Twelve Votes for an Exit: Compromise and Responsiveness in the Brexit Process

Brexit has been at the centre of the last two British elections and the past legislative term. The UK's exit from the European Union was characterized by a series of parliamentary setbacks, with several government defeats, continuous rebellions and cross-party agreements made to secure control of the agenda. In the research reported in this article, we analyse the parliamentary Brexit process through careful examination of the 12 indicative votes held in Westminster in 2019 to find an alternative solution to Theresa May's exit agreement. We map the choices of each MP along two relevant dimensions, connecting them to the socioeconomic structure of their constituencies as well as to the preferences expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Moreover, we associate these parliamentary behaviours – and thus MPs' attitudes towards compromise and responsiveness – to the gains and losses experienced during the subsequent 2019 general election.

Adaptive Secure Control for Leader-Follower Formation of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots in the Presence of Uncertainty and Deception Attacks

This paper addresses an adaptive secure control problem for the leader-follower formation of nonholonomic mobile robots in the presence of uncertainty and deception attacks. It is assumed that the false data of the leader robot’s information attacked by the adversary is transmitted to the follower robot through the network, and the dynamic model of each robot has uncertainty, such as unknown nonlinearity and external disturbances. A robust, adaptive secure control strategy compensating for false data and uncertainty is developed to accomplish the desired formation of nonholonomic mobile robots. An adaptive compensation mechanism is derived to remove the effects of time-varying attack signals and system uncertainties in the proposed control scheme. Although unknown deception attacks are injected to the leader’s velocities and the model nonlinearities of robots are unknown, the boundedness and convergence of formation tracking errors of the proposed adaptive control system are analyzed in the Lyapunov sense. The validity of the proposed scheme is verified via simulation results.