I take it the Court said, in effect: "You need Parliament to approve Something.
Now the issues is “just what will Parliament vote on?”.
The PM would love to get a blanket “Go Ahead; you don’t need to tell us where you’re aiming”.
I’m also going to guess the chances for such a blank slate are about 0.5%.
This is likely where the financial behemoths of London make their last stand to avoid moving to Germany and/or France to retain access to the European Market.
I can’t believe May is willing to scrap the market just to keep out those nasty brown people with their funny god.
Make you a deal: you take Trump and Pence and we’ll take May and Johnson (or other Brexit loon of your choosing).
:dubious:
You had ridiculous amount of scrutiny on Maastrich. John Major’s government nearly fell over the issue. The UK unarguably got the best possible deal during the negotiations; as evidenced by the fact even Alex Salmond does not want the Euro anymore.
Lisborn lacked enough oversight, but then Blair (due to his ridiculously huge majority) tended to keep Parliament out of the loop as much as possible.
I guess because although the voter turnout was a near equal split, it’s probably harder to predict symmetry in actual outcomes if one side or the other gets/does not get its way.
The whole situation is like opening up the delicate workings of some intricate machine - the moment you start poking around, springs and parts fly off in all directions and you wish you’d just left it alone. Now there’s no very simple way forward or back.
Water under the bridge now, but it went deeper than just scrutiny of major changes by treaty (remember, the Referendum Party at the time of the Maastricht debates got nowhere in elections): the core problem was the lack of parliamentary scrutiny and transparency over what successive governments were doing in the detailed work of the Council of Ministers, right back to the creation of the single market and before.
Hence the perception that it was all about Them giving Us orders, rather than a complex set of compromises, too prone to corporate capture and ultimately ending up with the member state governments. To hear some of those who complained about the lack of democracy in the EU, you’d think they wanted so clear a line of accountability for the central institutions as to create the kind of superstate they claimed it was already.
But we are where we are, and there’s no realistic prospect of rowing back.
Maastricht was extensive quibbling over the footnotes, nothing was actually done to address the direction of travel of the E.U. towards the structure that it is now. The detail of each treaty meant that at each stage it became harder and harder for any single country to initiate fundamental change to the E.U. And, inevitably, we find ourselves at the position we do now. Lisbon was waived through on the nod.
A refusal of Britain to sign up to either of those would have meant either a major change or an earlier withdrawal with less pain. Neither could have been ratified without the assent of the UK. and there is a good case to be made that it would have been better for such disruption to have been made at an earlier point. As we know, other countries were also steamrollered into re-running referenda until the “required” answer was given. The warning sign have been there for decades.
There is now an acceptance at the highest levels of the E.U. that it must change, but it will be much harder because they have been ideologically wedded to a certain vision and they didn’t listen and no-one had the balls to throw a spanner in the works.
I think a huge majority of people in the UK are in favour of close ties and trading agreements with Europe but if we were starting again no-one, in the UK or wider Europe, would seek to create the same beast we have now.
Then I am afraid if you opposed the principal of further integration, then the ship had long sailed buy 1991, Parliamentary oversight or not. The SEA (Mrs Thatcher) and earlier ECJ caselaw had already expanded the erstwhile EEC’s remit beyond, actually well beyond what the initial Treaty of Rome signatories had intended. Maastrich and Lisborn were born as a result of the road taken by the ECJ in Costa, *Van Gend En Loos
*, Simmenthal, Marleasing
Major, by getting major British opt outs probably kept the EC/EU from collapsing on itself.
Anyone who watched/listened to the BBC Nws reports yesterday could be deeply confused:
The Supreme Court decision was no more than a procedural clarification necessary in unprecedented circumstances - no country as done this before.
There could only be one outcome, of course Parliament is sovereign, of course MPs will vote on the deal. That’s why the Gov is already prepared for the next stage.
The rest is just drama for the sake of it. And yes, BBC News is prone to that, esp. since Laura Kuenssberg became Political Editor. Almost infantile spin on this.
I suspect you are right on this, the die was cast.
but I suspect a significant minority of the signatories did have ever-increasing integration as an ideological endpoint. Certainly the original architects had that in mind
Perhaps, but my wider point is that such individual tinkering has perhaps delayed an inevitable rethink to a point where it is going to be much more difficult and painful to put it right (if, indeed they ever can). Up until now the response of the E.U. to periods of relative success has been “GREATER INTEGRATION” whilst the response to periods of challenge has been “GREATER INTEGRATION”.
Only now when the reality hits home is there impetus for change and a rethink.
Not that I can see. They do reference “Re Resolution to Amend the Constitution [1981] 1 SCR 753” (para 141) and quote the majority judgement that conventions cannot be legally enforced.
Sorry for missing a fairly minor story in the UK press this week. I was specifically talking of Labour officially opposing the Bill, and gave a couple of different options - abstention and removal of the whip. I would say a 3 line whip in support of this Bill is in itself a way of Labour keeping it’s head down over Brexit. They are not in it to destroy the Bill. Instead, this Bill looks as if it will be one of the easier Bills(in terms of raw numbers) for the UK Gov’t to pass in the Commons this session.
Labour are royally fucked on this. There is a very simple equation to be considered and it is captured neatly in the second bar chart down in this article
Put simply, Labour hold twice as many “leave” constituencies as they do “remain”
How can they campaign on a platform of opposition to Brexit and go against two thirds of the seats they hold?
But of course all the while Corbyn gives mealy-mouthed assent to such a monumental change he is seen as a weak opposition leader which will not endear him any further to floating voters. Plus if he throws too many procedural spanners in the works as the brexit process progresses then people (certainly the tories) will also blame him if the deal goes pear-shaped…and anyway, ultimately Corbyn wants to be out of Europe, which will forever put him in direct opposition to most of his MP’s
He is fighting on several fronts and on at least two of those he is in direct opposition to a huge chunk of his party’s voters and MP’s.
All the while he dithers, May can put on a business-like air and make strong sounding speeches like she did last week which (whether you like the content or not) cast Corbyn in a bad light. Labour need to be a strong opposition now more than ever but I can’t hear or see any evidence of that.
Seems to me this opens up a historic opportunity for the Lib Dems?
If they go in hard for remain, they’ll gain access to the nearly 50 % of voters who are remain and don’t feel neither Labour nor the Tories are on their side here.
Actually no. During the Costa litigation representations were made by all six founding governments (and this was a few years after the original treaty was signed , so many of the same people were still around) that under the Treaty of Rome as they had intended to read, did not make EC rules (at the time it was not even called “law”) to be superior to national law. The ECJ told them to get stuffed.
During* Van Gend En Loos
a year later, again all six governments said that nothing in the Treaty was supposed to give private individuals the ability to enforce rights against governments, and indeed International agreements generally do not and are not construed to do so unless specified. The ECJ took the opposite view.
So the EEC managed to become more integrated and more influential than its creators intended. Much more.
I voted remain and recently responded to an online poll asking remainers what they thought now. I have yet to see the published result, but I suspect that there will be many like me who say that the die is cast - let’s get on with it.