Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.

We aren't at the end of history.

And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?

That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.

But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.

What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".

Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.

Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.

That’s a tough bar to get past…

Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.

I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.

Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.

1year 5years 10years Etc

Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.

... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.

Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.

This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.

An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.

The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.

There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).

Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.

If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.

The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.

Also, any sort of "vetoing direct democracy", where voters can repeal a law.

Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.

It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.

We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.

In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.

You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.

Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.

Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.

Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.

This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.

You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).

Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).

So like France and Germany?

> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.

1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation. 2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.

> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized

Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.

We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.

Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated

[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...

When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.

The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.

No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.

Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.