We had a People’s Vote two years ago. Let’s get on with delivering it
If Mrs May cannot secure a deal, she will face a motion of no confidence: no need for a “meaningful vote”
The computer company IBM has developed a robot that can debate with humans by sifting through journals, academic papers and newspaper articles to frame a coherent argument. We could have done with it in the Lords on Monday when the House discussed Brexit.
A speech of epic pomposity from Viscount Hailsham, aka Douglas Hogg, managed to sway more than 350 peers behind an amendment designed to queer the pitch for the Government as it goes into the final stages of the Brexit negotiations. Coherence did not come into it, just withering disdain for anyone stupid enough to think leaving the European Union was anything other than what the noble viscount called “a national calamity”. As a result there will be another showdown in the Commons today between the Government and a dozen or so Tory mutineers over the status and implications of the “meaningful vote” due to be held at the end of this wretched process.
After Theresa May tried to pull the wool over their eyes last week the chances are she will be defeated, assuming that Labour and the other opposition parties support the amendment cobbled together by Lord Hailsham and Dominic Grieve, the former Attorney General. This would be a blow to the Prime Minister’s authority, but that is pretty much shot to pieces anyway.
It is an odd fight to have, because if Mrs May comes to the Commons in the autumn and says she has not been able to secure a deal with the EU there will be a monumental political crisis in any case. The precise wording of a “meaningful vote” will be irrelevant since she will face a motion of no confidence, which is the constitutional way of holding any administration to account. For as long as it can command a majority in the Commons, government should be allowed to get on with it, especially when it comes to international treaty negotiations.
The reason why Mrs May has dug in her kitten heels is because if the amendment is made to the Withdrawal Bill there is concern that EU negotiators will simply stall until such time that parliament steps in and says enough is enough. Whatever its proponents say, the “meaningful vote” is an attempt to thwart Brexit by making it harder to secure a deal in the full knowledge that leaving without one won’t get through parliament – certainly not this one. Mrs May will not be able to make the threat, even if it is a hollow one that she will never actually fulfil, of walking away from the talks.
On the radio yesterday, Mr Grieve said it was “almost certain” that the UK would be leaving the EU. It was that “almost” that caught the ear. In February last year, the House of Commons voted by 494 to 122 to trigger the Article 50 process and begin the countdown to departure. Mr Grieve was among those in favour. Surely that was the opportunity to stop Brexit; but apart from Ken Clarke, none of those now seeking to block it attempted to do so. The reason, I had assumed, was because even the most diehard Remainers had accepted the outcome of the referendum two years ago on Saturday. There should be no “almost” about it. Yet many are clearly unreconciled to Brexit but are reluctant to say so openly.
An anti-brexit march on Parliament is taking place on Saturday, organised by Open Britain with the aim of securing a People’s Vote. Protesters expect one of the biggest gatherings ever seen in the capital for what they call this “historic event”. Somehow I doubt that, because beyond the diehards, most people think we had a People’s Vote on June 23 2016.
Anti-brexiters say we never had the chance to decide the precise nature of how we would be leaving the EU, and that is true. It is one reason, indeed, why many people do not like referendums; they are blunt instruments that brook no nuance. But this was known when the Commons passed the Referendum Act by a majority of almost 500 in 2015. Mr Grieve voted for that, too, presumably in the complacent assumption that the country would never vote to leave.
Now they want another People’s Vote, not in order to endorse whatever outcome Mrs May secures in her negotiations but to reverse the first one. They are displaying the same complacency as they did then. They think the shenanigans of the past two years will have turned the country away from Brexit, when it has almost certainly done the opposite by exposing the true, undemocratic, vampire squid-like nature of the EU for all to see.
In any case, imagine what would happen if there were to be another referendum. What would the question be? Do we accept the deal or go; or reject the deal and stay? Attempts would be made to introduce a threshold in the vote whereby a specific proportion of the electorate would have to back leaving. It would be a recipe for parliamentary meltdown that would make today’s antics look positively benign by comparison.
I have sympathy with those who say more preparation for the various possible outcomes should have been made before Article 50 was triggered. Mrs May interpreted Brexit in her own way without any wide consultation in her Cabinet, let alone in her party. She then compounded her difficulties by losing her majority at last year’s election. These are problems of her own making and the resulting lack of direction has created the circumstances for the turmoil we are currently witnessing.
We do still live in a parliamentary democracy, so it is inconceivable, and always was, that MPS would not decide what happens in the end, even if it requires another election to get there. For now, the Government is trying to fulfil the outcome of the People’s Vote that Parliament decreed two years ago.
A sizeable proportion of the 17.4million who voted Leave did so because they wanted to get back to what they thought we had joined in the first place: a Common Market of free, independent nations, not a fledgling superstate able to interfere in our laws and politics. They want the UK to disengage from the EU’S federalist structures while retaining good trading relationships. Mrs May wants that too and should be allowed to get on with it. If she makes a hash of it then the reckoning will come.