Parliament demands greater say over ‘Brexit,’ defying May
Vote signals lawmakers acting to regain power in withdrawal decision
LONDON — Britain’s Parliament voted narrowly on Wednesday to demand a decisive say over the country’s plans to withdraw from the European Union, dealing an unexpected defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May, who had asked for maximum leeway to negotiate with Brussels on untangling decades of integration with the Continent.
Rebel lawmakers from the governing Conservative Party joined with pro-European members of opposition parties to require that any final deal to withdraw from the European Union be submitted to Parliament before it can be put into effect.
May had argued that going through such formal approval would add yet another hurdle to the already contentious and protracted negotiation over withdrawal — a process, known as Brexit, that is supposed to be completed by March 2019.
She had promised that lawmakers would get a vote eventually, but the lawmakers effectively refused to take her word for it, insisting by a formal vote — 309-305 — on their explicit right to approve any final deal.
Conservative rebels, led by Dominic Grieve, a lawmaker and a former attorney general, feared that without a specific, legal guarantee of a vote, Parliament might find itself being bypassed at the last minute.
Those rebels joined with members of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties — some of whom believe the nation made a grave mistake when it voted, in a June 2016 referendum, to approve leaving the European Union. At the time, a majority of lawmakers opposed withdrawal.
That vote ended the political career of May’s predecessor, David Cameron, and left May with the unenviable task of trying to pick up the pieces and make the best of Brexit.
Since then, May lost her parliamentary majority in a snap election she called earlier this year, complicating her already formidable task of negotiating Brexit. She also does not have a majority in the House of Lords.
The election setback also led to months of speculation about May’s prospects of survival, particularly after a disastrous speech at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in which her speech was interrupted by a prankster, and May then lost her voice, suffering a persistent cough.
The defeat — the first over Brexit legislation — also underscored the persistent discontent in Parliament. Some lawmakers regret Parliament’s decision in June 2015 to call a referendum and surrender sovereignty on one of the most consequential decisions in Britain’s history. To some extent, the vote on Wednesday represented an attempt to retrieve that sovereignty.
The issue of parliamentary scrutiny is delicate in part because many of those who advocated the Brexit option in the 2016 referendum promised to “take back control” from the European Union and return it to Parliament at Westminster.