Brexit

On Saturday thousands of people across Britain demonstrated against Boris Johnson’s recently-announced prorogation of parliament. Despite the heated response it provoked, proroguing parliament is a standard device which over the years has been employed by governments of all stripes. And as parliament was to be suspended for a few weeks during September and October in any case to allow the parties to hold their annual conferences, Johnson’s measure has reduced MPs’ time to prevent a no-deal Brexit by just a few days. In the context of an unprecedented crisis, with the clock ticking down to October 31, the Prime Minister’s act of constitutional sharp practice nonetheless outraged those who demonstrated

At first, Brexit was seen in Poland as a glorious but chaotic farce. As strange as it sounds, three long, grim years after the referendum, the whole thing seemed, to them, like a glorious chaotic farce. Most of them supported Poland’s membership of the EU but the irreverent Nigel Farage was more relatable than a bunch of uptight bureaucrats; they could at least imagine having a beer with him. As reality sunk in, and the months ground by, these comical aspects paled. Poles are now as bored hearing about Brexit as many Brits. The national conservative Polish government has been in an interesting position when it comes to Brexit. Ideologically,

What is going to happen next week in parliament? Most anti-no-deal rebels see it as their last opportunity to block Britain leaving the European Union without a deal, but what they haven’t yet agreed on is how best to do it. There are a number of likely scenarios, some of which intertwine with one another, and to show how chaotic the next few days are likely to be, I’ve drawn up a flowchart of how things might pan out (you can click on the image to view a larger version of the chaos): The most likely parliamentary route is through an emergency debate under Standing Order 24, which the rebels

Has Boris Johnson done a Charles I and shut down Parliament indefinitely? The headlines this week might lead you to think so. ‘Uproar as Boris Johnson shuts down parliament to protect Brexit plan’, reported the FT. John Bercow called it ‘a constitutional outrage’. ‘It’s tantamount to a coup against Parliament,’ raged former attorney general Dominic Grieve. Nicola Sturgeon called it ‘a dictatorship’. Yet the reality hardly lives up to the rhetoric. These are the facts: Parliament will return from summer recess on 3 September as planned. Parliament will not sit from mid-September to early October during the three-week party conference season – also as planned and as happens every year. What has

This morning, a petition demanding ‘Do not prorogue Parliament’ is doing the rounds. At the time of writing, more than 1.4 million people have signed it. Remainers are very excited. They’re holding the petition up as proof of a mass outpouring of democratic disdain for Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for a few more days than is normal. It is no such thing. It looks more like yet another middle-class hissy fit against Brexit and the people who voted for it.  As the petition map demonstrates, the signatories are strikingly concentrated in certain parts of the country, especially the leafy, super-middle-class bits of southern England. There are very high

Boris Johnson is being widely accused of subverting the British version of democracy with his plan to suspend or prorogue parliament for four weeks – unprecedented in modern times. His apparent aim is to make it much harder for MPs to take control of the process of when and whether the UK leaves the EU. But in behaving more like a Trumpian president than a British prime minister, he is simply following the logic of the massive constitutional changes that the 2010 and 2015 parliaments perhaps recklessly and thoughtlessly pushed through. These were, of course, the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act and the referendum on whether to leave the EU. Johnson himself

Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to use ‘all tactics available’ to block a no-deal Brexit. The Labour leader is meeting MPs today to try work out how to do just that. But with no deal back in the headlines, are we having the wrong discussion about what it would mean for Britain to leave the EU without an agreement? Most of the focus around a no-deal Brexit has been on the economic pain that will be suffered by various parties, but particularly the UK. Little thought has been given, however, to the political pain. To politicians seeking re-election (for either themselves or their party), small issues can become greatly magnified. Whenever

We are living through the most dramatic period in British peacetime history since the agitations leading up to the Great Reform Bill – and, irrespective of Brexit, there is more to come. The UK is about to experience a revolution in government. This will take one of three forms. There could be a chassis revolution, as in ‘The world’s in a terrible state of chassis.’ If the Government were forced into an early election, with the Brexit party on one flank and the Liberals on the other, Parliament would be hung beyond hope of stability. It is reasonable to describe the prospect of such chaos without foreseeable end as revolutionary.