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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Blindsided. Leavers have given the PM a free rein over the Article 50 negotiations and they’ll come to regret it
Theresa May has striven mightily at every stage to avoid Parliamentary restraint on her Brexit negotiations with the rest of the EU. She fought in the courts to the bitter end against the principle that the triggering of Article 50 required the prior approval from Parliament. A White Paper was extracted out of the government in a manner akin to that used by Lord Olivier in Marathon Man. The White Paper thus extracted was so anodyne that vanilla seemed tangy after reading it. The Article 50 Bill was pushed through Parliament with every attempt to place any restraint on the way in which the government negotiates Brexit stripped out. It received Royal Assent on Wednesday in pristine form. The only commitment that the Government has given is to allow a vote on the final deal on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Leaving it would mean that Britain left the EU without any deal at all. So from now on, Theresa May can ignore Parliament.
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XX For One Oz Viewer ....
This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide.
So this is entirely consistent with what we were told before the referendum. If the MPs and Lords had a problem with this, they should have said something when the referendum bill went through parliament.
In practice there will not be any different options on the table other than the final bill, so it was always going to be a take it or leave it rubber stamp (and as an international treaty it is questionable whether that falls under Parliament anyway). The timetable of negotiations and their outcome are in the hands of the EU, and it will be hard to get even an inadequate deal from them as the ardent federalists who are negotiating are still very sore at their rejection and determined to punish Britain pour encouragers les autres. So the suggestion that Parliament could stop a hard Brexit by forcing a return to the negotiating table was always something of a fantasy.
Theresa May has not only the right to ignore Parliament now, she has got to ignore it. There is no way a successful negotiation can be carried out while a much-divided assembly is exposing her strategy at every turn and demanding five different courses of action at once. Indeed, that only raises the odds of failure from very high to stone certain.
And as it is a treaty Parliament has authorised her to negotiate and been granted a vote on, if anything it strengthens the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty rather than weakens it.
https://twitter.com/DouglasCarswell/status/843012308855132161
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4327916/MP-tells-Jeremy-Corbyn-quit-face.html
Seemingly rational people have taken leave of their senses.
On topic - it's nice to see John Major get his mojo back;
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/19/john-major-attacks-ultra-brexiteers-undemocratic-un-british-theresa-may-eu-brexit
Thread after thread by Mr Meeks, I've no idea what he or the editors are hoping to achieve but its not a good look.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39318463
At some point, somebody is going to have to deal with this, and if it turns out to be Trump rather than Xi it could get very nasty very fast.
Take the much discussed rights of EU citizens here, vs UK citizens in the EU. The EU does not have the authority to require an EU country to treat one non EU citizen differently to another. Just as our government can currently set different visa requirements on Somalians vs Canadians, post Brexit Spain has the right to decide whether Brits can stay rather than the EU parliament. The Spanish government also has the right to change its mind over the status of non EU citizens at any time, as in the EU that is a national competence. The EU cannot negotiate over this, tbough 27 EU countries can.
As I have said all along, hard Brexit is nailed on and soft Brexit was always a mirage. Even on such a single issue the negotiations cannot be concluded within the 18 months. The only sensible plan is to batten down the hatches for total hard as nails Brexit, as that is what Brexit means Brexit means.
Oh, my aching sides.
Mr Farron has always bent the truth. In 1997 he was sacked by the leader of Lancashire CC Lib Dems for refusing to stand during the loyal toast at a civic function. Today he is claiming patriotism. Journalists - ask him about that civic function in 1997 !
Yes they are relying on the government, but perhaps they think that's where the odds are better
Such a take it or leave it veto does of course massively increase the prospect of failure.
As Alastair Meeks points out she has no legislative restraint on changing her mind again.
*heads back to bed*
Meeksy - be good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFo8-JqzSCM
So unfortunately for Blighty the deal we will be offered is va te faire foutre, and so off we go to WTO land. In a few years time things might settle back down, but thats like saying that after a big asteroid crashes into the earth things might settle back down.
The cost of WTO tariffs is broadly similar to what we pay the EU, so no £350m a week for the NHS. But it's the shock impact to industry that will do the terminal damage - a British car industry reliant on parts being shipped to and from the EU to be built here won't be viable if BMW have to pay an import tariff to the EU to ship Hams Hall engines to Germany for gearbox fitting then a tariff to the UK to install them in a Mini. Yes in the long term a supply chain can be set up. But in practice it will be the same impact as privatisation had on the train building industry - its swift closure.
And the same with banking, where it's even easier to up sticks and move. This I believe is the Trump card Sturgeon intends to play. All the way through our "negotiations" the EU will tell us not to go. They'll say stay in the market are you mad? So Sturgeon will agree her own deal - an independent Scotland in the EEA via EFTA, they'll give her transitional access, and so she'll have her referendum next autumn whether London likes it or not. And the carrot? No need to move to Frankfurt Mr Barclays, just come to Edinburgh.
Edit - incidentally the second one is in any case clearly wrong as Parliament can debate anything it chooses. That's how the Norway debate happened in the first place. That doesn't mean May will be bound by what it says any more than Merkel would be Lund by the will of the Bundestag if what they want is impossible.
Say Mrs May called an early election, and lost her majority this year. The new government (perhaps a coalition led by Mr Farron!) would have absolute authority over the negotiations. A juicy prospect indeed. It was quite unnecessary for Parliament to deny itself control over the executive.
The reality is that Westminster will endlessly discuss Brexit, but only in a debating society formative manner rather than with authority.
What might be really damaging to the SNP is that they seem intent on holding a wildcat ballot - which they still look set to lose. Losing a once-in-a-generation ballot twice in ten years under such auspicious circumstances would kill talk of independence for another 300 years. Not smart politics by Mrs May to try and block it.
The main problem here is that the nation voted one way and Parliament disagrees. That can happen on individual issues, but we vote for MPs on a variety of issues. The difference here is that we don't have a referendum on each individual issue. If we did, we wouldn't need Parliament and it would be impracticable anyway.
If we'd had a referendum on the NI changes, they might well have gone through.
I'll repeat my first sentence for you.The main problem here is that the nation voted one way and Parliament disagrees. The blame for that lies with a man whose initials are DC. Not the voters
For a country to vote against the agreement they need to make their own decision to do so (whether that is government or Parliamentary - I don't know).
For the treaty to be rejected you need multiple countries to vote against it.
Hence no one EU Parliament can veto the Treaty
Mr. Doethur (2), May can't have a Scottish independence referendum during negotiations. Before or after might make sense, during is a case of Sturgeon transparently playing silly buggers.
"If May announces her intention to go to the country to confirm her Brexit strategy at the same time as she triggers article 50 at the end of this month, she could just manage to coincide the general election with the local elections on May 4.
Then or later, the Fixed Term Parliament Act is not much of an obstacle. The easiest way to overrule it would be a two-thirds majority vote in the Commons. Conservative MPs want an early election because they think they would do well and seats would not be cut down by new boundaries. Jeremy Corbyn is on record as saying: “If there is a vote to dissolve parliament then obviously we will vote with it.” Even if he backtracks, the majority of Labour MPs still see painful election chemotherapy as the quickest and surest way to purge their party of the Corbyn cancer.
May is in a similar position to Gordon Brown 10 years ago. He too got to No 10 without winning a general election. Brown famously missed his chance in 2007 because he feared the opinion polls were turning against a clear victory.
Some Tories working closely with May say she resembles Brown in other ways: paranoid, bullying, over-reliant on unaccountable advisers but ultimately indecisive and cautious. This is the moment for her to prove them wrong and run ahead of the storm. Otherwise things will only get harder."
Like a banking run it will be a cumulative accelerating collapse. The decision of one business impacts the decision making of the next who impacts on the next 3 then the next 5 and so on. "We'll threaten them with tariffs" will bleat Rees Moggy, but why would business want that level of uncertainty and the cost of operating like that? And slamming the shutters down on trade in that matter is the literal antithesis of what the Rees Moggs of this world stand for, so that has its own shock factor that will accelerate the collapse.
And yes, Scotland will need the Euro. Because you can imagine what cable will be worth whilst this collapse is going on
Leaving the EU means that jobs that would have been created in the UK will now be created elsewhere and investments that would have been made here will now happen in other countries. Missed opportunities and lower growth will be the name of the game. But the wealthy nationalists that led the Leave campaign will be fine, so that's OK.
red red green now heading for a majority ( SPD, the Left, Greens )
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/bundestagswahl/rot-rot-gruen-erreicht-laut-umfrage-knappe-mehrheit-14931775.html
Now, Don Brind is another matter.
two weeks ago Remainers were wittering on about the death of UK car production
last week Toyota announced it was investing quarter a billion quid
one could equally argue that investments made in the EU to take advantage of favourable tax regimes in Ireland and Luxemburg will be forced to come back to the UK if they want to keep trading here
Under such circumstances, even Arthur Balfour wouldn't have much trouble winning an election.
The focus of the anger will move to the EU itself, when the hard Brexit/ WTO situation turns out to be sub optimal and economically problematic. That, I am afraid to say, is the simple logic of the politics of nationalism and grievance, you just blame someone else for the problems, rather than making difficult decisions.
And so it goes on forever, increasing fragmentation and squabbling. Its the same difference, UK and the EU, Scotland and the UK, Northern Ireland / Ireland and the UK, etc etc etc.
Political nationalism is toxic, always has been. We've seen this many times in the twentieth century and it usually ends in war and poverty.
We all weigh evidence and make decisions on what we see shock.
Didn`t Mrs May once say something like that?
"I agree. But that has nothing to do with Alastair's article."
It has everything to with Mr Meek's article. If we had a referendum on whether to go to war with Adolf, we might well have voted Yes at the time. Then Parliament would have been hamstrung about when and if to surrender. It wold have meant continuing the war to its end - which actually happened.
if Parliament, in its wisdom decides, that a referendum is needed (and they did), they can't then row back when they don't like the result.
We didn't have a referendum in 1939, so parliament could have voted to sue for peace after the fall of Norway. In an alternative universe, that happened an infinite number of times.
What Mr Meeks and you would prefer(correct me if I'm wrong) is that if the going gets tough, or is portrayed as getting too tough, Parliament could reverse or rerun the referendum.
That would surely happen if it's left to Parliament. The EU would be fools not to take advantage. What would you do if you were the EU negotiators?