George Peretz KC 🇺🇦🌹 Profile picture
Aug 15, 2019 18 tweets 3 min read Read on X
A thread on the difficulties with legislation requiring a PM to seek an extension to the Article 50 period. This is not about how to get such legislation debated and passed (parliamentary procedure). It’s about what it can and should say.
We can assume that this legislation will require the PM to do something he really does not want to do.
Moreover, the legislation can’t require the PM to *get* an extension. It isn’t in his gift. The EU27 have (unanimously) to agree.
The “Cooper/Letwin” Act said this.
Essentially it required the PM to seek an extension to a date set out in a HoC motion.
But there are two problems. A requirement to “seek” is hard to enforce. To take a not entirely hypothetical example, the PM could surround the request with inappropriate language that caused enough irritation and offence to make his request unattractive.
You could argue that that infringed the PM’s duty to seek an extension (which must be a duty to do so in good faith): but that is a point that could be hard to establish in court.
The second problem is that the EU27 could counter-offer a different date, or attach conditions. At that point, Cooper Letwin falls silent.
The PM could say “I sought the date Parliament told me to seek. But the EU27 are offering me a different date/attaching unacceptable conditions. I’ve done what I was told to: but negotiations are now over.”
What you would have to do in order to stop that is to force the PM to go back to the HoC, to put down an amendable motion approving his decision to reject any counter proposal made by the EU27, and then to comply with any amended motion requiring him to accept it.
All this gets quite complicated. And it is constitutionally awkward (which isn’t to say Parliament can’t do it).
It effectively gives the HoC the power to direct the conduct of international negotiations in place of the usual role of the legislature in a parliamentary system, which is to hold the government to account for its conduct of international negotiations.
There is also something odd about tying a negotiator down in this way. If you have a complete lack of trust that the person negotiating for you is going to try to get what you want, the usual response is to sack them, not to give them lists of detailed instructions.
It therefore seems to me that it would be better if, behind any extension legislation, there was a realistic political threat that failure to get an extension will lead to the PM being sacked and replaced forthwith.
That political threat - if it can be pulled together - is likely to be more watertight, and less constitutionally awkward, than any clever drafting.
Lack of time could, indeed, be another problem.
And even that original provision in the Bill didn’t deal with the real problem of a conditional extension.

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More from @GeorgePeretzKC

Jul 31
I would expect @LegatumInst (well-funded, with large anonymous donations supplemented by taxpayer subsidy) to get basic facts right. Thread.
1. It is incorrect to say that mobility arrangements are an "EU competence". Plenty of EU member states have mobility agreements with third countries.
What is true, and is perhaps what de Fossard is (inaccurately) trying to get at, is that there is debate within the EU as to how mobility agreements with the UK should be handled, with the Commission trying to assert its competence (as it tends to do).
Read 18 tweets
Jun 21
This is poor from @rcolville, who should know better.
To show why it’s poor, all I need to do is to refer him to a few paragraphs of the judgment setting out what was the legal issue that @UKSupremeCourt had to resolve.
Image
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To summarise the summary: legislation requires an environmental impact assessment (EIA); the local authority decided that the EIA didn’t need to include an assessment of the impact on the climate of oil produced by the site; was it lawful for it to take that view?
Read 8 tweets
Jun 21
Apart from its silly click-bait title, this by @LegatumInst is unimpressive.
The 🐘 in the room that it fails to confront (though sometimes hints at): that companies operate in a world where the public expects them to uphold standards in conduct and recruitment and they will suffer *commercially* if they don’t.
An example is the hand-wringing discussion of the growth of ESG funds that simply fails to explain why they’ve grown (the obvious answer being the inconvenient one that they respond to public demand).
Read 14 tweets
Jun 12
Others - see eg - have dealt with the “no big negative impact” claim here (and it isn’t “assume”: it’s looking at the evidence and applying standard analysis). But a couple of points on “and so little use has been made of the opportunities [Brexit] offers”
The current government has taken - in rafts of legislation since 2019 - enormous powers to change EU regulatory rules. That was so even before the Retained EU Law Act (REULA) gave them even greater powers to do so, largely without needing to involve Parliament.
Have they used them? Despite the huge political pressure on them, and every incentive on individual ministers, to find “Brexit opportunities”, hardly at all.
Read 14 tweets
May 18
The concerns set out by @GeorgeMonbiot here have powerful and authoritative backing from the 2022 @CMAgovUK report into children’s care. Its conclusion:
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Further backing from the President of the Family Division. judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl…
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Since then, the inability of the children in care system to deal adequately with children in care with complex needs has led to an explosion in “Deprivation of Liberty Orders” (DOLs) - so many that there is now a special court to deal with them. judiciary.uk/launch-of-nati…
Read 9 tweets
Apr 19
Some brief comments on the European Commission’s proposal to get a mandate to negotiate a youth mobility agreement with the UK. ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
1. The EU is not there yet. The mandate has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers: probably by qualified majority. And it isn’t clear whether a final agreement would need to be ratified by all Member States as well as the EU itself.
2. If the EU does agree a mandate, that is likely to slam the door on any attempt by the UK to negotiate youth mobility agreements with individual Member States (because they have a duty of sincere cooperation). So any agreement would have to cover (say) 🇧🇬 as well as (say) 🇫🇷.
Read 17 tweets

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