BREAKING: Government loses Article 50 court fight

[BooScout]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785

Government loses Article 50 court fight

Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the European Union, the High Court has ruled.
This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - beginning formal discussions with the EU - on their own.
Theresa May says the referendum - and existing ministerial powers - mean MPs do not need to vote, but campaigners called this unconstitutional.
The government is expected to appeal.

(more) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785

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Most excellent news to wake up to this morning!

[Hokie]

1. I predict Brexit will never happen

This ruling might provide the cover for cooler heads to prevail in the long run.

[LeftishBrit]

4. Great news!

[Dworkin]

5. First bit of good news

Hi,

This is the first bit of good news on Brexit. An act of Parliament would bring in the Scottish MPs and the Lords. I'm not confident on Corbyn's Labour party though.

D

[T_i_B]

6. Most of the PLP are very pro-EU

Sadly, Corbyn himself is not and has performed very badly on this subject, which is one of the major issues behind Labour's current internal infighting. I expect them to oppose triggering article 50 with a handful of rebels such as Dennis Skinner and John Mann.

[Ken Burch]

8. It's been shown over and over that the Leave victory wasn't Corbyn's fault.

He campaigned for Remain more than any other Labour figure.

What was he supposed to...promise to restrict immigration while staying in the EU when everyone knew that was impossible?

If Corbyn had lied on that issue, Leave would have prevailed anyway.

None of the other 2015 leadership candidates would have been able to reduce Leave support in the North of England, nor would Owen.

[T_i_B]

9. Still lying about Corbyn's role in the referendum then.

Alan Johnson lead the Labour Remain campaign, and was far more visible than Corbyn. Others such as Chukka Umuna and Hilary Benn managed to be more high profile than Corbyn.

To be brutally honest, Corbyn did not even convince people he was even sincere in defence of EU worker rights and so forth.

[Ken Burch]

10. I am not lying.

Corbyn made more speeches in support of Remain than anyone else.

But he had to present the argument honestly. That was his only crime.

It isn't possible for an EU member state to adapt more restrictive immigration policies than the EU currently allows. All Corbyn did was to state that fact. It's not as though Remain would have won if only he had promised to do something it wasn't possible to do.

The only argument that might have worked would be a pledge to stay in the EU while leading the fight against its austerity requirements-and the anti-Corbynites would have tried to oust Jeremy for making it, since most of them support the EU budget policies.

There's nothing any other possible Labour leader would have been able to do or say to flip the North of England over tp voting Remain. Northerners were unchangeable on that. Andy Burnham didn't have any arguments that swayed anyone there, neither did Angela Eagle(who still needs to apologize for her false accusations that Corbyn supporters aimed homophobic slurs at her). Neither did Chuka or Hilary.

[T_i_B]

11. Corbyn made less speeches than Alan Johnson on the subject

Therefore your argument is false. Furthermore, when he was dragged into the campaign his contributions were lacklustre at best.

And as somebody who actually lives and works in the North, your arguments about Northerners are patently untrue. There were big arguments to be made about the EU's role in regenerating the old coal fields, but not enough was done on this point. Especially by Corbyn, who still nurtures the false hope of reopening the coal mines. Even though most of those sites have been extensively redeveloped and the mines would be ruinously expensive and impractical to get into anything resembling a workable state anyway.

[Ghost Dog]

7. Heading for constitutional crisis / civil unrest?

Or, can the gutter press be finally taken down?

The rule of law is the bedrock of a democratic society. It can check corruption and abuses of power. It permits individuals to order their lives. It allows private corporations, public bodies and the executive to regulate effectively their own activities. If the rule of law is to be upheld, it is vital that there should be an independent judiciary. This fact appears lost on Brexiter rabble-rousers. This voluble, influential political sect has unleashed gales of fury on the high court judges who ruled that only parliament has the authority to trigger article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, the legal route for Britain to leave the EU. Leading the charge are rightwing newspapers, which claim themselves to be champions of free speech and traditional British liberties. Yet since the Brexit vote they have sought to delegitimise their opponents’ views and silence them through intimidation. This morning these newspapers laced racial innuendo with accusations of treachery, casting themselves as representatives of the people against unelected “out of touch” judges and their “loaded foreign elite” remainer acolytes.

This is rhetoric that goes beyond character assassination and rightwing posturing into something darker and more dangerous. Remember, we are only months away from the gunning down of a pro-remain MP in broad daylight. During the course of this case, the bench – headed by the lord chief justice – was compelled to remind the gallery that threats against the claimants would be taken as contempt of court. The hysterical, and frankly ludicrous, response to the ruling was to claim that the judges’ decision had sparked a crisis akin to that faced by Winston Churchill during world war two when he called on Britons to “fight them on the beaches”. This intolerance threatens to undermine political freedom and judicial independence. No court is infallible. One can dissent from judgments without trying, via newsprint and social media, to shatter a nation’s confidence in judges as impartial guardians of the rule of law. Judges don’t do opinions unless they are legal ones. Hence the need for politicians to speak up.

So we ask: where is the prime minister in all this? Has she lost sight of the obvious – that the rule of law requires that the courts have jurisdiction to scrutinise the actions of government to ensure that they are lawful? Where, pray, is the lord chancellor, Liz Truss, who – as former office-bearer Charles Falconer notes – has a constitutional duty to defend the judges? The government will have its appeal heard in the supreme court next month. Unless ministers make clear their support for the judiciary, it looks as if the government is colluding to try to cow the highest courts in the land. The high court used Jacobean case law – “the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm” – to spike the government case that ministers have a right to invoke article 50 under the royal prerogative. The citizen must be able to challenge the executive before an independent judiciary. Because it is the executive that exercises the power of the state and because it is the executive which is a frequent litigator in the courts, it is from executive pressure or influence that judges require particularly to be protected. By standing by, ministers are encouraging mobocracy to overwhelm the rule of law.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/04/the-guardian-view-on-brexit-ruling-the-response-to-the-courts-threatens-to-undermine-the-bedrock-of-a-democratic-society

[LeftishBrit]

12. It is worrying...

and I don't think the gutter press will ever go away; but I hope there will be more limits on its incitements.

But I suspect that in future, dangers may not come so much from the gutter press as from the still less regulated 'gutter' social media.