Thread by @vuk87912

This is one of the most thoughtful and clear headed posts I have read ...

Credit to Stephen Douglas in FT comments
15 tweets following

One of the first “problems” one is taught in U.K. constitutional law is how to entrench rights, through the generations. Awareness of the core U.K. constitutional principle that “Parliament can’t bind its successors” has gone mainstream in the past few days. This doesn’t exactly

help the extreme Brexiteers: a previous Parliament voted for Article 50. A previous electorate three years ago voted 17-16 to leave. Anyway, I digress. Now, John McDonnell is quoted yesterday as saying Labour’s looking for a way of getting whatever is agreed between his

party and Her Majesty’s Government in the talks on the withdrawal treaty (if anything) embedded in the U.K.-EU treaty itself. Ironically, this would mean the EU is being asked to be the guarantor of an agreement between HMG and Her Majesty’s Official Opposition that is

necessitated by the inability within U.K. constitutional framework to entrench (or “Boris proof” it) domestically such an agreement; which agreement is to withdraw from the protection of such entrenchment. Which brings us back to one of the core purpose and effects of

the EU: it acts as a Backstop against the transgression of rights by national governments. The EU itself is a solution to this conundrum as John McDonnell’s appeal yesterday acknowledges. A perfect example of this is how the overlapping spaghetti labyrinth of

treaties binding together the EU, EEA, EFTA, ECHR, et al make it virtually impossible to disentangle a State Party to these treaties without the trade off of huge and unpredictable economic, social, and every other kind of harm. Just look at the current state of

the UK’s body politic if one doubts this truth. The purpose/effect of the EU is to end war in Europe by so entangling economic and social relations that it is impossible for one national interest group to profit from going to war against another interest

group. As Philip Allott (who as a young foreign office lawyer helped negotiate the UK’s accession to the EEC and who is the U.K.’s preeminent international lawyer of the past generation) puts it: “...The monstrous complexity of the EEA system is

intended to solve the problem of how non-member states could possibly accept the single market legal system of the EU without participating in the institutions that make single market law and enforce it. If one had been asked in advance, one would

have said that that problem is insoluble...” ukconstitutionallaw.org/2018/11/07/phi…
Which brings us right back to entrenching agreements in any legal system. How do you Boris-proof an agreement between HMG and the Official Opposition in the UK?

You ask the EU to act as guarantor, with the implicit threat of sanctions if a Boris led government breaches the agreement. How does Ireland, suspicious that a withdrawing U.K. won’t act in good faith as co-guarantor of

the Good Friday Agreement any more, entrench that Agreement? It asks the EU to act as guarantor, which is the effect and purpose of the Backstop. How do you prevent a Nazi-like government which once elected claim a mandate to cancel

voters right ever to vote again? (The authoritarian echoes of the repeated mantra that the June 2016 electorate’s opinion can NEVER be tested again, also provokes the question: what is so special about that advisory referendum that it is

entrenched such that it can ever be questioned or tested again?). The answer to every problem Brexit throws up is: continued membership of the EU. This is s really expensive tutorial/supervision revision for all of us in the value

of the EU. The EU is the way of entrenching further our rights and duties, in a world in which thankfully Parliament’s can never bind their successors.

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