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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
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:51PM
In all fairness to both the voters and the current government, that's not a great analogy or explanation. There is a "mandate" for an exit, and no definition for what type of exit it is. There was no vote on the nature of Brexit, only whether or not it should happen. Your analogy implies a betrayal of the vote, rather than people voting on an ambiguous thing and then being surprised what they got.
A better analogy would be if voters made a vote to put a "Republican" into office, and then being surprised and dismayed that the person who was elected was Donald Trump. The party did what they got a mandate to do ("put a Republican as president"); it's just that people didn't realize what they were voting for. If you really want to argue it, you could say that they had Jeb Bush as the figurehead and promised they would appoint him, but in the end the vote was "do you want a Republican as President?"
Note: I'm completely ignoring the fact that the Brexit was meant to be a non-binding referendum, which throws a whole new layer of confusion into the mess.