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The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Thursday, January 17, 2019

Legislative Gridlock

The ongoing train wreck in British politics that is their effort to decide how they're going to split from the European Union doesn't affect me personally much, but I've still been following it with some interest. A parliamentary system such as theirs doesn't usually develop the sort of gridlock which is paralyzing it now.

For anyone that's not familiar with it, normally a prime minister whose proposals lost by a wide margin (i.e. what just happened to the Brexit deal) would expect to lose a vote of no confidence shortly afterward. The entire point is that the prime minister is supposed to command majority support in the parliament, after all. In this case, though, Mrs. May's Conservative Party doesn't particularly like the deal in question, but is still willing to support her as prime minister over other alternatives, and so the normal consequences aren't happening.

Which leaves the British government unable to function in the normal way, and without any other obvious means to either get back to that normal or find a new standard. Not reaching any deal at all by the deadline is a real possibility, as is a deal passing with mostly the opposition parties' support instead of the majority parties. It depends on exactly how much those opposition parties want to avoid the no deal scenario, how much they're willing to help out Mrs. May's government, and what they can get in exchange for their support.

I'm calling those answers "probably a lot", "not much at all", and "who knows; making deals with the opposition isn't that common", which isn't as helpful in actually predicting the future as we might wish. Hopefully they'll still manage to avoid the worst case scenario.

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