Great Repeal Bill Brexit row: Keep Henry VIII’s name out of it

One wonders whether the outrage over the “Great Repeal Bill” has been a little overdone. The White Paper explaining how the UK Government will handle all the mass of EU legislation that needs to remain in place after Brexit notes that much of it, while remaining in force, will need “correcting” by delegated legislation – powers given to ministers by Parliament. 

The White Paper explains that this correcting will simply be to ensure the laws, all of which will be transposed into UK law, can continue to operate rather than become ineffective upon repeal of the European Communities Act 1979. Critics fear the Government will go further than this and use delegated legislation, or “Henry VIII powers”, to actually change or abolish laws and rights derived from the EU.     

But this post is more concerned about whether the respectable name of King Henry has been blackened by being dragged into this sordid modern row. “Henry VIII powers” are quite often included in parliamentary legislation (increasingly and controversially of late) to allow a minister to later change the statute by issuing a statutory instrument. 

The name (or nickname, really) of the powers has been mistakenly taken rather literally by some parts of the media with suggestions that the powers, legitimately given by a democratically elected Parliament, are actually derived from the despotic Henry VIII himself, that the Government has dredged up some arcane pre-democratic power and is about to swing Henry VIII’s very own axe to abolish EU law. Thus the Evening Standard: “Ministers defended so-called Henry VIII clauses dating back to 1539”. CNN took a similar line: “The British government wants to invoke controversial powers that date back 500 years to the time of King Henry VIII.” The Independent called them “ancient powers”. This is simply untrue.

What if James Eadie was right about Brexit?

Pity poor James Eadie QC, the lawyer tasked with swaying at least six Justices of the UK Supreme Court to his rather unappealing view that David Davis can sweep away 40-odd years of EU rights with the scrawl of his crabbed hand on an Article 50 notice.      

When smooth-as-silk Silk Lord Pannick stood to address their Lordships and Ladyship in the Gina Miller Brexit case, one could sense the hearts aflutter and knees atremble in chambers up and down the country as he caressed the precedents and drove his points home with firm but gentle force. Expect the CSI-effect to kick in during the next round of university applications – an upswing in applications to law schools from 18-year-olds who suddenly really want to be constitutional lawyers. There is, in contrast, no such thing as the Eadie effect.     

Where Pannick was a gallant schooner expertly managing the light zephyrs wafted his way by the assembled justices, deftly avoiding the gentle sandbanks and glittering coral reefs to reach his haven, Eadie was an oil-bespattered tramp steamer buffeted by blizzards, bouncing of rocks and barely making it into port.   

He found his craft beached in his final gasping moments on a very poor (and probably unconstitutional) point in which he seemed to suggest the Justices check what MPs had been doing in the Commons the night before (passing the Brexit motion) and somehow take it into account in their judgment.   

But what if (one can put it no higher) – what if Eadie turns out to be right? Even half right might be good enough. So, what does his somewhat incoherent case amount to?  

1297 And All That: how to impress a Brexit judge

Turned down the chance to take the option on Medieval Law during your time as a legal scholar? Bad move. Ancient precedents are now cool – and the best way to impress our top judges when they are considering tricky matters such as the Brexit wrangle.

One of the teams in the Gina Miller/Dos Santos Brexit case came up with material going all the way back to 1297 to support their contention that Theresa May didn’t have power to start Brexit by issuing an Article 50  notification. But were they, how can one say it, a little economical with the historicité?

Helen Mountfield QC, for the People’s Challenge, said Henry IV had tried to suspend a 1297 Act which allowed foreigners to trade in London:

“So this is an example, which is right on point, an Act which provides for freedom of movement and establishment of foreign merchants. The Crown doesn’t purport to repeal this act; it simply frustrates its purpose by a decree which makes the intended purpose of the Act unenforceable for a particular period of time. The law itself which is referred to there has been, I think, tracked down by the industries of my friend Ms Simor QC, the law of 1297 at bundle E1, and it is perhaps unsurprising that it was Henry IV who wanted to ‘kill all of the lawyers’.”  Second day of case; digest here. 

This writer, of course, cannot pretend to have access to their lordships bundles. However one assumes that the 1297 Act must be Magna Carta – the Edward I inspeximus* re-issue, not the 1215 original. Strictly speaking it is a treaty (between the King and his people – or those who mattered) rather than an Act of Parliament but it was also enacted into law. It remains on the statute books, what’s left of it, and can be found here. But it wasn’t exactly the act of a “sovereign parliament” as we know it today.

The Brexit court case (Miller/Santos): Link to extracts

Our sister blog Thinking Legally has published digested versions of the Brexit High Court case R (Miller and Santos) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. 

First day: Thinking Legally 1

Second day: Thinking Legally 2

Third day: Thinking Legally 3.

Here are some Brexit pieces on Al’s Law.

The High Court case: full (uncorrected) transcripts
The first day transcript 13 Oct of the Miller/Santos court case is here (MoJ pdf).
• The second day transcript: Full day transcript for 17 October 2016.
• Third day Full day transcript for 18 October 2016.
• All available at the Ministry of Justice

The High Court case has now been superseded by the Supreme Court case (December 2016). Transcripts and other material can be found here on the Supreme Court site. A report/analysis of the Supreme Court case is here: What if James Eadie was right?

The Brexit High Court case: actually Parliament already holds all the cards

There is a paradox at the centre of the great Brexit High Court case. The applicants demanding a parliamentary vote on leaving the EU assert the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – yet to gain their point they have to prove a piece of parliamentary legislation can be overthrown at the whim and say-so of the Prime Minister – by issuing her EU exit notification under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

But Brexit cannot occur in any effective form without Parliament’s clear and overt agreement – enshrined in legislation. A pro-EU Parliament is in a powerful position, but Theresa May and her Three Brexiteers are not rushing to inform MPs and Peers of the strength of their hand.

The point is that the European Communities Act 1972 is a piece of sovereign legislation – and it will remain intact after the Article 50 notification goes out – and even after Britain leaves the EU if Parliament decides to leave it there. If Parliament says so, it will remain good law, actionable in the British courts and indeed in the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Mrs May can issue her Article 50 notice under Royal prerogative, break with the EU if she wants, but the legislation stays in place – forever, if that is what Parliament wants. Furthermore it can continue to be effective law for as long as the EU continues to exist if that is the will of Parliament. Britain could be outside the EU – yet governed by its treaties, laws, Court of Justice decisions. It could all continue to apply and the UK courts will (or should) apply it insofar as it is practical to do so.

That is because, to hammer home the point, Parliament is sovereign – and the meaning of parliamentary sovereignty is that British courts will recognise the legislation that passes through Parliament and is signed into law by the Monarch (see Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway Company v John Wauchope).

Now, Mrs May has offered a Great Repeal Bill so Parliament can sweep aside the ECA – but she hasn’t pointed out that Parliament need not sweep it aside at all if it doesn’t want to (otherwise why have a “repeal” Act?). If Parliament wants Britain to be governed by EU law it can be. Which puts Parliament in a powerful position to amend the ECA (via the Great “Repeal” Bill) to dictate the nature of Britain’s continuing relationship with the EU – soft Brexit, hard Brexit, European Economic Area membership or some other system. Or it can leave Britain in the, admittedly anomalous position, of being a sovereign nation governed in part by foreign law.

The Brexit Great Repeal Bill – a rather cunning ploy

Note: The High Court has been unpersuaded by the sort of arguments set out below and has now ruled that the Government does not have power to issue its Article 50 notification. The post nevertheless remains relevant regarding the background and possible political implications of the judgment. The 3 November 2016 judgment is available here.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s announcement of a Great Repeal Bill to set the seal on Britain’s march out of Europe has not received much good press (or good blog, if that’s a thing) among the legal pundits. “No news here”, “inevitable, really”, “bound to have happened at some point” – this has been the general tenor of informed opinion on the matter.

Yet for some reason informed opinion has failed to recognise it as a remarkably clever wheeze that manages to shoot a number of Opposition and Anti-Brexit foxes with one twitch on the trigger. It has undermined the legal case for giving Parliament a direct say on whether Britain leaves the EU and helped shift the political debate to whether Parliament should merely have “oversight” of the process or a say in the final form Brexit would take.

So Ed Miliband’s comments this week included this: “It would be a complete outrage if May were to determine the terms of Brexit without a mandate from parliament. There is no mandate for hard Brexit, and I don’t believe there is a majority in parliament for [it] either.” This is far from a demand for an In/Out vote for parliamentarians before Article 50  notification of EU exit is issued under Royal prerogative in March.

Brexit Secretary David Davies was at pains in his statement this week (October 10) to point out that a vote on the Great Repeal Bill will involve plenty of debate on the issue – but not offer MPs to vote against Brexit: “This Bill is separate issue to when Article 50 [notice of EU exit] is triggered … it [the Bill] won’t take us out of the EU.” 

Bonfire of EU rights: Bring on the Brexit bureaucrats!

So Britain is out of the European Union. How do we get rid of all that pesky EU legislation on standards, the environment, workers’ rights, consumer law etc etc that has been holding back Global Britain?  A disturbing prospect has arisen of a bonfire of legal rights currently held by British citizens that could be brought about on little more than the say-so of government ministers. No parliamentary debate, little likelihood of votes by MPs, rights lost by administrative order or government “Henry VIII” powers, rather than new laws passing through both Houses of Parliament.

This would be the preferred option no doubt of Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, who have both promised to get rid of EU legislation “holding back Britain” in a mater of a little over a year. But will it be that easy?

Here is the plan: Given there are many legal rights enshrined in UK law that derive from the European Union and which remain in effect post-Brexit, an efficient way must be found to comb through them and disapply them where necessary. It could take mammoth parliamentary sessions passing complex repealing legislation. Instead, and rather chillingly, Conservative barrister Martin Howe QC (among others) has said ministers should be “given powers” to disapply them bit by bit as and when it is deemed appropriate.

So Parliament could be asked to pass a piece of primary legislation , a “Brexit Freedoms Bill” no doubt, handing those powers to ministers, in other words allowing the ministers to repeal or disapply European law at will through secondary (delegated) legislation, probably statutory instruments (see below). It will be “the quickest way of taking the necessary decisions … to reemploy or replace them” Howe told BBC Radio 4’s Unreliable Evidence 14 Sept 2016.  

But giving such powers to the Government could leave whole areas of law at the mercy of ministers, including employment and equality rights, privacy and consumer rights, environmental law, copyright protections, safety law, food hygiene and many laws affecting business. It is difficult to establish how much British law is driven by the EU but FullFact.org says this:

“An estimated 13% of Acts [primary legislation] and Statutory Instruments have an EU influence, whereas that rises to 62% when EU regulations are included in addition to Acts and Statutory Instruments.”

Why the sovereign UK Parliament has no backdoor exit out of Brexit

Note: The High Court has now ruled that the Government does not have power to issue Article 50 notification. The 3 November 2016 judgment is available here.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May has said there will be “no attempts to sort of stay in the EU by the back door”. She’s right. Those anti-Brexit voices hoping that a “sovereign UK Parliament” has a constitutional right to halt May’s European Union exit plans are wrong. A debate and vote by MPs would have no more constitutional weight than, let us say, the “advisory” referendum of June 23 (arguably rather less). Nor does the Prime Minister have a duty to give MPs a vote before she issues her withdrawal notice to the European Council under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

But if and when May does that, she will be entering a complicated constitutional maze – rooted in a treacherous political quagmire – with no predictable way through. Britain could be in limbo with Parliament and Government unable to agree, judges unable or unwilling to give clear guidance, a crisis “Brexit election” – which will resolve nothing and will not get May out of the hole left by her predecessor.

Wiser heads than this blogger have written at length on these issues, particularly regarding whether Parliament has a final say in taking Britain out of the EU. Unfortunately they have come to diametrically opposed views – with others taking up positions of various polarised degrees around the unsquared circle that is Britain’s Brexit crisis. What follows is simply an attempt to give some guidance through the maze.

The CRED report and Tory ‘Marxism’: Time to bring in S1 of the Equality Act

The thing about inviting Marxists (or “post-Marxists”?) into the heart of the UK Government, if you are a right-wing prime minister like Boris Johnson, is that they sometimes come with ideas you don’t understand with implications you can’t fathom – and hence policies you are unlikely to want to implement. This is very much the case with the No 10 report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). Its emphasis was on the largely socio-economic basis of such disparities, ditching decades of liberal-left post-structuralist identity politics and notions of institutional racism for a more orthodox materialist historicism. Boris must have been quite baffled (though how would we tell?).

As it happens, if the government does actually want to do something about disparities that are embedded in socio-economic deprivation rather than racism, it has one quick fix that would actually do something: bring into force Part 1 of the Equality Act 2010.

This Act was largely a tidying up operation by the Gordon Brown government to bring equality legislation into one handy place.  It is full of provisions to deal with institutional racism but it also had something new in Part 1, Section 1:

Public sector duty regarding socio-economic inequalities
(1) An authority to which this section applies must, when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise its functions, have due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage.

This is bang on the button as far as the disparity report goes, with its concern about Britain as “a world where your talent and potential contribution are limited by which postcode you live in, your race or your socio-economic background”.

The CRED report, for example, shows its socio-economic class-based analysis by quoting with approval research that suggests Black Caribbean children perform less well than Black African children at school (and hence in life) in part because the more recent African immigrants are from a higher socio-economic group than the second or third generation of Caribbeans who came over specifically for working class jobs. Similarly those Indians who have migrated to Britain had a higher socio-economic status allowing them to flourish. (Report pp 67-8)

Can Boris Johnson defy a commons vote of no confidence?

For those British MPs wanting to stop a no-deal Brexit, the options are running out. Among  avenues apparently blocked, according to some, is a motion of no confidence in Boris Johnson’s government. The prime minister’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, has declared it is too late for such a motion to halt Brexit on 31 October. Even if he loses a motion of no confidence, Johnson can, according to Cummings, refuse to make way for a new Prime Minister and stay on until he decides to have a General Election – probably during or after Brexit on 31 October.

Meanwhile, the bad news for the ant-Brexit proponents of the “government of national unity” is that, even if Johnson follows correct procedure and quits, it is Jeremy Corbyn who should most likely be invited to set up a new government, not a cross-party coalition. There is no parliamentary mechanism for such a coalition to take power unless it is led by Labour.