Accompanied by leave campaigner Chris Grayling (background). Home Secretary Theresa May launches her Conservative leadership campaign. Stefan Rousseau \/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Theresa May says today in her statement announcing a leadership bid that there should be no triggering
\nof the article 50 process until a negotiating strategy has
\nbeen resolved. That must be right, but she also asserts there will be no
\ngeneral election before 2020. Is it really constitutional, democratic or right
\nthat the mechanism for determining the future relationship of our country with
\nthe EU and the world at large will be a Conservative party leadership election
\nthat does not even feature Boris Johnson, the man who was widely assumed to
\ntake over the leadership and the negotiation? Or should we demand a wider
\ndemocratic input into the terms on which we re-align with Europe?<\/i><\/p>\n
Of course Theresa May is right that the Article 50 process
\nmust not be hastily commenced. We need to decide what we want from the Brexit
\nnegotiation before we start negotiations. The Article 50 process is stacked
\nagainst the UK. The whip hand of the EU member states is that once it is
\nactivated, the UK ceases automatically, after two years, to have any of the
\nobligations, but also any of the benefits of EU membership. The only means of
\navoiding that outcome are either to agree a withdrawal deal with a heavily
\nqualified majority of the European Council (for the purposes of a vote, this
\nmeans the Heads of State of the member nations) or else obtain unanimous
\nagreement to an extension of time for negotiations. Any small bloc can impede a
\ndeal and more threateningly, any single member country can veto an extension of
\ntime for negotiations once the withdrawal process is initiated. Article 50 even
\ndictates that the country triggering article 50 is not entitled to participate
\nin the talks concerning its exit. Because a withdrawal agreement would cut
\nacross all sorts of lines of competence, it is likely that every individual
\nmember state will have to ratify it. In short, Article 50 ensures that the
\ncountry which has triggered its exit is in no position to make any demand that
\nmight meet with resistance. Theresa May is right to be cautious about entering
\ninto such a doomed negotiating position without an idea of the strategy for
\nnegotiation.<\/p>\n
Several EU figures have said there will be no pre-article 50
\ndiscussions outside the procedure stipulated by article 50. That is no doubt
\nthe case. However, that does not mean from the UK\u2019s perspective that a rapid
\nstart to the process is required. The people of the UK are entitled to take
\ntime to clarify the shape of the post-exit Britain that we want to achieve
\n(though there is clearly a need to minimise periods of uncertainty). <\/p>\n
What did the Leave vote mean? Answering this question is like
\nstaring into a Rorschach drawing. The only sure thing it meant is that a
\nmajority is in favour of leaving the EU. The Leave vote cannot be read as
\ngiving any authority to any particular view as to what an exited Britain should
\nlook like. There is no agreement among leading Brexiters, or even a plan, as to
\nwhat we build in place of EU membership. And nor do those in the Conservative
\nParty who advocated Brexit hold a monopoly over the parameters of a
\nrenegotiated relationship.<\/p>\n
Almost any reason, any shade of moderate and radical, any
\nshade of sophistication and ignorance can be found amongst those who voted
\nLeave. On both the left and the right some voted to stick two fingers up at the
\nelites, the experts; the establishment. On the \u2018leftish\u2019 side, people voted
\nagainst austerity and neo-liberalism. Some voted to re-allocate money from
\nEurope to the NHS. Others voted to reject plutocracy and the influence of
\nanti-democratic institutions. Others voted against the privatisation process
\nimplicit in EU state aid and procurement restrictions. Some sought to reject
\nthe free movement of goods, services and capital and the EU stance on TTIP,
\nwhile seeking protectionism and state subsidies (this may sound esoteric, but
\nthe EU stance on steel dumping was very significant in Wales for example).
\nOthers on the left voted out of a distrust of the cruelty and fanatical dogma
\ndisplayed towards Greece. <\/p>\n
On the right, some voted to express hatred of foreigners, or Resolving out of this mass of reasons what should be the The least democratic way forward would be for a new prime minister But is Parliamentary approval enough in the current Section 2 of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 requires two thirds of Accompanied by leave campaigner Chris Grayling (background). Home Secretary Theresa May launches her Conservative leadership campaign. Stefan Rousseau \/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Theresa May says today in her statement announcing a leadership bid that there should be no triggering of the article 50 process until a negotiating strategy has been resolved. That must be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nagainst free movement of Europeans. Yet at the same time many on the right are
\nnot xenophobic and on both right and left some voted against \u2018fortress Europe\u2019
\nand its own insularity against the wider world. Boris Johnson says in his
\nrecent Telegraph<\/em> article that he voted
\nto repatriate the legislative (sic<\/em>) powers
\nof the European Court of Justice (this is nonsense: the ECJ interprets, but
\ndoes not make legislation). Better informed voters want the UK courts to have
\nsupremacy over interpretation of the law and for the UK Parliament to recapture
\npower over the making of laws. Some don\u2019t like \u201cred tape\u201d. Some voted to facilitate
\nthe dismantling of employment rights protections. Some no doubt voted to leave
\nthe European Convention on Human Rights (although that was not on offer). Some hope
\nto diminish the environmental protections conferred by European law, while
\nothers voted to end environmental destruction caused by EU agricultural
\npolicies and the iniquity of farm subsidies. <\/p>\n
\nshape of our exit from the EU is not as obvious as those with an agenda will
\ntry to claim. A Conservative version of Why
\nWe Left<\/em> will soon come to dominate in the media and a simplistic narrative
\nwill come to be woven out of it to political ends. The right\u2019s version of exit
\nwill seek to appropriate the vote as an endorsement of its ideological agenda: the
\nrestriction of free movement, while continuing the endless yard-sale of our collective
\nwealth to the full rapaciousness of international capitalism. The right may
\nseek to exit the European Convention on Human Rights; diminish workers\u2019
\nprotections; invest billions shoring up financial institutions and banks. In short,
\nthey will continue the political work of the Westminster elite. But there is
\nnow a real chance to change all this. The vote to leave clearly meant a myriad
\nof different and contradictory things to different voters, but one powerful
\ncurrent was to end, rather than fulfil the neo-liberal dreams of the right of
\nthe Conservative party.<\/p>\n
\nto seek to exercise the power to trigger article 50 as an exercise of
\nprerogative power. It would surely be unconstitutional to embark on such a
\nmomentous course without (at least) parliamentary approval. There is sound legal debate about whether the prime minister
\ncould act in a way that takes away so many rights (including a right to vote in
\nEuropean elections) from British citizens without statutory authority to
\nactivate the article 50 process, based on some understanding of where those
\nnegotiations will go.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\ncircumstances? We have no fixed constitutional rules and our processes must
\ntherefore evolve as new circumstances arise. In this case, an almost unique
\nflirtation with direct democracy has resulted in a seismic decision which cuts
\nacross the general election platforms of every elected party apart from the
\nsingle UKIP MP. Nobody has voted for this government or this Parliament to
\ndirect negotiations with the EU in any given way. The only means of
\nsafeguarding any democratic input into the reshaping of our country is for a
\ngeneral election to precede the triggering of article 50. That is not to
\nadvocate rejecting or ignoring the Leave vote, but to recognise that the vote
\nto leave tells us only that we are not to be part of the EU: it tells us
\nnothing about what our relationship should now entail. There is no mandate for
\nfringe figures of the Conservative party \u2013 some of whom, such as May herself \u2013
\nbacked Remain to now assume leadership of the country and assert their own
\nversion of the consequences of Brexit. That would be no more democratic or
\nconstitutional than ignoring the Brexit vote altogether. <\/p>\n
\nParliamentarians to approve a new election, though it seems that could be amended
\nby majority. The focus of progressive agitation must now be to secure democracy
\nthrough a general election or else risk the very autocracy that so many thought
\nthey were rejecting with the vote to Leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"