Prime Minister’s Question Time

Theresa May was due to meet with the 1922 Committee on Tuesday.

The chair of the committee, Graham Brady, has brought Tuesday’s meeting forward to Monday – tomorrow – in effect, summoning Theresa May before her backbenchers to explain herself.

Graham Brady has been the Tory MP for Altrincham and Sale West since 1997. He is described as an “early and enthusiastic Brexiteer“.

One Conservative method of removing the leader is to have 15% of Tory backbenchers write to the chair of the committee asking for a vote of confidence in the current leader. (Iain Duncan Smith was the last leader to be removed in this way.)

The backbenchers will certainly want Theresa May to justify why she should stay on as Tory leader after she called a general election that dissolved the Tory party’s small but working majority. Given that Theresa May’s motivation for calling that general election may have been precisely so that she needn’t worry about Tory backbencher rebellions against her while going through the show of Brexit negotiations, she may find this question difficult to answer.

But that’s really not the only question they should be asking.

They may also want to know why she claimed on Friday morning to have a deal already made with the DUP to prop up the tiny Tory advantage in Parliament, only to have the DUP deny it by Saturday: and they should certainly ask what the DUP is demanding as payment for the deal.

Some of them at least will want to know how May plans to prevent the Tory party being tarred by association with the creationist, climate-change-denying, homophobic, sectarian, anti-abortion DUP.

A few may even think to ask how May plans to preserve the Northern Ireland peace process, already at risk from Brexit, by removing the UK government’s ability to be a neutral broker in the Stormont crisis, on-going since January: and what happens if Sinn Fein mounts a legal challenge, asserting in court that the UK government is now in breach of the Good Friday Agreement.

If a UK government has been formed with the DUP’s support and this government is under legal challenge, even if the challenge fails, the EU negotiations – due to start on 19th June, already delayed by May’s general election – will have to be further put off because the EU cannot begin negotiations with a government in legal doubt and uncertainty. A European council meeting on 22nd June is said to be the next deadline for Theresa May – if still Prime Minister – to explain herself and to say when the negotiations can start.

The deadline for Brexit is 29th March 2019 and weeks have already been wasted.

I don’t have a Tory MP. If I did, and especially if they were a backbencher, I would write to them tonight or contact them by phone tomorrow and ask them to ask Theresa May these questions at her meeting with them tomorrow.

Please feel free to share this as widely as you can: Tory backbenchers should know that they need to hold Theresa May to account for more than just putting their jobs at risk.

Turn Left

In fairness, Theresa May never said what would happen if she lost 13 seats.

But here we are.

The Conservative Party has 317 seats in the House of Commons: even allowing for the 7 Sinn Féin MPs who never take their seats, the Tories are five seats short of a majority.

Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party, have between them got 314 seats.

Oh, Snap! General Election 2017

“Guess what we’re doing on 8th June 2017?” I asked.

“I dunno,” said the love of my life, busy with her coursework.

“Having a general election.”

Theresa May today announced (following a cabinet meeting) that she would hold a “snap general election” on 8th June 2017.

If you want to read her claimed reasons for doing so, her full statement is available.

Brexit Day: independence for Scotland

EU Referendum Results Map

Yesterday, the Scottish Parliament voted by majority both for the government’s resolution to hold a second independence referendum, and for the Scottish Green Party’s amendment, that sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds and EU citizens should be able to vote in the second independence referendum.

Labour, the Conservatives, and the Scottish LibDems all voted for Scotland to Brexit.

Today, Theresa May invokes Article 50, and the UK begins its two year departure from the EU. On Friday 29th March 2019, short of some fairly major political upheavals in the Conservative Party, the UK will no longer be a member of the European Union.

According to report, Theresa May believes that in eighteen months time, the UK’s Brexit deal will have been fully negotiated and voted on by the EU Parliament. Whether she is right or not in that assessment, we will certainly know by that time whether or not the UK is likely to have a Brexit deal, or if the UK is likely to leave the EU with nothing but unpaid debts and no deal at all.

No deal at all, means an end to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland: it means the the multiple essential agencies dealing with atomic energy, prescription-drugs regulation, etc, will cease to include the UK as from 29th March 2019 with certainly quite a gap before the UK can set up any replacement.

“No deal” means that millions of EU citizens currently legally resident in the UK, may become illegal aliens who can, if they refuse to leave their familes and homes when told to do so, quite lawfully be taken to centres such as Dungavel, locked up, and deported. “No deal” means the beginning of the end for the City of London as a financial centre: an end to the car industry in the UK: and all the food we import from the rest of the EU will become a lot more expensive.

Theresa May is likely to see as a “bad deal” any deal that includes requiring the UK to pay its full debts owed on leaving, and above all, a “bad deal” that requires the UK to be part of the Schengen Area or equivalent in freedom of movement.

But Scotland voted by majority to Remain in the EU. The only way this can be achieved, is for Scotland to become an independent country and rejoin the EU.

The second independence referendum for Scotland is likely to be held sometime in October or November 2018.

I voted No in 2014, believing that the SNP government had not properly thought through their plans for independence. I plan to vote Yes in 2018, or whenever the next independence referendum should take place.

I think Theresa May has three choices with regard to our independence referendum.

Parliament is sovereign: Vote on article 50

Why I think you should contact your MP to ask them to vote against Theresa May’s Article 50 bill – whether your MP is pro or anti Brexit.

Theresa May claimed as Crown Prerogative the right to invoke Article 50 and take the UK out of the EU without consulting Parliament.

The Supreme Court has ruled, as matter of constitutional law, that she’s wrong: Parliament is sovereign, and only Parliament can take the UK out of the EU.

So Theresa May has had written a very short bill which will by Parliamentary vote give her the right to invoke Article 50 without further consultation.

Way to miss the point, Prime Minister.

This is the full text of the bill Theresa May has published today, two days after the Supreme Court ruled she couldn’t just use her Crown prerogatives to invoke Article 50:

Confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU.

Why is the UK leaving the EU?

“Does anyone know why the UK is leaving the EU?” someone asked.

This was my answer:

From where I’m sitting, the UK is leaving the EU because, in no particular order:

Murphy’s Law: Après moi, le déluge

Jim Murphy cannot take all of the credit for the rise of the SNP in the polls: even before he declared his candidacy, the SNP were looking set to take the majority of the Scottish seats.

But under his leadership, the likelihood of Scottish Labour remaining a significant force in politics at Westminster has continued to fall, to the point where there is an even chance that Jim Murphy may not even be Renfrewshire East’s MP after 7th May: Electoral Calculus currently predicts Murphy’s margin of victory as 1.1%, in a seat which was 20 points ahead of the Tory challenger in 2010, when SNP was in fourth place behind the LibDems.

This is a shattering upset for the man who wanted to be Scotland’s First Minister. In October 2014, Jim Murphy – the third candidate in the Labour leadership race and the only not an MSP – told the Scottish Daily Record:

“I want to unite the Labour Party but, more importantly, I want to bring the country back together after the referendum.
“I am not going to shout at or about the SNP, I am going to talk to and listen to Scotland and I am very clear that the job I am applying for is to be the First Minister of Scotland.”