Vocal Voices

The EU Withdrawal Bill is sensible and necessary in many ways, but its aim has been lost in translation. The Lords tried to amend it and failed spectacularly in the last ttwo days except on one amendment - regarding giving parliament a "meaningful" vote on any deal. That only scraped through because the PM gave a personal assurance to her rebels that the wording would be changed before it went back to the Lords and then returned to the Commons.

That wording has now been published and the rebels have rejected it outright saying that it is unacceptable. Dominic Grieve, the former Attourney General who tabled the amendment, has now said that he and other rebels will vote against government once it returns to the Commons.

Meanwhile, Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, suggests that a"meaningful vote" rebellion would be treated as a confidence vote and could bring the government down.

This follows the rebellion and resignations yesterday of some Labour front bench junior ministers and other MPs who refused to follow the party line and abstain from the EEA vote. Had they been allowed a free vote the amendment might have stood, again putting the government at peril.

Is there anything our politicians can do to make a bigger hash of things than they are at present?

Most of the political class are remainers. So right off we had a problem after the referendum. Some remainer MP's accepted the referendum result. Others however absolutely do not accept it and are determined to ignore it. Indeed I get the distinct impression that some of them are working to keep us in the EU or as closely aligned to it so that we can be taken back in asap.
And I think they don't care how they do it, whether they damage the country or not.
Combine that with indecisive leadership of the two main parties and there is only one outcome - a mess!

Oh yes - when you have a house of Lords who are also determined to block and obstruct, the EU who (as is their right) don't want to do us any favours....

Workingman wrote:Is there anything our politicians can do to make a bigger hash of things than they are at present?

No, I don't think there is. We desperately need a polital leader who can get us through this quagmire, and I don't think such a person exists. That in itself speaks volumes about the fractured state of this country.

My only hope now is that we now crash out of the EU, draw breath, regroup, and go our own way. It's obvious that the EU has no wish to reach any form of amicable settlement with us and is hell-bent on "punishing" the UK for the effrontry of deciding to leave its undemocratic and corrupt club. You only have to look at the EU's current reaction to our continued participation in the Galileo defense project to know that there's no future in maintaining amicable relations with them. We should demand the money we have already invested in it back from Brussels.

The upcoming NATO summit promises to be interesting and it would be good to see the EU bullied rather than a bully .... might concentrate their minds a bit.

Ossie, both you and Cromwell know that I voted Remain and am still a supporter of the EU: in general. However, we had a referendum and I also respect the result, even though I sometimes push against it.

Forgive me, but once the result was known I expected the government to handle our extraction from the EU in something like a professional manner. Unfortunately we have been following a script straight out of a Brian Rix farce; we could not have been more amateurish if we tried.

Make no mistake, the mess we are in is because our "no deal is better than a bad deal", "strong and stable government" never had a plan - for anything but staying in. To say "we are screwed" is an understatement.

Workingman wrote: once the result was known I expected the government to handle our extraction from the EU in something like a professional manner.

It's a legitimate expectation. But two years later we're still going in circles.
May has promised concessions to both leavers and remainers; she can't satisfy both.

cromwell wrote:It's a legitimate expectation. But two years later we're still going in circles.

Actually we are not going in circles. We have the initial agreement with the EU, we've settled the debt at less than half what the EU wanted, we have defined the exit timetable (end of 2020) and all of that has been approved and signed off by the EU27.

Working on EU timelines, this is warp speed and is driven by the fact that when the UK leaves one bloody great big hole is going to be blown through EU finances and they know it.

Next is an agreement on trade. We have an open border with them through Ireland and that has to be resolved. However, putting that aside, it took the EU 7 years to arrange the CETA trade deal with Canada and even then, at the 11th hour, the commission and council had to strong arm Belgium to sign it off.

Yet, apparently, we're supposed to have some "plan" which produces a much bigger, much more wide spread, trade deal with the EU in some 9 months.

Honestly, get real. If we get out with anything other than Hard Brexit it will be a bonus.

As for the shenanigans in Parliament, you will recall that I predicted EXACTLY this scenario. Where Labour would be critically split down the middle by the voters who voted for Leave. Sufficient to support any vote where Tory rebels might attempt to derail it. Corbyn has tried to circumvent this party disunity by whipping his MP's into submission. Leaving him in the position that the Tories had one Minister resign and Corbyn lost 5 times that from his front bench. Not all of whom were voting against.

This rebellion in the Labour party will continue. As for the Tories, there will be retribution as time goes on. Tory MP's are well aware that to bring down the government is both feet and half their body in the Grave as far as remaining in the Tory party is concerned.

This is Democracy at its worst, not its finest hour. But if anyone thinks this can't get any more chaotic, then they have never watched a Partisan US melee or the Israeli Knesset.

Right now the Lords is trying to screw the whole system up to undo the vote of the people. This is a very dangerous game as has already been mentioned, one Labour MP has vowed to bring up a Private Members bill to abolish the Lords. In the mood the PM is in right now and more than half her cabinet, they might just take it up and champion it.

Once upon a time the Lords could have held things up permanently. Today it just requires a bill to pass the commons 3 times, voting down the Lords amendments twice. This is possible before we have to sign any treaty with the EU.

Just a little bit more faith is required. Sadly this lack of follow through is what kept us in the EU such a long time.

Well I hope you are right Suff and we get as good an exit as we can. The antics of some of our MP's are intolerable though. It's all right having an opinion but when you start to deliberately subvert a democratic vote they are going too far. They ought to be pulling together, not deliberately throwing spanners in the works.

Well that does depend on your point of view Cromwell. My POV says that a good deal means the least rapine and pillage of our economy and funds. To me, it is becoming clear, that this might just be Hard Brexit.

Politicians behaving themselves?? They sell their honour and integrity for votes... Nuff said.

Suff wrote:To me, it is becoming clear, that this might just be Hard Brexit.

So why are we negotiating, we could have had that the minute after invoking A50? Could it possibly be that not *all* of the other 17.4 million Leave voters want a Hard Brexit? It would only take about 800,000 of them to think otherwise to drive us to the negotiating table. Is that why we are there?

How would the referendum have gone if the question was "Remain" or "Hard Brexit"? Rhetorical question as we will never know because we were not asked.

All this talk about EU negotiations is slightly missing the point of my OP - that there is the possibility all the messing about with the Withdrawal Bill could bring the government down. That would really leave us in deep do-do.

Some kind of legislation is going to be needed to accommodate the (EU) rules and regs we have been working to for years once we Brexit, but both sides are using this for their own ends.

Perhaps it would have been better for the legislation to have been a cross-party or all party effort rather than only a "Tory" government affair as all future governments, of whatever colour, are going to have to work with it.