= Сообщение: 9191 из 12492 ====================================== ENET.SYSOP = От : David Rance 2:203/2 27 Dec 19 11:51:33 Кому : Gerrit Kuehn 27 Dec 19 11:51:33 Тема : Brexit FGHI : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:203/2+5e05e232 На : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:240/12+5d59a7a7 = Кодировка сообщения определена как: ASCII ================================== Ответ: area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:292/854+0f16340d ============================================================================== On Thu, 26 Dec 2019 19:13:30 Gerrit Kuehn -> David Rance wrote:
GK> 26 Dec 19 16:30, David Rance wrote to Gerrit Kuehn:
DR>> A Happy New Year to the lot of you! And I'm sure we'll still be DR>> friends even if the Brits will soon be foreigners!! :-)
GK> Same to you, and I concur with your expectations. GK> Also thank you very much for the long, detailed, and very interesting GK> explanation. Of course, I was kind of playing a "devil's advocate" in GK> the first place, but reading your text I realised that there is still GK> some truth for me in what I wrote, and there are some things that are GK> inherently different in our countires' political systems.
That, I think, is the reason why so many of you in Europe cannot understand our problems.
GK> In Germany, a government or the parliament cannot simply resign to GK> initiate new elections.
Until David Cameron became prime minister the way to initiate a general election was for the prime minister him/herself to go to the Queen and ask for a dissolution of parliament. This could have been prompted by losing a vote of no confidence in the government but even then it was up to the prime minister to make the decision to "go to the country", as our saying is, and ask the Queen to dissolve parliament. So in the past we never had a fixed term parliament but it was generally expected that any parliament wouldn't last any longer than five years.
Because of this, the media would often speculate about there being an imminent general election which often got in the way of effective government business, especially when there was a narrow majority, as DC had at the time and was why he led a coalition with the LibDems.
In order to stop the media from speculating about an imminent general election so often, he brought in a bill which would fix the term for the length of a parliament to five years exactly. So now the only way of having a general election sooner than the fixed five years was to get a two thirds majority (I think it is) of a vote of no confidence in the Commons.
This, of course, hasn't worked! It has been one of the causes of the delays in implementing Brexit. Instead of the prime minister being able to call a general election when he/she wanted, it was the House of Commons itself which now decided. And the reason why there was so much vacillation about whether to have a general election recently is because both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition wouldn't support a general election until the mood of the country favoured *their* interests. And with no overall majority the prime minister couldn't control the timing - and neither could the leader of the opposition! And so DC's law for fixed term parliaments has actually delayed Brexit rather than giving any kind of stability towards "getting Brexit done". So even Boris Johnson "couldn't get Brexit done" when he became prime minister without having a general election.
(And BJ has been heard to say that he will abolish the fixed term parliament!)
GK> So from this background, it looks really fishy to see a country GK> re-electing several times, obviously only (or mainly) to fix a GK> stale-mate in the parliament because of a non-binding referendum's GK> result.
Yes, the referenda that we have are not legally binding but heaven help any prime minister who tries to ignore the result of a referendum if he/she has said that he/she will abide by it, especially as a referendum is an extraordinary thing for us to have. We'd never had one before 1974!
GK> In that case, I'd always put an election result above such a GK> referendum. If the current parliament cannot pass a bill, the bill will GK> need to be fixed. If fixing the bill isn't possible, it will need to be GK> put on ice. And I don't think that the parliament wasn't able to pass GK> /any/ bill, the Brexit was the main issue there. "Get Brexit done" was GK> /the/ slogan for the elections, there was hardly any other topic, wasn't it?
Oh yes, there were plenty of domestic topics which featured in the general election campaign. They probably weren't reported outside the UK because they were of little interest to other countries. I touched on them in a previous mail, things like the National Health Service, education, housing, and the plight of the poorest section of society, which were *very* important to many voters and (in my opinion) was the reason why so many Labour strongholds voted Conservative for the first time in their lives. Labour had let them down and BJ, knowing that he had to make an appeal to the nation for things besides Brexit, cleverly made these other things as important as Brexit. Oh yes, he had a slogan "Get Brexit Done" but apart from that he said very little about Brexit and focused on the domestic issues, having photo calls in hospitals, schools, old folks' homes, etc. That's where we saw BJ all though the campaign. Oh yes, he's clever! I respect his cleverness but I don't admire nor trust the man!
GK> Having new general elections because of "we cannot agree on anything" GK> is really letting the parliament appear in bad light. They're not doing GK> their job properly then, and having new elections is the easy way to GK> weasel out.
No, we don't see it like that in this country. We were only to thankful to have a general election simply to break the impasse.
GK> A general election is a much broader thing than just getting a couple GK> of bills passed. In that sense, BJ's victory is the success of a GK> one-trick pony. It'll be interesting to see what else he can achieve.
Well, I've just told you above what else he is planning to achieve. As for the fallout after Brexit and negotiating a trade deal, well, we shall have to wait and see. We all said he couldn't get any changes to the Brexit agreement, but he did (for what they're worth!). So we're prepared to give him the benefit of any doubt when he says that he'll have a new trade deal by the end of December 2020.
He does have a record of getting things done, especially when he was Mayor of London. Not always popular, but things usually happened when he promised them.
David
-- Formerly ICHTHUS (Reading) UK (1987-2007 R.I.P.) (2:292/854.110)
