As Conservative conference begins, we are finally starting to find out a little more about what Brexit means. But only a little. In her interview on Marr this morning, Theresa May confirmed that she would trigger Article 50, which starts the process of taking Britain out of the European Union, before the end of March 2017. She said:
‘I’ve been saying that we wouldn’t trigger it before the end of the year so that we get some preparation in place. But yes, I will be saying in my speech today that we will trigger before the end of the March next year.’
But when it came to hard vs soft Brexit, the Prime Minister was rather more coy, merely repeating what she had said on the British people voting for controls on immigration in the referendum. It will be rather more difficult to be this vague even for the rest of the conference now that May has suggested that the government knows what it wants to do by setting a deadline for Article 50.
Her way of governing suggests she doesn’t do things in a piecemeal fashion: where David Cameron often set deadlines without a clue about how he was going to meet them (such as on his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe, and we all know how well that went), one of the reasons May has kept us waiting is that she has been working out what she wants to do and how she can do it.
But she’s not prepared to share too much of what she has concluded. And not just on Europe. The Prime Minister gave few more details on her education reforms, save her desire to examine whether more struggling families and pupils could be identified by a measure other than the long-used free school meals eligibility. She seemed quite relaxed about this. In Birmingham later today, we will see whether the rest of her party is.
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