Prime Minister Theresa May’s startlingly brief Article 50 bill is being debated by Members of Parliament today. When MPs first saw the published bill, the thought on all of their minds was, “Is that it?” Now they’re getting to debate it, although the furore of the Labour Party is that May hasn’t given them very much to debate, since the bill is only a few words long, but this suggests that was her plan all along.
She wants to leave as little room for debate as possible so that she can get Brexit up and running at the nearest opportunity.
What the MPs have to say
According to pro-leave Conservative politician Sir Edward Leigh, the United Kingdom should easily be able to sign into a free trade arrangement with the EU following the leave. This is because he believes that Brexit will actually strengthen the UK’s ties to the other countries in Europe, contrary to what the naysayers believe will happen.
Sammy Wilson of the DUP argues that MPs should accept the results of the Brexit referendum, since it was a nationwide vote put to the British people, and their mind was made up.
The SNP’s Ian Blackford confirmed that Scotland does not want to veto the referendum result. Wilson said that even if they did, to heed the veto would tarnish the UK’s integrity.
Interesting blog post by The New Statesman
George Eaton of The New Statesman posted a blog earlier today stressing the significant of Brexit in the wider British political history. He said it “will define British politics for a decade or more,” and that the EU leave “will be a central issue” in the next Labour election. He called out Labour as “the original eurosceptic party in British politics” (rather than the Conservative Party).
The post also brought up how “the 1975 referendum split Harold Wilson’s Government, Michael Foot backed EEC withdrawal just six years later,” and how “Jacques Delors’s 1988 address to the Trades Unions Congress...led Labour to embrace Europe as a counterweight to Thatcherism (and the Tories to concurrently shun it)” as a way of using past events to put the Brexit issue into perspective.