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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the returning-sovereignty-to-parliament dept.

A controversial motion that will grant the government the power to force through Brexit legislation has been passed.

[...] It means the Conservatives, despite not winning a majority at the general election, will take control of a powerful Commons committee, and grant themselves the power to force through legislation without it being voted on or debated in parliament.

With parliament needing to change, amend or import wholesale thousands of laws and regulation to prepare the UK for its exit from the European Union, the EU Withdrawal Bill has been designed to allow for new laws and regulations to be passed via controversial legislative device called a statutory instrument, which are debated in tiny standing committees.

But the government has now voted to give itself a majority on the little known Committee of Selection, which decides the make up of those committees, and in so doing has seized control of the whole process.

[...] Liberal Democrat Chief Whip Alistair Carmichael commented: "This is a sinister power grab by an increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister.

"The Tories didn't win a majority at the election, but are now hijacking Parliament to try and impose their extreme Brexit on the country.

"It is a bitter irony that Brexiteers who spent their careers championing parliamentary sovereignty have now chosen to sell it down the river.

Source: The Independent


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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:22PM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:22PM (#567270)

    > This avoids the troublesome problem of having elected representatives create laws,

    The difference is that in the UK, the executive *is* drawn from the democratically elected legislature. For example, the UK PM is actually a member of the House of Commons and gets to vote like all of the other MPs. The ministers of state are also drawn from the House of Commons. Typically, the ministers of state are chosen because they can persuade lots of MPs to vote with them because they have social leadership over a large number of MPs. If they act in such a manner that they lose said leadership, they are no longer qualified to be ministers of state (and either the Prime Minister has to choose someone else, or, eventually, the government can't pass legislation and the government falls.

    So it is NOT like the US president, where once decisions are removed from the floor of the parliament they are no longer within the purvue of parliament. Rather they are dealt with in a small committee that actually goes through the gory details but that is DRAWN FROM parliament. This is the only sane way to run Brexit - to give the government a reasonably free hand to negotiate without having the risk of parliament undoing all the negotiations by voting against whatever is set up (and ending with no Brexit decision).

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