On Tuesday the Supreme Court ruled that the government must get parliament’s permission to trigger Article 50, and so begin the process of leaving the European Union (EU). “The significance of the judgement is not that Brexit will be blocked or even delayed,” says David Allen Green in the Financial Times.
It is that it has “brought clarity to the fundamental power relationships in the uncodified British constitution: those between parliament and the executive and between the constituent nations of the UK”. The government may not be happy at the verdict, but the decision proves that we have “a working constitution”.
“Well done, Gina Miller,” says Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph, referring to the investment manager who helped to launch the initial legal challenge. Leaving the EU was supposedly about “restoring control and sovereignty to our nation”. It is ironic that “Remainers have become the great defenders of the sovereignty they previously wanted to see pooled”. Their victory means that Brexit “can now proceed with the full wind of the law and parliament in its sails”.
“MPs will almost certainly approve the enabling act and allow Brexit to proceed,” says Bloomberg View. Tory MPs will back Theresa May “out of partisan loyalty”, while Labour, which fears “a crushing defeat at the next election… won’t challenge voters’ distaste for the EU”. So an organised rebellion that stops the process, or even forces May to make serious concessions, “isn’t going to happen”.
Maybe so, but most MPs “know in their heart of hearts that even if a majority of their constituents voted Leave, they did not vote for a hard Brexit”, argues Andrew Grice in The Independent. Yet any amendments on issues like workers’ rights and access to the single market “may be ruled out of order because the bill will be very tightly drawn”. While May has talked about a final vote on the eventual agreement, this amounts to “a last-minute choice between her deal and the ‘no deal’ of World Trade Organisation tariffs”.
“The more promising battlefield” for resistance to Brexit is the “great repeal bill” expected in spring, says The Guardian’s Rafael Behr. This plans “to migrate the entire edifice of European law” on to the UK’s statute books. However, “it will also create a mechanism for ministers to expunge features of the European legacy post-Brexit”. Aggressive use of these “delegated powers” could “offend MPs from all parties” and even set off a battle between the Lords and the Commons. This “could get messy”.