Landmark Brexit bill set to clear key hurdle

LONDON: British MPs are set to give the green light on Wednesday to a key Brexit bill whose turbulent passage through parliament has dealt damaging defeats to Prime Minister Theresa May, but it faces further opposition from the upper house.

The House of Commons is expected to vote to approve the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, which would repeal the 1972 law which made Britain a member of the European Union and transfer four decades of EU rules onto the British statute books.

But one pro-EU MP warned that the largely europhile upper House of Lords was likely to insist on further changes when the bill moves there for scrutiny, while ministers still face a battle with the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations.

During weeks of Commons debate, MPs tabled hundreds of amendments to the bill, many of them focused on its sweeping powers to both amend EU regulations as they are transferred into British law and to authorise any Brexit agreement agreed with the bloc.

Eleven members of May’s Conservative Party joined with opposition lawmakers last month to force a change ensuring that parliament will have a “meaningful vote” on the final withdrawal deal.

Fearful of another loss, the government conceded to give MPs the power to amend the date and time of Brexit — currently set out in the bill as 2300 GMT on March 29, 2019 — if talks with the EU appeared to overrun.

Veteran Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke, a strident europhile, said on Tuesday that he expected peers to make “an enormous number of changes to this bill” when it moved there next.

He said it was an “illusion” to believe they would allow the government to give itself such sweeping powers.

The Scottish and Welsh governments have also warned against what they describe as a “power grab” in the bill, which would see some powers in devolved areas of policy-making currently held in Brussels, taken back to London.

“As both the Scottish and Welsh governments have repeatedly said, the withdrawal bill must be amended to prevent any devolved powers being removed from the Scottish Parliament,” said Scottish minister Michael Russell.