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Should the opposition agree to an election before the Benn Bill is passed?
Two key problems. One is understood and referred to by @PhilipHammondUK this morning: you can’t trust the PM not to change the date of the election to a date after crash out by proclamation after Parliament is dissolved (or too late for Parliament to stop it).
The PM’s reputation for untrustworthiness and ruthlessness in pursuit of his self-interest here comes to bite him: his promises not to do this won’t be believed.
The second issue arises out of @DavidHenigUK’s point here.
The fact is that crash out preparation cannot sensibly be carried out while an election campaign is ongoing. Ministers will be distracted and unable to take the thousands of key decisions.
Further, without Parliament, the necessary legislation to get our statute book in any shape to work after crash out can’t be done. As this piece explains, the Government has *already* given up on the primary legislation that is needed. lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and…
But without Parliament and during an election the statutory instruments needed to have any hope of plugging the gaping holes can’t be taken forward.
Johnson’s threat to disregard convention and ignore purdah is disgraceful. But it also doesn’t do the trick: crash out preparation is bound to be set back, badly, by an election.
Even for those who think a crash out Brexit could be tolerable with preparation, the only sensible course of action - if there is to be an October election - is to seek to get an extension to sometime after 31 October.
So opposition parties should refuse an October election without an extension (which they have power to do under the 2/3 rule). Both because Johnson can’t be trusted to keep the date and because an October election followed by a crash out on 31/10 would simply add to the disaster.
NB one problem here is that even if Johnson agreed to let the Benn Bill pass, it’s unlikely that an extension would actually be agreed with the EU until after an October GE (indeed the Benn Bill does not require the PM to seek an extension until 19/10).
So it’s just possible that even if the Benn Bill passed and there was then a GE on 10/14 October, with Parliament meeting very soon after that, a Johnson majority (packing the Lords) could them repeal the Benn Bill before 19 October.
I suspect that couldn’t be done (not least because packing the Lords couldn’t be done in time) but just note the issue.
And if “scrap the Benn Act at once” were in a winning Johnson manifesto, the Salisbury Convention would make it hard for the Lords to block an immediate repeal.
PS - I have thought further about the “we will carrying on preparing crash out even if there is an election” threat referred to by @DavidHenigUK. No 10 has a point here (though not the stupid and aggressive point it actually made).
