Lord Herbert wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 11:28am:


Yes, Herbie, but a majority in both houses of parliament have to agree to put it to the people first. Now call me a spoil-sport, but I can't see the Liberal Party, the ALP, the Greens, Nick Xenophon, the Lib-Dems, Family First or even Our Pauline voting to overturn the constitutional right to religious freedom, can you?

So I ask again, apart from having a jolly good whinge, what can you do?

Aussie wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 11:40am:


Yes, Aussie, but look at the Nazi Party. They overturned their constitution and banned religions, races, hommers, the disabled, the lot. And they didn't have a single referendum.

So it is possible, you know.

Lord Herbert wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 11:28am:


"If a majority of people in a majority of states and a majority of people across the nation as a whole vote 'yes' (called a double majority), then the proposal to amend the Constitution is agreed to.

"Otherwise the Constitution remains unchanged."

"Since 1906, when the first referendum was held, Australia has held 19 referendums in which 44 separate questions to change the Australian Constitution have been put to the people.

"Only eight changes have been agreed to."

Quote:


Keep that secret from Herbert especially, Mr Peccary.

Paki gob on a stick wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 2:44pm:


Er, UK was NOT a signatory to The Schengen Agreement before brexit.........therefore was not obliged to 'open its borders' like the other members...........understand?

Illegal country shoppers, migrants, border transgressors, whatever you want to call them was not the only reason Great Britain decided to leave. The nation was fed up with the waste and massive amounts demanded of UK, not to mention the bureaucratic monkey spankers trying to dictate to the country.

Returned crippled servicemen who are forced to sleep on the street, while foreign garbage enter the country and take advantage of benefits, housing, and free health care etc.

There's a lot more to it than simply keeping the scum out.

Fuzzball wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 3:43pm:


"More generally, Remain supporters never got around to offering positive reasons for Britain’s EU membership that would convince those who weren’t already on their side. Instead, they simply insisted that “any thinking person” would vote Remain, and anyone who disagreed had to be a xenophobic Nazi nice person. Their behavior in the wake of defeat has by and large been the same, alternating between furious statements that the 52% of Britons who voted to leave the EU must all be drooling fascist bigots, and the plaintive insistence that people couldn’t possibly have intended to vote the way they did, and can we please have the vote all over again?

Absent from the entire Remain repertory, before as well as after the vote, was any sense that the question of continued EU membership for Britain involved substantive issues about which it was possible to have reasoned disagreement. It should have been obvious that telling people that their concerns don’t matter, and berating them with schoolyard insults when they demur, was not going to convince them to change their vote. That this was not obvious to the pro-EU camp, and shows little evidence of becoming any more obvious even in the wake of defeat, hints that the issues in question are things that the pro-EU camp is utterly unwilling to see discussed at all.

...


Fast forward to the Brexit campaign. In polite society in today’s Britain, any attempt to point out the massive problems with allowing unrestricted immigration onto an already overcrowded island, which can’t provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services for the people it’s got already, is dismissed out of hand as racism. Thus it’s not surprising that quite a few Britons, many of them nominally Labour voters, mumbled the approved sound bites in public and voted for Brexit in private—and again, the pollsters and the pundits were blindsided. That’s one of the downsides of the schism between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat; once the dominant minority loses the loyalty of the masses by failing to deal with the needs of those outside the circles of affluence and privilege, sullen outward conformity and secret revolt replace the mutual trust that’s needed to make a society function.

...


Fast forward to the Brexit campaign. In polite society in today’s Britain, any attempt to point out the massive problems with allowing unrestricted immigration onto an already overcrowded island, which can’t provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services for the people it’s got already, is dismissed out of hand as racism. Thus it’s not surprising that quite a few Britons, many of them nominally Labour voters, mumbled the approved sound bites in public and voted for Brexit in private—and again, the pollsters and the pundits were blindsided. That’s one of the downsides of the schism between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat; once the dominant minority loses the loyalty of the masses by failing to deal with the needs of those outside the circles of affluence and privilege, sullen outward conformity and secret revolt replace the mutual trust that’s needed to make a society function.

The EU, in turn, made a perfect target for disaffected voters among the working class and the poor because it’s entirely a creature of the same consensus of the affluent as the Labour party after Tony Blair and the Democratic Party after Bill Clinton. Its economic policies are guided from top to bottom by the neoliberal economics that came into power with Thatcher and Reagan; its unwavering support of unrestricted immigration and capital movement is calculated to force down wages and move jobs away from countries such as Britain; its subsidies inevitably end up in the pockets of big corporations and the well-to-do, while its regulatory burdens land heaviest on small businesses and local economies.

This isn’t particularly hard find out—in fact, it takes an effort to avoid noticing it.  Listen to people bemoaning the consequences of Brexit in the latest reports from the British media, and you’ll hear a long list of privileges mostly relevant to the affluent that the speakers worry will be taken from them.  Aside from a few fringe figures, those who voted for it generally aren’t talking, since they’ve learned from bitter experience that they’ll simply be shouted down with the usual shopworn accusations of racism et al..  If they were willing to talk, though, I suspect you’d hear a long list of burdens that have mostly landed on the ordinary working people so many of the affluent so obviously despise.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au "

Fuzzball wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 3:35pm:


I do, Fireball, and I'm glad you're aware of this treaty. Country shoppers from the continent, however, are allowed to enter the UK with a European passport and reside as long as they like. Gypsies, Romanians, even the jolly Irish.

The Schengen agreement is about borders between European states. The belief that Middle Eastern or African refugees can somehow enter the UK from the continent without a visa is one of the great myths of the Leave campaign.

European passport holders have full access to every country in the EU. The EU has been quite firm about this. If England wants its free trade with Europe it must also accept free migration. That's the deal.

I don't know if they'll buckle on this to keep Britain in, but from what I can see, the Tories have every intention of getting out, even if they're completely shell-shocked over the vote.

But getting back to the constitution, how do you suggest we change it?