So I was reading about this whole deal here and there’s one thing I didn’t really understand. The article says that the far-right UKIP “provoked” Cameron, who’s the Tory party leader into granting a vote on the issue of the UK leaving the EU. Why would Cameron grant such a vote? What does he gain from it since he was in the Remain camp and the UK was already part of the EU. As an American who don’t exactly understand how the parliamentary system works, it seems like an analogy would be if a Republican president called for a referendum in Congress to allow Texas to exit the US. He wouldn’t do that, it would hurt him and his party if it succeeded.
Elsewhere in the article it says that the new Prime Minister after Cameron would “call for” a new general election after the leadership was established, which makes it seem like England doesn’t have regular elections. So what’s to stop a PM from just not calling for a vote, ever? They’d stay in power permanently, right?
And lastly, with so much uncertainty on who will face the wrath of the voters, with the UKIP projected to win some seats, why even call a vote so early? It makes the British system, pardon my ignorance, seem uncoordinated and sloppy. If I were a PM, I’d delay the vote until I can be more certain that my party would win. I certainly wouldn’t do it immediately after taking power. I’d wait to consolidate my power first, maybe go on a campaigning spree for a few months, and then call for a general election when I’m more certain things will turn out my way. But the article makes it seem like its the normal thing to do for a new PM to call for a vote shortly after taking power, which to me seems odd because it would just undermine the people who just voted you into power in the first place.
It was a move by the EU skeptics in the Tory caucus to threaten Cameron’s leadership. The moron opted to throw a referendum as a means to side step an internal party political battle.
There’s no real analog in US politics I can think of, other than maybe the Tea Party GOP trying to overthrow Boehner as House Speaker.
To expand on this, legally the UK has a fixed election date, but this doesn’t override the Queen’s ability to dissolve parliament at any time. In practice, this power is only exercised when requested by the Prime Minister and doing so without the agreement of the Prime Minister would cause a constitutional crisis.
When a sitting PM is replaced as party leader (the new party leader becoming Prime Minister), it is traditional for the new leader to call an election within a reasonable period of time. This is done to get moral authority for the new PM to pursue their own agenda as opposed to their predecessor’s. This is not a legal requirement and a new Prime Minister could legally serve out the rest of the original Prime Minister’s term.
The OP should also look up “motion of no confidence” in parliamentary systems. Voluntarily stepping down is far more graceful for Cameron than being pushed out by the parliament. Even before the referendum it was passed there was speculation that the Eurosceptics had enough backing for a no confidence motion, even if it was narrowly defeated, and Cameron would have difficulty winning it:
Note that the Labour party leader has their own leadership turmoil, too:
More like, in a Texas where a lone-star-independence party has some significant portion of the popular vote, a candidate for Texas governor (with strong attachment to the U.S.) promising that, if elected, he will consult the Texas population on whether to leave the U.S. Once elected, his credibility rides on holding the referendum, but polls and common sense tell him that there’s no danger, that sanity will prevail.
Callaghan didn’t call an election. Major didn’t call an election. Brown didn’t call an election. Whatever tradition there may have been, it’s been gone for more than a generation.
The Conservatives had originally achieved power by going into a joint agreement with another party - it was a shared governing arrangement with the Liberal Democrats.
A significant number of their supporters looked as if they would throw in their lot with UKIP - if this had happened then they would very likely lose the following election, and lose power.
There looked to be a serious danger of the right wing vote being split further and this would have either had a majority for the opposition Labour party, or a situation where no party had a majority, and so there would have been another coalition. If the Conservatives had been forced into a coalition, its likely they would have had to hold their noses, swallow and share power with UKIP, but the condition would certainly have been to hold a EU referendum.
The reason that Cameron called the referendum was because his party was in danger of tearing itself apart over the issue, so as a way to placate them, he promised a referendum on this issue. This persuaded those who had thought of joining UKIP to stay. The Conservatives were the only party who offered a referendum, so it may be possible that voters right across the political spectrum also threw in their lot with the Conservatives.
The matter of EU membership is not unanimous across any of the political parties, Jeremy Corbyn - current(this week anyway) leader of the Labour party has expressed dislike of the EU in the past, and there are others that I have met within the Labour Party who voted BREXIT - in fact in the further past, quite a swathe of the very left wing of the Labour party, right through to the Communists were against the EU.
It does have to be said that the Liberal Democrats are far more pro EU than any of the others, but they also have a few doubters
The article did mention that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t seem to care if people likes him or not, but he’s in a minority party and not the PM so he has less to lose for himself and his party. Realistically, was Cameron position threatened had he not held that vote? The article makes it seem like its completely on his whim and that no one could have forced him to have it.
And now that its done, given the power of the PM to call votes, could they legally call for another vote? Or is this one binding for a time?
Wasn’t Cameron and the vast majority of the Tories in favor of staying? I’m not used to the leader of a political party having such a different view than the rest of his party. If Cameron and the rest of the Tories were mostly in favor, and only the apparently tiny minority UKIP wanted out, why was there so much dissent? Or was the UKIP’s support conditional upon a vote to leave the EU?
I asked in another thread and didn’t get an answer.
My understanding of the act is that simply replacing the Prime Minister with a member of the same party is not a condition that would allow a snap election. I’d like to know if this understanding is correct.
Yes, this is correct. The only ways for Parliament to be dissolved are for it to expire in advance of the scheduled election, for 2/3 of the House of Commons to approve an election, or for a motion of no-confidence to be passed by the House of Commons and not retracted within two weeks.
(The implicit 4th option is that Parliament could repeal or amend the act. As with everything else in the UK, it’s just an ordinary law.)
For Cameron (or anyone else) to be Prime Minister, two conditions have to be satisfied:
First, Cameron has to be the chosen leader of his party.
Secondly, his party must either win a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, or (more rarely) it must form an alliance with other parties so that, together, the alliance holds a majority of seats in the House of Commons, and it must be the largest party in that alliance.
Right. Cameron’s party, the Conservatives, was internally divided over the question of EU membership, and the division was becoming deeper and more bitter. In-fighting over this issue could injure Cameron in one of two ways. First, at an election the public might be reluctant to support a party so obviously divided over such an important issue. The party might lose the election. Secondly, the divisions in the party could lead to a challenge to the existing leadership - Cameron - by the opposing faction within the party, and Cameron might lose the position of party leader. Either would be fatal to Cameron’s objective of being Prime Minister.
So, Cameron promised a referendum on the question of EU membership. In the short term, this calmed down internal party divisions on the question.
So, legally, he didn’t have to have the referendum. It was a political decision to have it. Yes, he took the decision in order to avert, or at least postpone, a threat to his own position. (But also to avert or postpone a threat to his party.)
This one is not binding at all, legally speaking. On one view, it’s just a very large opinion poll.
But politically, it’s binding. The Conservative Party campaigned in the last election on a platform which contained (a) a commitment to hold a referendum, and (b) a commitment to respect the result. They won a parliamentary majority on that platform, and this now means that they have a democratic mandate which requires them to implement the referendum result. Simply ignoring it would be political suicide.
Which leaves only two options: implement the referendum result by taking the steps needed to take the UK out of the EU, or seek a fresh mandate from the electorate not to exit the EU. You could do the latter either by holding a second referendum, or by fighting and winning a general election on a platform of remaining in the UK.
At present the question of how to seek a new mandate is academic. Cameron has resigned as leader, and all of those who are seeking to replace him are taking the position that the UK must now leave the EU, and if elected they will take steps to bring that about. Hypothetically, if the new leader did decide at some point to seek a mandate to remain in the EU, a general election rather than a second referendum would be the standard British way to seek that mandate. But the leader would presumably chose whichever method they judged most likely to yield the result they wanted.
(As noted, neither would be straightforward. The power of a Prime Minister to call a new election is limited by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, while a new referendum would require the Prime Minister to get legislation to hold the referendum approved by Parliament. But, given the political will either could be done.)
Cameron and a majority of Conservative MPs did favour remaining in the EU, but the pro-Leave minority within the Conservative party were large enough and vocal enough to be a problem. Far from UKIP offering support to the Conservatives, they opposed them, and there was a fear that they would chip away at the Conservative vote. Under the UK’s charmingly primitive electoral system, in a district with a right-of-centre majority of voters, if the right-of-centre vote is split between, oh, say, the Conservatives and UKIP while the left-of-centre vote remains solid around Labour (or another party), the left-of-centre minority can win the election. The big fear from the Conservatives was not that UKIP would win many seats at an election - in fact UKIP won only 1 seat out of 650 - but that by splitting the right-of-centre vote UKIP would deliver a significant number of seats to the Labour party. The promise of a referendum was intended to neutralise this threat; potential Conservative voters who favoured leaving the EU could vote for the Conservatives rather than UKIP, knowing that they would later have the opportunity to vote to leave the EU.
Not really, no. Suppose you favour Candidate C, who has no chance of winning, and loathe Candidate A, who very well might win. A tactical vote might be a vote for Candidate B who, while he’s not your favoured candidate, is nevertheless preferable to Candidate A. If enough people think like you, then candidate B gets elected, which is preferable to Candidate A getting elected.
But this is neither nuanced nor sophisticated. You have succeeded in keeping Candidate A out, at the cost of not recording or registering your preference for Candidate C. Candidate B’s party may think its policies enjoy more support than they do. Worse, Candidate C’s party may think its policies - the ones you favour more than any other - enjoy less support than they do, and may be induced to modify or even abandon them.
A nuanced and sophisticated system would allow you to register your preference for Candidate C, while still voting in such a way as to disadvantage the loathsome Candidate A. First-past-the-post is not that system, however. It allows you to do one or other of these things, but not both. That’s a loss of nuance.
While in practice this has been true, technically, it is not correct. The Prime Minister is simply the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons. That can be any MP apart from the Speaker. (Well, the Speaker could but then she’d stop being the Speaker.)