Comment by Maxatar
7 months ago
The United Kingdom has parliamentary supremacy with little to no checks or balances, so if the parliament wants to give away something, there is nothing that can really stop them.
7 months ago
The United Kingdom has parliamentary supremacy with little to no checks or balances, so if the parliament wants to give away something, there is nothing that can really stop them.
Indeed. The only practical constraints on parliament are the Laws of Nature, which unlike man's laws cannot be broken, and the will of the People, in defiance of which a Parliament necessarily would fall since the Parliament is constituted from those people.
If Parliament tried to ban booze (as the US Federal Government once did) that's probably not going to go well, and maybe they would (like the US government) be forced to undo that - but all they did here was give away something very few of their citizens likely even knew they had. I was surprised it made headlines.
Parliament can for sure overrule the will of the people, and very often do.
They might get punished in the next election or they may not.
More precisely only the PM can call an election I believe.
> They might get punished in the next election or they may not.
If what they do is sufficiently contrary to the will of the people (or at least, those with weapons and the will to use them), they'll get punished sooner than that. Laws and constitutions are a useful abstraction but ultimately an imperfect one.