Britain
must have a general election before activating article 50
Nick Clegg
Sunday 3 July 2016
17.05 BST
We
can’t start the clock ticking on Brexit before we’ve had a chance
to judge what life outside the EU would look like
Who would have
thought? The Conservative party, the party of continuity and
tradition, is now the cause of the greatest constitutional crisis in
modern times. The party of business is now the source of reckless
economic turmoil. The natural party of government is now presiding
over paralysis in Westminster and Whitehall. The party of the British
bulldog spirit is now leading our great country towards rudderless
introspection.
There is something
almost grotesque in the contrast between the self-indulgence of the
Conservative leadership contest and the anxiety gripping millions of
families worried about the future. The media swarms around Michael
Gove’s self-absorbed pronouncements justifying the tawdry betrayal
of his friends.
A nervous nation,
unsure what it has done to itself, is subject to the tedious,
vituperative comments from one Conservative nonentity about another.
No wonder Theresa May – a diligent, hard-working if unimaginative
politician – stands out as a grownup in that political playground.
This cannot go on.
Somehow we must navigate the country through the months ahead. The
government not only finds itself without leadership, it has no plan,
no consensus and no clue about what it wants to do in the future. The
only thing it agrees on is that the UK should leave the EU. But how,
when and to what end all remain unanswered. It enjoys a mandate to
quit, but no mandate as to how this should be done.
This is partly the
result of the unforgivable cynicism of a Brexit campaign that refused
to tell voters what comes next. But it is also a consequence of
contradictory opinions: the hedge fund owners who financed the
campaign want to turn the City into a low–regulation Dubai; Boris
Johnson wanted to open Britain to far-flung continents; Michael Gove
wants to close Britain against incomers; and most Brexiteers witter
about maintaining access to the single market while not being subject
to its rules, apparently oblivious to the glaring contradiction.
This debilitating
cocktail of hubris, incompetence and dishonesty must be overcome if
the country is to move forward. This is what we should do.
First, each
Conservative leadership candidate must set out, in detail, what they
think our future relationship with Europe should be. Second, the new
prime minister, to be announced on 9 September, should immediately
publish a white paper setting out a full plan. And third, he or she
must then seek a democratic mandate for their plan in an early
general election.
The notion that it
should be left to Conservative members to handpick a new prime
minister for what in effect will be a new government pursuing new
priorities is absurd.
This election would
also give all parties the opportunity to set out their stalls on what
our new relationship with Europe should be. As Tim Farron has made
clear, the Liberal Democrats will fight that election on a
patriotically pro-European platform. Labour, whether under Jeremy
Corbyn or not, will need to make up its mind.
Importantly, the
election must be held before any attempt is made to activate article
50, the legal mechanism triggering the negotiations for EU exit.
Starting that clock ticking before people have had an opportunity to
cast a judgment on what life would actually look like outside the EU
would be deeply undemocratic. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011
envisaged exceptional circumstances in which an early election can be
held, and those provisions should be invoked.
The baton then moves
to the newly elected parliament. It will have two tasks: MPs must
scrutinise the government’s specific plan to ensure it is legal and
workable, and, crucially, article 50 should only be triggered
following a vote of consent from MPs. Some have argued that the prime
minister can invoke article 50 on her/his own, using royal
prerogative powers. Many top legal experts, including Lord Pannick
and Lord Lester, disagree.
In any event, there
is recent parliamentary precedent. Under the Lisbon treaty, the UK
was granted the right to a “mass opt out” from EU laws governing
police and judicial cooperation. In the coalition government, both
parties agreed to exercise this power, while negotiating to preserve
the most important crime-fighting measures, such as the European
arrest warrant. We went to parliament to seek a mandate for those
talks in 2013, and returned again to parliament in 2014 to seek
approval for the package we had negotiated.
If a vote at the
beginning and the end of a negotiation was good enough for a specific
area of EU policy, it should also be good enough for the complete
decoupling of the UK from the EU.
Finally, the
definitive, negotiated terms both of our exit from, and our future
relationship with, the EU must then be put back to parliament for a
vote of consent.
The EU referendum
has exploded constitutional, political and economic conventions. Our
country is in a tailspin. An election of a new parliament in which
MPs act responsibly to manage our historic divorce from the EU is the
only way to forge some order out of the present chaos.
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