and the 6% national popular vote lead for Biden is actually less than the current 7% RCP average national Biden lead
I think that's only a 1% difference though (ie they have the national lead at 6% and 3 tipping-point states at 5%, of which he only needs 2). That's less of an EC handicap than Hillary had.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this Richard. My concept of Parliamentary sovereignty must be different from yours. Passing an Act of Parliament is not law breaking, it is law making and Parliament has the absolute right to do that even if it puts us in breach of international obligations that we as a country have undertaken.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
I can only assume because Lewis and the Government lawyers understand the basis of international law better than you or I.
I suspect the Supreme Court may well agree with them in so far as it confirms they are breaking international law.
Do you think "international law" should trump British law, if Parliament explicitly is prepared to overwrite "international law"?
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
“if we get away with it” - said every crook ever.
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
International law is upheld by the courts. You ascribe very little value to the courts? Those same courts which uphold the U.K. law you claim to care about?
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
“if we get away with it” - said every crook ever.
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
International law is upheld by the courts. You ascribe very little value to the courts? Those same courts which uphold the U.K. law you claim to care about?
Don’t you see a bit of a problem here?
They're only upheld by the courts if the UK law says they should be. If the UK law says they shouldn't be, that is a different matter.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Was weird before. Masks for meditation groups. Not for yoga. One religious, one exercise. Apparently.
May's backstop would have avoided anything like that as a possibility.
Yep. There was a very good reason why she insisted on that approach rather than the EU's original proposal which is what Boris went back to. As was noted at the time, it was a quite a coup for the British negotiators. All thrown away in the short-term interests of the career of Boris Johnson.
It was not a coup.
EU: We want control over NI. May: That's unacceptable! Have control over the whole of the United Kingdom instead.
Some "coup"
No, because it was a backstop, specifically designed to give both parties a strong incentive to agree a deal. The EU wouldn't have wanted it to persist because it would give the UK full access to the Single Market without having to pay anything and with only limited level-playing-field provisions, and the UK wouldn't have wanted it to persist for the reason you give. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a better solution than Boris's - not perfect, but better - for the reasons which the government belatedly now seems to have got round to trying to understand.
I don't care what the EU would have wanted or not wanted.
What matters is the UK. What the UK wants or doesn't want and the UK having the power to determine that democratically.
If you can not change the law at an election then you have ceased to be a democracy. That is why international law is subordinate to domestic law.
Good for you for sticking to your guns on this. Personally I don't have the time and inclination to enter into prolonged debate lasting days with the cacophany of contrary voices on here, but I'm grateful that you have.
We have got where we are because in 2019 the EU clearly sought to exploit the deadlock in parliament to impose the worst possible terms on the UK in the hope that we would either fold or eventually have second thoughts about Brexit altogether. Johnson was stuck with that parliamentary limbo when he took over, in a position of political weakness in which he needed to sign up to something within weeks in order to stand a chance in an election needed to break the deadlock. But now it is clear that the EU is still trying to exploit to the full an agreement reached under maximum duress in order to compromise further the UK's negotiating position. Meanwhile Johnson is not constrained by the political limbo of 2019 and still has nearly four months rather than a few weeks to prepare to cope in the absence of a free trade agreement. So the UK's negotiating position should be stronger, but for the existence of a clause in the agreement which the EU thought they could rely on. Now, to their surprise, the EU have found that they can't rely on that clause and that there are limits to the extent to which they can play the UK, and I think the UK's position is stronger as a consequence. So that's good in my book. What remains to be seen is what the EU does next. I have little doubt that there will be some form of fairly extensive trade agreement in place between the UK and EU by the middle of 2021, and that the settlement as a whole will be better for the UK than that which the EU was until now prepared to concede.
As for all the huffing and puffing about international treaties, the point is that the UK is acting reasonably under absolutely extreme circumstances after years of having had its nose placed to the grindstone by a political union seeking to humiliate us. Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
So, Johnson wasn't stupid he just lied to the electorate, to Parliament and to the EU. It is worth noting, though, that he actually signed the treaty in January, after the election took place. I htink it's rather sweet you believe other countries won't notice that or be concerned by it. British exceptionalism really is quite the thing.
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
Also according to Newsnight, government quite happy somebody had leaked this to the FT (obviously one of their biggest critics when it comes to Brexit).
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
There is a thread on Twitter about whether this is deliberate from team BoZo, or whether the statement at the despatch box was yet another cock-up.
One curiosity of the 538 projection is that the probability distribution is very flat - as noted by @Richard_Nabavi yesterday. So, if you look at the probabilities for every Electoral College Vote score, and consider those for which there is at least a 1% chance, there are 11 different ECV scores above that probability threshold, and they exist in the range [279, 416] (where these are Biden's number of ECVs).
The 279 scenario would probably see Biden winning the Clinton 2016 states + PA, MI, WI, NE-2 The 416 scenario would be something like the 279 scenario + AZ, FL, NC, GA, OH, IA, OH, TX, ME-2, MT On the one hand, that feels like a very broad distribution, but then it doesn't even include a Trump victory within its bounds.
The 538 model is currently almost schizophrenic in its split between the projection based on the fundamentals - the economy and incumbency - and the polls. The former would give Trump victory with his 2016 states + NV, MN, NH (326). The latter would give Biden victory with 2016 + AZ, NE-2, WI, MI, PA, NC, FL (334)
I'm really not sure how the 538 model gives so much probability to the 416 scenario. It would seem to require Trump's polling situation to deteriorate from where it is now and/or there to be a systematic bias in the polling that downweighted Biden's support.
I seem to have convinced myself that the 538 model is unduly bullish about Biden's chances.
Your observations are right, it does look odd at the high end of Biden's ECV totals. Counterbalancing that, though, they have a lot of scenarios of him getting less than 270, which are individually given a lowish probability but which add up to the full 29%. These include a better than half a percent chance of Biden ending up with each of the following: 188 201 210 216 226 232 242 243 248 252 258 259
(I'm using yesterday's figures, they might have changed slightly today).
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, it seems to me that it is one thing to say there is uncertainty in the central bands of your forecast (i.e. that small changes to the position shown by the polling are more likely than the other models imply). but too much seems to be going into the long tails of the distribution. Intuitively, I wouldn't expect a normal-type distribution, more something flatter at the peak but hitting sharpish cut-offs at the edges.
May's backstop would have avoided anything like that as a possibility.
Yep. There was a very good reason why she insisted on that approach rather than the EU's original proposal which is what Boris went back to. As was noted at the time, it was a quite a coup for the British negotiators. All thrown away in the short-term interests of the career of Boris Johnson.
It was not a coup.
EU: We want control over NI. May: That's unacceptable! Have control over the whole of the United Kingdom instead.
Some "coup"
No, because it was a backstop, specifically designed to give both parties a strong incentive to agree a deal. The EU wouldn't have wanted it to persist because it would give the UK full access to the Single Market without having to pay anything and with only limited level-playing-field provisions, and the UK wouldn't have wanted it to persist for the reason you give. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a better solution than Boris's - not perfect, but better - for the reasons which the government belatedly now seems to have got round to trying to understand.
I don't care what the EU would have wanted or not wanted.
What matters is the UK. What the UK wants or doesn't want and the UK having the power to determine that democratically.
If you can not change the law at an election then you have ceased to be a democracy. That is why international law is subordinate to domestic law.
Good for you for sticking to your guns on this. Personally I don't have the time and inclination to enter into prolonged debate lasting days with the cacophany of contrary voices on here, but I'm grateful that you have.
We have got where we are because in 2019 the EU clearly sought to exploit the deadlock in parliament to impose the worst possible terms on the UK in the hope that we would either fold or eventually have second thoughts about Brexit altogether. Johnson was stuck with that parliamentary limbo when he took over, in a position of political weakness in which he needed to sign up to something within weeks in order to stand a chance in an election needed to break the deadlock. But now it is clear that the EU is still trying to exploit to the full an agreement reached under maximum duress in order to compromise further the UK's negotiating position. Meanwhile Johnson is not constrained by the political limbo of 2019 and still has nearly four months rather than a few weeks to prepare to cope in the absence of a free trade agreement. So the UK's negotiating position should be stronger, but for the existence of a clause in the agreement which the EU thought they could rely on. Now, to their surprise, the EU have found that they can't rely on that clause and that there are limits to the extent to which they can play the UK, and I think the UK's position is stronger as a consequence. So that's good in my book. What remains to be seen is what the EU does next. I have little doubt that there will be some form of fairly extensive trade agreement in place between the UK and EU by the middle of 2021, and that the settlement as a whole will be better for the UK than that which the EU was until now prepared to concede.
As for all the huffing and puffing about international treaties, the point is that the UK is acting reasonably under absolutely extreme circumstances after years of having had its nose placed to the grindstone by a political union seeking to humiliate us. Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
Yes the lesson that foreign countries may take from this is that forcing us to sign up to ridiculous provisions by extortion and blackmail does not work in the long run. But we're prepared to accept reasonable and moderately unfavourable ones. The EU's conduct towards us over the past ten years has been a masterclass in overplaying a strong hand. First they arrogantly assumed that EU membership was so amazing that we'd never vote to leave, then they refused to make more than token concessions on freedom of movement, then they imposed a lop-sided withdrawal agreement, then they reneged on the promise of a Canada-style deal.
It is no wonder that the EU has bad or terrible relations with virtually all its neighbours, despite its laughable constitutional requirement to do the opposite.
Also according to Newsnight, government quite happy somebody had leaked this to the FT (obviously one of their biggest critics when it comes to Brexit).
Somebody else said they launched a leak inquiry because they were very not happy about it...
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
It can't dissemble.
If the government intends to overwrite the law they need to do so explicitly. They can't dissemble or play it down because if they did the courts would strike down any new law because the WA would take precedence. The new law must explicitly overwrite the WA and if it does that then dissembling becomes rather impossible.
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
I think this is right. "International law" is better understood as "contracts between nations". Anyone who has run a business knows how this works. It's not "breaking the law" in the same way that throwing a brick through someone's window is breaking the law.
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
Precisely.
Changing UK law rather than breaking it is democratic and following "the rule of law".
Anybody would think you are Boris fanboy
I am.
But do not put the cart before the horse, I was on this website saying the exact same thing two years ago when I was opposing Theresa May's government and Theresa May's backstop and Boris was just a backbencher. I am entirely consistent.
I am a fan of Boris, because I am a fan of what he is doing - I am not a fan of what Boris is doing because I am a fan of Boris.
The last bit is a complete nonsense. Johnson could do anything and you would support it.
We know that because you support him literally breaking the law.
I do not support him "breaking the law", I support him changing the law. If the law is changed then the law is not broken - what part of that are you struggling to understand?
I do not respect "international law" and never have. I respect domestic law and I want him to change that.
I have opposed Boris where his politics diverges from mine. I opposed him voting for Theresa May's deal at the Third Meaningful Vote for instance. They do not here.
"International law" is a misnomer because everyone's framing for this comes from domestic criminal law. It's much more like contract law, where you absolutely can breach a contract, and doing so is not a criminal offence, provided one accepts the penalties that go with breaching the contract.
Businesses have to breach contracts from time to time. It happens, and if the cost of performing the contract would be greater than the cost of breaching it, then breaching is the correct move.
However, if the CEO of a company signs a deal with the company's largest customer, and enthusiastically informs the shareholders that it's a great deal for the company, then less than a year later comes back with the news that he's going to breach the contract because it is too onerous to perform, then the shareholders might want to know what the hell he thought he was playing at.
That is a very good summary. Johnson's calculation is that he can get away with anything he wants: he has already got a client House of Commons, he is in the process of emasculating the judiciary and he has sufficiently cowed enough of the media to know that all storms will blow out sooner rather than later. He is following the Orban/Erdogan playbook to the letter. His next task will be to start fixing the electioral process to ensure the voters cannot turf him out.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
But if outside team sports are OK then surely hanging out in the park is OK too (less contact, less sweating or heavy breathing). What about training or group exercise classes? Does my son's U12 football league count? Can the team still train? And if that's OK, why not my daughter's drama class? And why not a kickabout in the park after school? Whole thing is a mess.
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
“if we get away with it” - said every crook ever.
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
International law is upheld by the courts. You ascribe very little value to the courts? Those same courts which uphold the U.K. law you claim to care about?
Don’t you see a bit of a problem here?
They're only upheld by the courts if the UK law says they should be. If the UK law says they shouldn't be, that is a different matter.
Also according to Newsnight, government quite happy somebody had leaked this to the FT (obviously one of their biggest critics when it comes to Brexit).
Somebody else said they launched a leak inquiry because they were very not happy about it...
It just seems coincidental that Boris briefed the Telegraph that the deal was always crap and that he wanted to rejig on the same day, after the weekend piece from Frost basically hinting the same thing.
It all smacks of Cummings, same as prologuing parliament.
We have got where we are because in 2019 the EU clearly sought to exploit the deadlock in parliament to impose the worst possible terms on the UK in the hope that we would either fold or eventually have second thoughts about Brexit altogether. Johnson was stuck with that parliamentary limbo when he took over, in a position of political weakness in which he needed to sign up to something within weeks in order to stand a chance in an election needed to break the deadlock. But now it is clear that the EU is still trying to exploit to the full an agreement reached under maximum duress in order to compromise further the UK's negotiating position. Meanwhile Johnson is not constrained by the political limbo of 2019 and still has nearly four months rather than a few weeks to prepare to cope in the absence of a free trade agreement. So the UK's negotiating position should be stronger, but for the existence of a clause in the agreement which the EU thought they could rely on. Now, to their surprise, the EU have found that they can't rely on that clause and that there are limits to the extent to which they can play the UK, and I think the UK's position is stronger as a consequence. So that's good in my book. What remains to be seen is what the EU does next. I have little doubt that there will be some form of fairly extensive trade agreement in place between the UK and EU by the middle of 2021, and that the settlement as a whole will be better for the UK than that which the EU was until now prepared to concede.
As for all the huffing and puffing about international treaties, the point is that the UK is acting reasonably under absolutely extreme circumstances after years of having had its nose placed to the grindstone by a political union seeking to humiliate us. Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
The UK would be in a stronger position now under May's deal because we would have a guarantee of tariff free trade regardless of the outcome of the negotiations this year.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
But if outside team sports are OK then surely hanging out in the park is OK too (less contact, less sweating or heavy breathing). What about training or group exercise classes? Does my son's U12 football league count? Can the team still train? And if that's OK, why not my daughter's drama class? And why not a kickabout in the park after school? Whole thing is a mess.
Don't disagree. There doesn't seem much "following the science".
May's backstop would have avoided anything like that as a possibility.
Yep. There was a very good reason why she insisted on that approach rather than the EU's original proposal which is what Boris went back to. As was noted at the time, it was a quite a coup for the British negotiators. All thrown away in the short-term interests of the career of Boris Johnson.
It was not a coup.
EU: We want control over NI. May: That's unacceptable! Have control over the whole of the United Kingdom instead.
Some "coup"
No, because it was a backstop, specifically designed to give both parties a strong incentive to agree a deal. The EU wouldn't have wanted it to persist because it would give the UK full access to the Single Market without having to pay anything and with only limited level-playing-field provisions, and the UK wouldn't have wanted it to persist for the reason you give. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a better solution than Boris's - not perfect, but better - for the reasons which the government belatedly now seems to have got round to trying to understand.
This is an honest question - do you think the trade negotiations would have gone differently with May's deal?
With May's deal and May in charge of the negotiation and with a parliamentary majority, yes, certainly. We'd be there by now. This disaster all stems from the 2017 election, where voters having chosen to leave the EU took away the government's ability to do so coherently.
Blaming the voters again....
Absolutely I blame the voters. They were the ones who decided on this mess.
Intrinsically the problem is that binding referendums are not very compatible with a representative democracy. They force a divisive dichotomy on a situation that requires consensus building. Scotland is another example.
The colossal missed opportunity post GE2017 was Labour not putting forward an EEA type option, and instead listening to the siren voices of the hardcore remainers. The Corbynites were too thick and the moderates too far up their own arseholes to realise this.
Just popping in briefly to say that I view the breakage of international law by our politicians very differently to that of UK law, and I take a dim view of lawyers trying to pretend they are somehow equivalent.
Especially when it comes to the EU: one of my principle frustrations with the organisation came from the fact that everyone else always seemed to ignore it more or less at will, while we bent over backwards to follow it in both letter and spirit (I am in particular thinking about financial services regulations here, but there are plenty of other examples).
The EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 is a piece of U.K. legislation. Breaching the Withdrawal Agreement necessarily involves breaching a piece of U.K. legislation.
You simply cannot pick and choose which laws you choose to follow. Or, rather, if you do, don’t be surprised, if others do the same.
As I understand it, the plan is to change the UK law to avoid having to break it (which is totally fine by me), which in itself breaks international law (which is less fine, and clearly not ideal, but I can absolutely live with it if we get away with it).
“if we get away with it” - said every crook ever.
Right, but that's what I see as the difference between UK law and international law. I simply don't care about whether we follow international law or not, because I ascribe very little value to the institutions which administer and supposedly uphold it.
International law is upheld by the courts. You ascribe very little value to the courts? Those same courts which uphold the U.K. law you claim to care about?
Don’t you see a bit of a problem here?
They're only upheld by the courts if the UK law says they should be. If the UK law says they shouldn't be, that is a different matter.
That is simply not correct.
Are you suggesting the UK law doesn't say to enforce the international law? That the courts are doing so on their own back?
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
It can't dissemble.
If the government intends to overwrite the law they need to do so explicitly. They can't dissemble or play it down because if they did the courts would strike down any new law because the WA would take precedence. The new law must explicitly overwrite the WA and if it does that then dissembling becomes rather impossible.
Correct. There is a presumption that the government intends to comply with its international obligations and the Act of Parliament will be construed by the courts in a manner consistent with that presumption unless the Act makes it plain that that was not the intention. Still didn't need Lewis's statement though.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
I hope this is because it is simply the prorogation all over again - a bit of theatre to convince the Brexit extremists that Johnson is as extreme as them, so that they will trust him enough to accept the deal he comes back with from Brussels.
This assumes that Johnson accepts the view put forward by @AlastairMeeks - that the Brexit extremists are incapable of compromising with reality. So he is going to provide a bit of fantasy for them instead.
If this is the only way to have the ERG vote for a deal that necessarily contains a series of compromises, then at least it is better than the alternative of No Deal, or that Johnson actually believes this nonsense. It does, however, do a not inconsiderable amount of damage to Britain's reputation to go through this pantomime.
The UK would be in a stronger position now under May's deal because we would have a guarantee of tariff free trade regardless of the outcome of the negotiations this year.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
But if outside team sports are OK then surely hanging out in the park is OK too (less contact, less sweating or heavy breathing). What about training or group exercise classes? Does my son's U12 football league count? Can the team still train? And if that's OK, why not my daughter's drama class? And why not a kickabout in the park after school? Whole thing is a mess.
Not to mention the nonsense of forcing quarantine on people coming, or returning, from places much safer than the UK right now
BTW in all the excitement, we’ve missed the fact that, just like in March the government - while saying that no-one can meet in groups of more than 6 from Monday - is allowing 3,500 people to go to Doncaster races this weekend.
In unrelated news, Mike Hancock is the MP for Newmarket and gets lots of funding from the racing industry and Dido Harding, in charge of Track and Trace, owns horses and is on the Board of the Jockey Club.
BTW in all the excitement, we’ve missed the fact that, just like in March the government - while saying that no-one can meet in groups of more than 6 from Monday - is allowing 3,500 people to go to Doncaster races this weekend.
In unrelated news, Mike Hancock is the MP for Newmarket and gets lots of funding from the racing industry and Dido Harding, in charge of Track and Trace, owns horses and is on the Board of the Jockey Club.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
I have been back at my gym and church for weeks and they will remain open from Monday.
My gym has closed its changing room and showers you go in changed and have to pre book your place so numbers are limited with every other piece of exercise equipment taped off and once finished you have to exit by the back door. You have to wipe equipment after use and use hand sanitiser.
My church has hand sanitiser to use on entrance and hand sanitiser used before communion (without wine), seating is spaced out and arrows set out a clear route through the church, masks are also compulsory for the congregation.
Hardly, shops, pubs and restaurants will still be open, gatherings over 6 will still be allowed for public worship, at weddings and funerals, in workplaces and schools and in team sports.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The public worship and team sports exemptions are odd ones. Why prioritise some leisure activities over others? Why is a football match OK but not an outside group yoga class? Why is a congregation OK but not people at a poetry reading? For that matter why can five groups of five crowd together inside in a pub but not one group of seven spaced out in the park? The new rules don't make sense at all. Plus of course, with schools back anyone with kids will probably be exposed anyway. Whole thing smacks of desperation.
Outside sports appears to be very low risk (what we are doing with indoor gyms open is another matter). However, we have seen time and time again that places of worship are extremely good at acting as idea venue for super spreading events.
But if outside team sports are OK then surely hanging out in the park is OK too (less contact, less sweating or heavy breathing). What about training or group exercise classes? Does my son's U12 football league count? Can the team still train? And if that's OK, why not my daughter's drama class? And why not a kickabout in the park after school? Whole thing is a mess.
Not to mention the nonsense of forcing quarantine on people coming, or returning, from places much safer than the UK right now
1. Its not quarantine. Its self-isolation where you can still leave the house for a whole list of reasons 2. Its not quarantine where other people you live with aren't also quarantined if they didn't travel with you 3. Nobody is being forced. Travellers still not being checked if they have actually completed the form...
The Govt declares, on the floor of the House of Commons, “we are breaking the law”.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
That the government are boasting about "breaking the law", bigging it up when they could easily take the more normal option of dissembling and playing it down, is imo the key clue as to what the game is here.
I think this is right. "International law" is better understood as "contracts between nations". Anyone who has run a business knows how this works. It's not "breaking the law" in the same way that throwing a brick through someone's window is breaking the law.
Although if you do throw a brick through someone's window it is better if they do not know who you are.
Excellent header Cyclefree. Spot on in every respect.
What @DavidL fails to recognise when he says people are getting hysterical is that this is not just a case of a Government pushing the boundaries to see if they can get away with something. They did that last year in the proroguing and although I think they were wrong, they could reasonably claim the law was not clear and when told it was illegal they at least backed down.
In this instance they are going into this course of action not only knowing it is, beyond any doubt, illegal but also proclaiming loudly that they intend to break the law. It is not hysterical in any way to say that a Government that both willingly and unashamedly breaks the law and announces in advance that it is doing so is unfit to govern.
They are not saying that. What they are saying is that as a sovereign country they have the right to regulate intra UK trade should they choose to do so in the future. There would be consequences for NI in doing so because clearly the EU would then not be bound by the additional rights given to NI in the WA either. But they have the right to do so should they so choose.
The idea that we are bound by every treaty we have ever signed in perpetuity by the rule of law is absurd. Unless you have submitted to a superior jurisdiction, such as the EU has with the CJEU, any country is always free to break agreements if it thinks fit and is willing to live with the consequences.
The use of "illegal" in this context is misleading. If these powers were ever exercised they would be a breach of an agreement. Such a breach is not an illegal act if Parliament has authorised it because that's what Parliamentary sovereignty means. We are no longer subject to the supravening jurisdiction of the CJEU who have the right to overrule Parliament as they did in the Factortame case.
Is this a good tactic? I would say no. The price of this flexibility is a lot of trust not only with the EU but with future prospective partners. The price is too high and I wouldn't have paid it. OTOH it shows to me that the government is a little more desperate for a deal than they are willing to admit which is probably a good thing.
Nope absolutely wrong. The Northern Ireland Minister stood at the dispatch box yesterday and said that the Government intend to break international law. These are not my words, they are the words of the Government. So the use of the term 'illegal' is in no way misleading.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
This testing situation. Starmer's mentioning a lot of London stories. Does this suggest that perhaps the situation in London isn't as good as we thought?
Comments
Anyone know what's going on with it? It's a very sloppy operation nowadays and I don't recall it being so previously.
No spinning that lot. But would support @Pulpstar 's view that OH is a value loser for Biden backers.
Even if breaking international law is not advisable legally there is not much can be done against the UK government because of it though it might affect future Treaty negotiations
The start of lockdown 2.0
I'd be happier than a pig in shit if that lot came in though on the night.
Hope it was noted by the higher ups.
Who appear not to be keen on peeping out the trench.
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1303356183508668419?s=20
Plus a few of the first, including TSE voted LD last year anyway
We have got where we are because in 2019 the EU clearly sought to exploit the deadlock in parliament to impose the worst possible terms on the UK in the hope that we would either fold or eventually have second thoughts about Brexit altogether. Johnson was stuck with that parliamentary limbo when he took over, in a position of political weakness in which he needed to sign up to something within weeks in order to stand a chance in an election needed to break the deadlock. But now it is clear that the EU is still trying to exploit to the full an agreement reached under maximum duress in order to compromise further the UK's negotiating position. Meanwhile Johnson is not constrained by the political limbo of 2019 and still has nearly four months rather than a few weeks to prepare to cope in the absence of a free trade agreement. So the UK's negotiating position should be stronger, but for the existence of a clause in the agreement which the EU thought they could rely on. Now, to their surprise, the EU have found that they can't rely on that clause and that there are limits to the extent to which they can play the UK, and I think the UK's position is stronger as a consequence. So that's good in my book. What remains to be seen is what the EU does next. I have little doubt that there will be some form of fairly extensive trade agreement in place between the UK and EU by the middle of 2021, and that the settlement as a whole will be better for the UK than that which the EU was until now prepared to concede.
As for all the huffing and puffing about international treaties, the point is that the UK is acting reasonably under absolutely extreme circumstances after years of having had its nose placed to the grindstone by a political union seeking to humiliate us. Any third party government in the wider world will not be bothered by that and indeed might note the consequences of the UK being pushed too far. So it means diddly squat for our relations with the wider world.
My result came back so quickly that they don't appear to be struggling with capacity
Businesses have to breach contracts from time to time. It happens, and if the cost of performing the contract would be greater than the cost of breaching it, then breaching is the correct move.
However, if the CEO of a company signs a deal with the company's largest customer, and enthusiastically informs the shareholders that it's a great deal for the company, then less than a year later comes back with the news that he's going to breach the contract because it is too onerous to perform, then the shareholders might want to know what the hell he thought he was playing at.
What they are doing is explicitly illegal under international law.
Moreover they are not claiming that they are withdrawing from the treaty. As you say no one can be bound in perpetuity. But we are bound for as long as we are saying the treaty is still extant. We don't get to pick an choose which bits we accept and which we ignore. That is the whole point of treaties.
You re attempting to defend the indefensible and condoning law breaking and it is pretty shameful.
Philip, on here, declares that they are wrong, do not know what they are talking about, and therefore feels free to continue his support of their actions.
You would have thought that if the Govt was not actually breaking the law, or at least if it was open to debate, they might at least have tried to argue along those lines...
It’s one thing to take pride in breaking the law, a special thing to do so when you aren’t actually doing so!
We signed a deal.
It's not unreasonable to expect us to keep it.
The circumstances are not extreme. Only BoZo's ego
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/03/11/political-rights-and-wrongs/
and
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/03/12/amber-warnings-what-might-be-the-signals-that-all-is-not-well-in-a-democracy/.
It is a minor change to reduce house parties etc nothing more
The 279 scenario would probably see Biden winning the Clinton 2016 states + PA, MI, WI, NE-2
The 416 scenario would be something like the 279 scenario + AZ, FL, NC, GA, OH, IA, OH, TX, ME-2, MT
On the one hand, that feels like a very broad distribution, but then it doesn't even include a Trump victory within its bounds.
The 538 model is currently almost schizophrenic in its split between the projection based on the fundamentals - the economy and incumbency - and the polls. The former would give Trump victory with his 2016 states + NV, MN, NH (326). The latter would give Biden victory with 2016 + AZ, NE-2, WI, MI, PA, NC, FL (334)
I'm really not sure how the 538 model gives so much probability to the 416 scenario. It would seem to require Trump's polling situation to deteriorate from where it is now and/or there to be a systematic bias in the polling that downweighted Biden's support.
I seem to have convinced myself that the 538 model is unduly bullish about Biden's chances.
Giving people one final big weekend, when you are clearing wanting to restrict things because the numbers are already looking bad, is like the logic of a child who thinks that if they eats the sweets from the box and carefully rearrange the ones left nobody will notice.
I have said they're not breaking domestic law, which is fine with me. Sovereignty and democracy are more important concepts than international law.
Why Lewis framed it the way that he did is one of the curiosities of this. He could have been far less provocative but chose to be the opposite. Why he chose to do so is the interesting bit of this, not the law (which is rarely interesting in my experience).
I do not want it.. Bloody nasty.
There are no votes in the US saying you're not backing Ireland, even if you're not bothered by the UK standing up for its own sovereignty.
I suspect the Supreme Court may well agree with them in so far as it confirms they are breaking international law.
Don’t you see a bit of a problem here?
LOL
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8713415/Donald-Trump-nominated-2021-Nobel-Peace-Prize.html
(I'm using yesterday's figures, they might have changed slightly today).
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, it seems to me that it is one thing to say there is uncertainty in the central bands of your forecast (i.e. that small changes to the position shown by the polling are more likely than the other models imply). but too much seems to be going into the long tails of the distribution. Intuitively, I wouldn't expect a normal-type distribution, more something flatter at the peak but hitting sharpish cut-offs at the edges.
It is no wonder that the EU has bad or terrible relations with virtually all its neighbours, despite its laughable constitutional requirement to do the opposite.
If the government intends to overwrite the law they need to do so explicitly. They can't dissemble or play it down because if they did the courts would strike down any new law because the WA would take precedence. The new law must explicitly overwrite the WA and if it does that then dissembling becomes rather impossible.
https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1303649896319385600
It all smacks of Cummings, same as prologuing parliament.
This assumes that Johnson accepts the view put forward by @AlastairMeeks - that the Brexit extremists are incapable of compromising with reality. So he is going to provide a bit of fantasy for them instead.
If this is the only way to have the ERG vote for a deal that necessarily contains a series of compromises, then at least it is better than the alternative of No Deal, or that Johnson actually believes this nonsense. It does, however, do a not inconsiderable amount of damage to Britain's reputation to go through this pantomime.
In unrelated news, Mike Hancock is the MP for Newmarket and gets lots of funding from the racing industry and Dido Harding, in charge of Track and Trace, owns horses and is on the Board of the Jockey Club.
BLM protests
Bournemouth beach
My gym has closed its changing room and showers you go in changed and have to pre book your place so numbers are limited with every other piece of exercise equipment taped off and once finished you have to exit by the back door. You have to wipe equipment after use and use hand sanitiser.
My church has hand sanitiser to use on entrance and hand sanitiser used before communion (without wine), seating is spaced out and arrows set out a clear route through the church, masks are also compulsory for the congregation.
Both my gym and church have done an excellent job
2. Its not quarantine where other people you live with aren't also quarantined if they didn't travel with you
3. Nobody is being forced. Travellers still not being checked if they have actually completed the form...
https://twitter.com/JGForsyth/status/1303620045885640704?s=20