Yahoo News Brexit weekly briefing: will May be outplayed in parliamentary ping pong?
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It’s parliamentary ping pong time – and the prime minister may be outplayed.
Theresa May won all 15 Commons votes on Lords amendments to the EU withdrawal bill last week, including the most dangerous one: whether MPs can shape government policy if parliament rejects the government’s final Brexit deal.
But it came at a cost: she increasingly appears hostage to both sides of a bitterly divided Conservative party.
The knife-edge “meaningful vote” vote (as it were) was won only after May promised Tory rebels to agree a mutually acceptable wording for “part c” of former attorney general Dominic Grieve’s amendment, which proposed allowing MPs to “direct the government” if no deal is reached by February.
Grieve and his supporters believed they had the prime minister’s word – but then the government tabled an amendment in the Lords that would only let MPs debate whatever statement on the deal the government eventually makes, not change it.
Understandably, Grieve called this “unacceptable”, and as the bill headed back to the Lords (where peers backed a new amendment, “Grieve II”, based on the accord rebels thought they had last week) and then to the Commons again this week, noted that pro-EU Tory rebels were aware their opposition could ultimately collapse the government.
With a raft of equally contentious bills (including on trade and membership of the customs union) set to be debated before MPs break for their summer recess and pro-EU rebels poised for fresh confrontation, the prime minister faces a torrid few weeks in parliament – let alone in Brussels.
She faced further anger over her announcement that £20bn of extra money for the NHS would be partly funded by a “Brexit dividend”.
This is highly contentious because most economists, including at the government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility and the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, say there will be no such thing. As Paul Johnson of the IFS tweeted:
Payments to the EU will fall after Brexit, but tax revenues will fall more. That is the official position of the government, which has accepted the OBR’s forecast that the public finances are likely to be weakened to the tune of £15bn a year as a result of the referendum vote.
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In the Guardian, an outraged Matthew d’Ancona argues that the Tories’ NHS pledge puts them on a Brexit bus to nowhere – magical thinking will not solve the conundrum of the leave “dividend”:
As Theresa May would say: let me be clear. There is no “Brexit dividend”. There is no glorious golden handshake to look forward to when we leave the European Union. If there is to be £600m extra a week in cash terms for the NHS within six years, it will not be found in the goody bag when we leave the Brussels party. Given that there is absolutely, categorically, definitely, no Brexit bonanza in prospect, it is natural to ask why ministers keep pretending that there is. And the reason is big and red and monstrous. In the game of politics, it is commonplace to speculate about what might happen if someone were knocked down by a hypothetical bus. Well, the Conservative government was knocked down by a real one two years ago, and specifically by the pledge emblazoned on its side that leaving the EU would yield £350m a week for the health service. Since the victory of the leave campaign, this particular promise – as fiscally ridiculous as it was emotionally cunning – has bedevilled the Tories like political herpes. How to deliver the undeliverable? The answer, it transpires, is to promise a quite distinct increase in NHS spending, and cheekily slap an entirely misleading “Brought to You By Brexit!” sticker on the side.
In the Observer, Andrew Rawnsley warns that faced with challenges that threaten the EU’s very existence, continental leaders have little patience left for Brexit:
Viewed from Berlin, Paris, Rome, the Hague or Madrid, the theatrics at Westminster are of marginal interest compared with the mounting strategic challenges facing the EU ... Britain could be having an influential role in shaping what sort of Europe, what sort of world, emerges next. A British voice might have been a powerful one urging and helping Europe to defend shared values and interests against authoritarianism, nationalism and protectionism. But the British political class is too consumed by Brexit to think about the world. The world has bigger things on its plate than Brexit. A fractured planet is in great flux. Many of the things we have taken for granted about the international order over many decades are in play. And where is Britain? Britain is busy with a bunfight at the bottom of its own navel.
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Far be it from us to comment, but:
Brexit Dividend = Spending money you don't have, to celebrate a deal you haven't done, to placate voters angry at not getting what they wanted...
— NewsThump (@newsthump) June 18, 2018
