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The amount of overspend per voter is not relevant - if one side sticks to the legal spending limit while the other doesn't, then the result can legitimately be called into question.
Brexit - The UK leaves the EU
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Tired Tyres
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It isn't an issue at all but try explaining that isn't going to get you far. The Remain camp are clutching at any straw coming their way while the politicians try to work out how to mess up as best they can. It would be funny. If I lived in any other country at all that is.
It isn't an issue at all but try explaining that isn't going to get you far. The Remain camp are clutching at any straw coming their way while the politicians try to work out how to mess up as best they can. It would be funny. If I lived in any other country at all that is.
Clutching at straws... oh look I got the law-straw!
Tired Tyres
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Indeed, I'd like David Lammy to go for it... though I do wonder what Labour would actually do. I think the only person who stands a chance of winning a GE for Labour would be David Miliband.
It is, but I think that the fact that it's been triggered and we are already so far along (time wise) would some what change the question. Not that we can't cancel it, but rather if we do continue to leave, there is some context to what that actually means.
I think I've made it quite clear I have zero intention of "getting lost" when it comes to Brexit.
Tired Tyres
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You've made it quite clear that you have zero intention of doing anything at all productive, such as contact your MP, and just happily flick peanuts from the gallery instead.
How do you know what I have or haven't done? I'm a member of several Second Vote movements, thank you very much, after all;
But I don't think that correcting you is unproductive.
Tired Tyres
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You said, it was a non-issue (the fact that the main Leave campaign broke electoral-law), this, is incorrect. And in-fact has been brought up in the House, today (which I also helpfully linked to).
I just read through the last page and I seem to missing it mate, unless you mean this?
I later say you didn't read the link and quote the important part (and then highlight the important sentence, because I'm helpful like that). But that link is in the quote you replied to in your own post... unless I'm missing something else?
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- GTP_Mars
The government have (perhaps unexpectedly) narrowly won the key vote on 'Clause 18' that would have forced the government to seek a Customs Union if a trade deal is not agreed... they won by just 6 votes.
- 29,366
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- GTP_Mars
Yeh - the Tories must have some pretty lethal whips stashed in the cupboard!
Speaking of whips, apparently the reason Cable and Farron didn't turn up for the vote last night was that the Lib Dem chief whip believed the vote 'would be lost by hundreds' and so Lib Dems weren't ordered to vote... seems a tad unbelievable to me!
Speaking of whips, apparently the reason Cable and Farron didn't turn up for the vote last night was that the Lib Dem chief whip believed the vote 'would be lost by hundreds' and so Lib Dems weren't ordered to vote... seems a tad unbelievable to me!
Tired Tyres
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More than a tad. They need a kick up the backside for that. They are the party that would keep us in the EU fully. The very least they should do is VOTE.
Yeah, that sounds like ******** to me.
No way the government was ever going to either just sail it though or be utterly crushed.
It’s a shame the Lib Dem’s never change, things like this are why people don’t trust them.
This is also a pretty massive tweet, David Lammy is/was a lawyer as well as a Labour MP;
I can’t find a link to what they are talking about, but did see this.
Also this petition is past the 10k marker to be replied to by the government, and almost a 3rd of the way through to being discussed in the house https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/223729
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It's deeply frustrating how the FT lock their content behind a very high paywall, but there content is usually of very high quality.
I found this article fairly relevant, not only to my own goals and ambitions with Brexit but in the wake of the revelation that Leave acted unlawfully.
Put this into the context of what Tory MP Anna Soubry said to the BBC;
I think it goes without saying that if Corbyn actually had any guile, he would have already have taken this stand, but alas...
I found this article fairly relevant, not only to my own goals and ambitions with Brexit but in the wake of the revelation that Leave acted unlawfully.
Via
Put this into the context of what Tory MP Anna Soubry said to the BBC;
...and include the speech I linked to above from Labour MP David Lammy. It looks like Labour should, if they want to actually get into power rather than simply ruin May, would be to take lead from it's back benches. Push for a second vote and take the place of the weak Lib Dems and march forward as a Remain party, at least in the guise that the governments idea of Brexit, is wrong. They do hold a very slight majority in the polls, and actually taking a stance on Brexit could boost that.
I think it goes without saying that if Corbyn actually had any guile, he would have already have taken this stand, but alas...
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- FLAT_TWELVE
I always had trouble to understand why at least half of the UK's people would want to leave the EU, but after two years of reading the DT's readers' comments I think I understand now.
IMHO, simple explanations are usually wrong but, by cutting through the complexities of any given person's motivations, they at least give you an hint of a common denominator, and that one tends to be, in the end, the deepest and strongest tie between all the personal decisions. So, according to my "feel" on this, in the end, it is nostalgia of a former, but lost, superiority that makes the UK's people so angry at EU bureacrats, EU red tapes, and ultimately, fearful of becoming the lesser brother, or not the greatest of them, in a brotherhood. Such a status is not acceptable in the collective, maybe not entirely conscious, mind of the british people. And therefore if or when other are in charge, or "call the shots", it becomes a dictatorship.
I know for a fact how portuguese still are still nostalgicly proud over the fact that we were the first navigators to sail and find new worlds, all the way from the western shores of Europe to Japan, how our own overseas empire (first and last, we only gave up the big African territories in 1975), even if smaller than the British, emcompassed all continents bar Antartica. It is deeply engraved in our collective memory and in the way we see ourselves, quietly proud about it all.
So it isn't hard to understand how a country that only recently lost superpower status is having it hard to be just one (even if one of the gretatest) in a collective group, having to share political decisions and not having the final say in many of them.
I can understand all that. But …
I can't understand the total chaos that is now happening. Seen from the outsiders perspective, the current state of affairs appears to be the one of a country that faces a HUGE challenge, is bitterly divided about it, can't decide how to tackle it, and didn't prepare for any of the inevitable scenarios that whatever option is chosen will present.
And I'm not even talking about the funny scenes from the last few days at the UK's Parliament. I'm talking about serious stuff, like the UK preparing for having proper customs, adequately sized to cope with the loss of "frictionless trade".
If you compare that with the preparations taking place by the EU countries, the contrast is boggling. The UK is the one getting out, and it is the other countries that prepare for it. Here one of the many recent reports about it:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...hard-brexit-uk-hire-staff-dutch-a8452386.html
IMHO, simple explanations are usually wrong but, by cutting through the complexities of any given person's motivations, they at least give you an hint of a common denominator, and that one tends to be, in the end, the deepest and strongest tie between all the personal decisions. So, according to my "feel" on this, in the end, it is nostalgia of a former, but lost, superiority that makes the UK's people so angry at EU bureacrats, EU red tapes, and ultimately, fearful of becoming the lesser brother, or not the greatest of them, in a brotherhood. Such a status is not acceptable in the collective, maybe not entirely conscious, mind of the british people. And therefore if or when other are in charge, or "call the shots", it becomes a dictatorship.
I know for a fact how portuguese still are still nostalgicly proud over the fact that we were the first navigators to sail and find new worlds, all the way from the western shores of Europe to Japan, how our own overseas empire (first and last, we only gave up the big African territories in 1975), even if smaller than the British, emcompassed all continents bar Antartica. It is deeply engraved in our collective memory and in the way we see ourselves, quietly proud about it all.
So it isn't hard to understand how a country that only recently lost superpower status is having it hard to be just one (even if one of the gretatest) in a collective group, having to share political decisions and not having the final say in many of them.
I can understand all that. But …
I can't understand the total chaos that is now happening. Seen from the outsiders perspective, the current state of affairs appears to be the one of a country that faces a HUGE challenge, is bitterly divided about it, can't decide how to tackle it, and didn't prepare for any of the inevitable scenarios that whatever option is chosen will present.
And I'm not even talking about the funny scenes from the last few days at the UK's Parliament. I'm talking about serious stuff, like the UK preparing for having proper customs, adequately sized to cope with the loss of "frictionless trade".
If you compare that with the preparations taking place by the EU countries, the contrast is boggling. The UK is the one getting out, and it is the other countries that prepare for it. Here one of the many recent reports about it:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...hard-brexit-uk-hire-staff-dutch-a8452386.html
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- Johnnypenso
Of course it's relevant. If they had overspent on one side or the other by $1000 we wouldn't be having this discussion. I highly doubt $0.01 per voter had any influence at all and it's ridiculous to be talking about a do-over as a result. I suspect if the tables were turned there would be much laughter and ridicule at the notion.
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The spend-per-vote differential is not a meaningful metric. Imagine if one side spends 10x more than the other and got 10x more votes - the cost per vote is the same for both sides, hence the difference is zero. Does that mean that spending 10x more has no effect?!
I view it more along the lines that each (undecided) voter is more likely to be influenced towards a particular side if that side were allowed to spend more than the other. I admit that it is likely impossible to elucidate how much of a swing in the result a 7.14% overspend actually caused in this case, but what is more important is that in this particular case there was a legal limit to how much each official campaign was allowed to spend, and it so happens that the winning side breached that legal limit.
I view it more along the lines that each (undecided) voter is more likely to be influenced towards a particular side if that side were allowed to spend more than the other. I admit that it is likely impossible to elucidate how much of a swing in the result a 7.14% overspend actually caused in this case, but what is more important is that in this particular case there was a legal limit to how much each official campaign was allowed to spend, and it so happens that the winning side breached that legal limit.
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Yes the legal limit was breached but I don't believe for a second that $0.01 per voter had any measureable effect on the result. I don' t think a court would either.
Internet lawyers are always the best, I’ve found.
What a court may or may not rule is irrelevant. They have been found to have broken electoral law and have been fined. The extent of their breaking of the law was so, that the commission requested parliament rethink its powers of punishment.
The metric you keep pushing is irrelevant and meaningless.
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But as I just said, you are using a meaningless differential (the difference between the total campaign spends per vote gained) - whereas I'm going on a more meaningful differential (the absolute difference in total campaign spends). As you can see from my example, the difference in the former can literally be anything (from zero to whatever) but it doesn't reflect how much of advantage a campaign might get. The absolute difference, on the other hand, doesn't rely on any such meaningless figure. Note also that if one side overspends (and gains more votes as a result) but the other side doesn't, the spend per vote of the side that loses votes goes up too, hence why the spend-per-vote metric is pretty useless.
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- TexRex72
Keep playing that card and it's going to wither away until there's nothing left.
Court not concerned with the law...
Don't you mean armchair lawyers? I seem to recall it was the legal scholars that demonstrated a degree of internettedness. Probably best to not conflate the two.
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- GTP_TheCracker
If you look at it as if it were motorsport regulations it's like a winning Formula 3 car running with a 28.5mm air restrictor when it's regulated to only run with a 28mm one. Whether that small change made any difference or not to the result is moot. The fact is it's not with the rules and regulations.
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- Johnnypenso
It isn't an F1 race and material differences do matter. You can't just throw out a national referendum because of an insignificant error that could not possibly have swayed the election in any statistically significant way. If it was $100 or $1000 or a $10 donation would we be having the same argument? If Remain had won, this contention would be the subject of much mockery and ridicule, of that I have no doubt.
Where is your evidence to support this ludicrous claim?
There is no argument, they broke the law. End of discussion.
Can you please, stop talking utter *****?
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- Johnnypenso
It's obviously my opinion so I don't need evidence. It's a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money to even consider it and just a blatant attempt to nullify perfectly legal results. IMO of course.
A. Please point to where I said they didn't break the law.
B. You don't get to determine when the discussion ends.
Why are you swearing?
A. I absolutely, unequivocally, totally and completely believe that. You don't have to.
B. You don't get to tell me what I can and cannot say on this forum. Please stop trying to control my participation here because you don't like what I'm saying.
These are my irrelevant opinions on a subject I don’t understand, let’s debate!
If GTP had a kissing emoji I’d be using it now, just for you.
