Skip to main content
Government Brexit date is less a Red Herring, more a Dead Cat

I have a prediction about the government amendment to EU Withdrawal Bill, fixing the time the UK leaves the EU as “before, after or at 11pm on 29th March 2019”. It will be withdrawn by government  on the evening it is debated, having served its purpose of putting up a massive target for Remain-leaning MPs and newspapers to get hugely upset about, and for Leave-leaning MPs to say “look at that, don’t look at this other stuff”.

It’s the biggest dead cat strategy employed by the Brexit brigade since the days of the Referendum.

As we know, the EU Withdrawal bill gives the government rights to massively trample over Parliament in the name of Parliamentary Sovereignty. Ministers, with a little help from a Gerrymandered Select Committee makeup, can do almost whatever they like.

Naturally for such a hugely important bill, many amendments have been put forward, to protect EU citizens (including us), to protect the environment, animal welfare, and most importantly, to protect our country from predatory use of the bill itself. But by far the biggest attention-grabber has been the amendment to Clause 14 (The Time We Will Leave Amendment).

The Withdrawal Bill has generated 191 pages of amendments containing 378 changes and 75 new clauses. Parliament has allocated eight 8-hour sessions of debate time for these amendments – that’s a little under 9 minutes of debate per change, not counting the time to actually vote on them. In practice this is managed by a process whereby the Speaker’s office and representatives from both sides group amendments into related packages, to stop us debating changes until way past March 2019.

Despite this cripplingly tight deadline to sort out the amendments, hours of debate time on the first day were wasted on Frank Field’s daft amendment for the actual time we leave the EU to be set using GMT rather than EU time. This amendment was eventually withdrawn after doing its job of occupying enough Parliamentary energy.

Three days of the eight allocated have now passed with zero amendments being accepted. Every amendment has been voted down. And some of them are very important.

One amendment recently defeated was to include EU rulesabout animal sentience into UK law – this defeat means that the official government line post-Brexit is essentially that animals can feel no pain, and don’t care how badly you treat them.

Two more crucial amendments were overturned in more recent debates – Challenges to Validity of Retained EU Law, which sounds dull but defeat means the UK can mess with employment rights after Brexit and those affected can’t go to the ECJ – and most astounding the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which are a package of human rights which UK citizens obviously currently benefit from.

These three amendments collectively mean we probably won’t be able to export meat to the EU as we won’t abide by their animal welfare standards, that any EU national still crazy enough to wish to work here after Brexit wouldn’t have the same employment rights, and that UK citizens could lose fundamental human rights (this last amendment wasn’t defeated but withdrawn after government promised "assurances”, which supposedly is good enough).

Another Labour amendment suggested we may want to stay in zero-tariff trading arrangements with the EU – meaning we could essentially stay in the Single Market / Customs Union. This was heavily defeated, with the astounding spectacle of Labour shadow cabinet members walking through the Lobby alongside David Davis, and Labour’s Barry Gardiner suggesting it was “illiterate” and illogical, without suggesting a more literate or logical alternative that could allow the UK to retain the huge benefits of the Single Market. Some of us remember when leaving the Single Market / Customs Union was described as a “disastrous hard Brexit” by Labour benches, and also remember how Theresa May went to the country to give her a mandate for a Hard Brexit – and lost her majority because of it. Now it’s a policy that Labour defends, making Theresa’s trip to the Ballot Box even more of a waste of time.

Hundreds of amendments are being defeated, with Remain-leaning Tories being advised to “choose your battles” in favour of defeating the Exit Date amendment, which is meaningless for two reasons. Firstly, a legal time limit already exists on when we leave the EU – exactly 2 years after we triggered Article 50 (i.e. on 29th March 2019) and short of withdrawing Article 50 there’s nothing we can do about it. That date cannot be changed by us unilaterally, only by agreement with the rest of the EU it. We can legally withdraw Article 50 unilaterally, as one of the authors who drafted it points out, but not fiddle with the date. 

Secondly, the Henry VIII powers given to ministers in the Bill “where necessary to aid the process of withdrawal” allows them to alter the bill itself so any clause can essentially be changed or ditched. Ministers could push the date in either direction at will. These powers are in clauses yet to be debated, and the Lords is likely to kick up a huge fuss about them, but as it stands we must trust David Davis and Boris Johnson not to abuse their powers. As if they would...


Government has introduced a Big Scary meaningless amendment as a distraction from the real changes that should be made. Expect them to drop it on the day it’s debated, with great fanfare about “defeat on a crucial aspect of Brexit” by both sides, when the damage has already been done.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Forget Fake News, Headline of the Day is where the Real News happens

You may have noticed there’s been a lot of news in 2017. But UK news headlines have been swamped by Brexit and Trump, two stories straddling the news landscape like the Petronas Twin Towers. But like Kuala Lumpur itself, tucked away beneath the behemoths there are plenty of smaller and more interesting places to be found.  So journalist Michael Moran (@TheMichaelMoran) plus myself and a few like-minded souls have focussed on the quirkier side of the news this year, in a competitive search for #HeadineOfTheDay material which we exchange on Twitter (Michael acts as chief gatekeeper and distributor). Clickbait is a staple of online news but a good headline has always been used to grab a reader’s interest. There’s little point in carefully crafting an elegant and revealing article, then putting “ Man Does Thing ” in 100pt bold letters at the top – the attention (and more importantly the quantity) of readers depends on a good headline.  Sometimes the story turns out...

Texas Court Battles Put Democracy on Trial

                               In the last few days a handful of Republican activists have gone to the courts in Texas, in what can only be described as an attack on the democratic process which manages the US Presidential Election. This weekend, representatives from the Republican party went to the Texas Supreme Court to request that ballots cast in drive-thru centres in Harris County in the state should be discounted. When the Supreme Court rejected their request they immediately took their case to the federal court. Anyone old enough to remember Bush v Gore will know that in a US election the courts are often used to decide state elections, and the Electoral College system means this can affect the national result. But the Texas case is different – Republicans aren’t suggesting that specific votes should be invalid, they are objecting to an entire method of voting which has already been in use for...

#FBPE is More than Merely a Meme

Twitter is no stranger to a hashtag or a meme – many know the hashtag was invented  on Twitter, and anyone who has had Twitter “conversations” with the Trump fanbase soon realises that memes (plus profanity and #MAGA of course) are literally all the language they have. Twitter, certainly Pre Trump/Brexit, was to quite a large extent cat videos, short jokes (don’t get me started on 280 characters – RUINED it they have, I tell you) and memes. But in the last few weeks, Twitter has gained a new meme - the hashtag #FBPE. When this one popped up in my feed, it was a curious thing. Firstly, hashtags are usually things like #MakeAMiserableFilm or #WallpaperWednedsay so their meaning is obvious(ish). They’re also often fairly short lived, being of their time, serve their purpose and quietly disappear from Twitter trends. But this one didn’t immediately make sense to me, it lasted more than a day or two – and, unusually, it was being added to Twitter users’ display names as well as twe...