Pilot 21: Parliament Takes Back Control By Ceding Power

Taking back control seems to get more complicated by the day.

The Great Repeal Bill the EU Withdrawal Bill narrowly passed on September 11th (shortly after we finished recording). This bill outlines the process by which the huge amount of EU legislation that has been adopted since 1972 will be passed, again, but this time as UK law. It involves over 1000 pieces of legislation.

In the build up to the vote, the Government’s Brexit position papers were leaked to The Guardian. They outlined some thoroughly unpleasant anti-immigrant policies: blocking low skilled immigrants entirely, restricting high skilled immigrant to 3–5 year stays, family members of EU migrants to be granted restricted rights to enter, the imposition of even stricter entry requirements — including minimum income — and, most Brave New World-ish of all, to demand biometric data from all migrants coming into the UK.

All rather grim, rather cruel and — in Home Office adjusted terms — par for the course.

In response, Ian Dunt asked the pertinent question: “Why would anyone fucking come given that this is how we’re going to treat them?”

The shadow of all this hung over the dour debate in the Commons that preceded the EU Withdrawal Bill vote. Backbenchers from both sides of the aisle stood up to express their dissent at Executive over-reach. Keir Starmer described the bill as a “naked power grab”.

The response was rather weak: we know there are problems with the bill but, right now, we really need unity to help us get through the negotiations. We have to get something out of the negotiations or there will be chaos.

That left me — and a fair few others — rather nonplussed.

Pretty sure I remember being told that leaving without a deal would be fine https://t.co/ckBEL2Er69 — Katie Martin (@katie_martin_fx) September 11, 2017

Less than a week before this vote, David Davis was making bullish statements about a no deal having worse consequences for various EU states than for Britain. He has spent the summer blustering early and capitulating often, so I very much doubt anybody was convinced by his point.

But wait, I hear you ask, haven’t we heard the steady hand argument before?

Oh that’s right, in the run up to the last General Election. Back then, Theresa May campaigned as a ‘strong and steady’ alternative to the Labour/Lid Dem/SNP ‘coalition of chaos’ — and virtually nobody bought it. Yet here we are again, the same line from an even weaker position.

British politics’ lack of imagination rears its instantly forgettable head once again.

Perhaps we won’t end up regretting handing over expanded Executive powers to Theresa May et al. This is a weak government. Two days after squeaking the EU Withdrawal Bill past, the DUP rebelled against the government on NHS pay rises.

It isn’t unreasonable to suggest that it might not be Theresa May’s strong and steady hand grasping these expanded powers for two years after the official date of departure from the EU (the Sunset Clause included in the bill is not dated). It might be Jeremy Corbyn.

Which leads to an excellent point from Rafael Behr:

“When designing a weapon, it is a good idea to imagine it falling into the wrong hands. The same principle applies when politicians ask for new powers: benefits of the advertised use must be weighed against the potential for misuse.”

For either side, the argument of steadying the ship with increasingly centralized powers doesn’t hold much water. For Labour, they’re seeing a Prime Minister who lost her majority reach for additional power — that can’t be what the people of Britain want. For the Conservatives, they’re handing additional power to a position that they look increasingly unlikely to hold on to.

And for what? It won’t help negotiations.

Nothing will go ahead until the UK agrees to pay up, probably a lot. The longer we hold out on that, the closer we come to the disaster of a No Deal. On top of that, there’s the fact that the EU has no faith that the Home Office will behave with even basic decency on citizens’ rights — a major stumbling block in the next phase of negotiations.

Handing over the ability to fast track new legislation doesn’t solve either of those problems. All it does is undermine Parliament and, potentially, give Jeremy Corbyn the ability to pass his massively ambitious and potentially ruinous manifesto in its entirety.

The steady hand strikes again.

Next week on the pod

The Conservatives are swinging hard to reset their Brexit positioning.

First up is Boris Johnson with his 4000 word essay in The Telegraph. Then we have Theresa May taking to the podium in Florence. We’ll be digging into both. Is this just more Tory infighting or are we finally going to see the emergence of a credible strategy for the Brexit process?

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