The question on everyone’s minds today is WHEN might article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon – the exit clause which officially starts the ‘Brexit’ process – be triggered by the UK government?
Questions are being asked as to whether MPs may be able to block it - this comes as EU chiefs have been pressing the UK to trigger the exit clause ‘immediately’.
Article 50 itself is vague, saying that a country decides “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements” and then notifies the EU, however a Downing Street spokesman told Connexion that triggering the article “will have to go through the House of Commons” before it can take place.
Prime Minister David Cameron also told parliament yesterday: “This house is sovereign…. My advice would be that the house must accept the will of the country. The next government will have to bring forward their proposals on article 50 and the rest of it and there will have to be discussions between the government and the house about how that goes ahead.”
Conservative MP Roger Gale told Connexion: “There will have to be a parliamentary vote to authorise the implementation of Article 50 and the house will have to interpret and reflect the public wish. That view may well have changed by the autumn if the economy continues to deteriorate, as UK costs escalate and as the true level of Vote Leave disingenuity continues to be revealed.”
He said that a vote against triggering article 50 is "unlikely but possible if the scale of the economic decline is great".
The professor of government at Manchester University, Colin Talbot, said: “Technically, MPs could block the Brexit. It’s not only a question of a vote on triggering article 50 but also the European Communities Act 1972 – which embodies the UK’s membership of the EU - has to be repealed at some point, and there are huge legislative consequences of that.
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“So if they don’t like the way it’s going then there are all sorts of things they could do to try and disrupt the process. Plus it’s clear most of them did not support leaving. It’s going to be very difficult to see exactly what does happen.”
He added: “What’s more, the Leave campaign spoke of wanting a prolonged period before triggering article 50 and are still speaking of a period of informal negotiation – even though the Europeans don’t want that.”
Complicating matters, he said, is the likelihood that Boris Johnson probably did not want to exit the union anyway, but was maneuvering to become prime minister in the event of a narrow win for ‘Remain’.
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Prof Talbot said: “Most astute observers think Cameron has now stitched up Johnson, who will now be the PM who triggers article 50 to take Britain out of the EU and also the prime minister who loses Scotland, probably before the two years of negotiations are over, so he will go down in history as the prime minister who lost Europe and lost the Scots.”
With Cameron having announced he is leaving triggering article 50 to ‘the next government’, nothing is likely to happen until September at the earliest, by which point we may have a new prime minister, who will appoint a new cabinet.
However there will then be “immense pressure” for a new general election to give the new government legitimacy, Prof Talbot said, perhaps as early as October or November – all before the MPs vote on article 50 and the actual exit process gets under way.
"People are going to say: 'we voted for David Cameron a year ago and now you're telling us we can swap to a person with a whole range of different policies and they don't need a fresh mandate?'.... I think it will be very very difficult for another government to hold on for another three and a half years without going to the country, when the Conservatives only have a slim majority anyway."
Roger Gale said he personally believes “we are heading for a Government of National Unity”, that is, a broad coalition of all major parties, usually associated with wartime or other national emergencies.
In the meantime it is also possible that either the EU or the UK will seek a ruling by the European Court of Justice as to whether the EU has the right to impose a time limit on the UK or if it can take as long as it wants.
Prof Talbot said: “This is the most confused, leaderless situation I have ever seen. I have been politically active for 50 years and can’t remember a crisis quite like this.”
