Theresa May’s decision to hold a Parliamentary vote in the
week beginning 3rd June on the Bill implementing the Withdrawal
Agreement from the European Union will have two probable consequences. First,
it will provide her with a brief respite after the (likely) catastrophic
Conservative results in the European Elections. Last week, the executive of the
powerful 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs agreed to wait upon the
result of the Parliamentary vote before pressing further for the Prime
Minister’s resignation.
Of all the
strange and unpredictable events generated by Brexit, the current negotiations
between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition must be the oddest.
It is easy to sympathise
with last week’s reluctance of President Macron and other EU-27 leaders to
endorse an extension of the Article 50 Brexit negotiations until the end of
October 2019. There is a real chance that in six months the present
bad-tempered and confused impasse in the House of Commons will still be in
place. Brexit has created for the British political system a series of
intractable dilemmas that will be no more attractive or easily resolved over
the coming months than they are now. The
European Council of mid-October may be confronted with a very similar menu of
Brexit options to those it considered last week.
Senior Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London; Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust
10th April 2019
Parliamentarians are seeking to exploit in the Brexit negotiations what they believe to be an incontrovertible, though normally only latent, power over the government. On Monday they passed the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill 2017-19, which received Royal Assent and became the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2019. It was designed to force the government to seek an extension to Article 50, and to require parliamentary approval for the length of the delay requested by the government. The government was obliged by the Act, the day after it was passed, to table an amendable motion enabling the Commons to instruct it to seek an extension to a date of the Commons’ choosing. On Tuesday, the UK government obtained approval for its plan to seek an extension to 30 June. But is this legislation really the assertion of parliamentary authority it might seem to be? Continue reading BREXIT AND PARLIAMENTARY ‘SOVEREIGNTY’→
At the time of writing it seems unlikely that the Withdrawal Agreement will be accepted by Parliament on 29th March, the day originally set for the UK to leave the EU. Parliament has decided that in these circumstances it will hold a further round of voting on 1st April, in the hope of arriving at a consensus on Brexit after the indecisive votes of 27th March. It is entirely possible that on 1st April a majority of the House of Commons will vote for permanent British membership of a Customs Union with the EU or for a further referendum. This will bring great political satisfaction to those MPs who since the beginning of the year have been arguing that Parliament should “take control” of the Brexit process.
UPDATE 25/03/19: Last week the European Council gave the United Kingdom two further weeks to come up with a plan for avoiding a “no deal” Brexit. It is now up to Parliament to adopt such a plan and make the government adopt it too. If this government remains set on “no deal,” Parliament needs to replace it.
It is frequently claimed that the central flaw of the 2016 European referendum was its failure to clarify the nature of the Brexit for which Leave voters were voting. There is some truth in this analysis, but it does not precisely capture the inadequacy of the result as a basis for subsequent action. Many, probably most, Leave voters had a clear idea of what they thought they were voting for: maintenance of the economic benefits of EU membership, coupled with the disappearance of the legal and political obligations arising from that membership. The Leave campaign spent much time and effort presenting this seductive and dishonest prospectus to the electorate. Indeed, they would not have gained their narrow victory if they had spoken frankly of the unwelcome trade-offs that would inevitably accompany Brexit.
by Dr Andrew Blick Senior Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London; Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust
8th March 2019
Parliament, it might be tempting to believe, can now seize control of the Brexit agenda. But a closer examination of the present political environment reveals a picture less flattering to the heart of representative democracy. The Commons will indeed be asked to vote on one or more propositions next week. First, does it accept whatever revamped exit deal the government may obtain from the EU? If not, second, does it want to leave without a deal? If not, then, third, does it want the government to seek an extension of Article 50? MPs may also vote on whether or not they want a second referendum.
by Dr Andrew Blick Senior Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London; Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust
26th February 2019
It is an irony frequently remarked upon that the Brexit
process, though embarked upon partly in the name of the sovereignty of
Parliament, has seen this institution marginalised. Some of this exclusion from
meaningful involvement in Brexit has been self-imposed. Parliament approved
legislation, the European Union
(Referendum) Act 2015, providing for an open-ended question to be put to
the public which it subsequently accepted as producing a binding requirement,
in some form, to leave the EU. It then provided the Prime Minister, through the
European Union (Notification of
Withdrawal) Act 2017, with the statutory authority required to trigger
Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, without attaching any conditions to
the exercise of this power. Parliament has subsequently proved more effective
at asserting that it should have power than actually exercising it. It has lately
been willing to reject options it finds undesirable, most dramatically the deal
secured by the UK government in negotiations with the EU. But even when
expressing negative views, parliamentarians have voted in the same direction
for different and opposing reasons. The imposition of a positive course of
action – a function that is surely the essence of a ‘sovereign’ body – has not
been attained.
A frequent
criticism of the Prime Minister is that she prematurely triggered the Article
50 negotiations in March 2017 and did so without a realistic plan for their conduct.
If she had waited longer and planned better, her critics contend, she could
have negotiated a more acceptable Withdrawal Agreement and Political
Declaration than the texts she is now having such difficulty steering through
Parliament. It is certainly true that
Theresa May began the Brexit negotiations with no realistic plan. But no amount
of delay and no amount of planning would have allowed her ever to achieve
results acceptable to a majority of “Leave” voters and their Parliamentary
sympathisers, let alone to the electorate or to Parliament as a whole. “No
deal” was from the beginning the most likely outcome. The contradictory and
unrealisable expectations reposed in “Brexit” could never lead to an outcome
with which its partisans would be satisfied.
Four conclusions emerge from the series of votes on Brexit in
the House of Commons this week (29th January):
• First, this government is so paralysed by internal
division that it is incapable of pursuing any coherent policy in the negotiations.
As long as it is in office but not in power, the UK is therefore on track to
leave the EU on 29th March 2019 with “no deal.”
• Second, there is a majority of MPs, probably a significant
majority, who wish to avoid the UK’s leaving the European Union without a
Withdrawal Agreement.
• Third, this majority is not yet willing or able to impose
its will on a government that runs the risk of bringing this about.
• Fourth, tensions and divisions within the major parties
will make it difficult, although far from impossible, for Parliament to impose
its will on the government before the end-March deadline. The possibility of
the UK’s leaving the EU in two months with “no deal” having been agreed remains
as high as ever. Whether this anarchic event occurs will depend on the
interaction between the above distinct and contradictory conclusions emerging
from this week’s vote.
