Our new book, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit, was published on 23 March. It focuses on the disputed role of parliament in the Brexit process, exploring how this most central UK democratic institution became embroiled in such controversy, and what the Brexit period demonstrates about the wider state of politics.
The first and most basic question answered by the book is what actually happened in these troubled years. This is a long and complex story. Different narratives developed, often fed by competing players, which were frequently partial and sometimes downright misleading. The book seeks to provide an objective account, based on the public record and interviews with insiders. What follows is only a very brief summary (adapted from part of the closing chapter), drawing out some important themes.
The need to restore sovereignty to parliament was a long-time argument of Eurosceptics. While the institution’s own role in Brexit rose to prominence after the referendum, it also served (as discussed in Chapter 2) as a key forum for helping to bring this vote about. Backbench MPs—assisted on occasion by Speaker John Bercow’s unconventional interpretation of the rules—generated significant pressure for a referendum. Notably, not all of them favoured exiting the EU. Some, in a similar way to Prime Minister David Cameron, saw the referendum as a way to make an awkward question go away. Based on polling, there was little expectation of a Leave victory, and this prospect was not taken particularly seriously. Parliament held no major debate on the merits of Brexit to air the arguments; the Leave campaign set out no detailed prospectus to voters; and the civil service was forbidden from preparing. Consequently, the dilemmas and trade-offs that dominated subsequent debates were barely mentioned before the referendum. As an interviewee from the strongly pro-Brexit European Research Group of MPs (ERG) acknowledged, ‘it was only [after the referendum] that different types of Brexit started coming to the fore. Soft Brexit and hard Brexit had never been canvassed before the referendum; the expressions were coined afterwards.’ This lack of definition greatly stoked the bitterness of the following years.
The unexpected Leave result triggered the Prime Minister’s resignation, and Conservative MPs elected Theresa May in his place (Chapter 3). She was, in the words of one interviewee, ‘blood and bone a party woman’, with her deep commitment to public service if anything surpassed by her commitment to the Conservative Party. But that party was severely divided over Brexit. Labour, too, was now internally split, with some party heartlands having voted strongly for Remain and others for Leave. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was already unpopular in his parliamentary party, and it tried but failed to remove him after his lacklustre performance in the referendum campaign. This left both party leaders significantly compromised.
The uncertain question of how to implement Brexit now passed over to parliament. Many feared that a Remainer-dominated House of Commons would seek to undermine the referendum result, and May’s instinct was to rely as far as possible on pursuing Brexit using prerogative powers. But the enormity of the question understandably led parliamentarians to seek oversight of the next steps (Chapter 4). This provoked an institutional conflict between government and parliament. The courts were also drawn in, via Gina Miller’s first legal case arguing for parliament’s role in the triggering of Article 50. This resulted in defeat for the government and the infamous Daily Mail headline labelling the judges ‘enemies of the people’. Rather than cooling down the conflict, May’s government sought to exploit it, in order to appear the people’s defender.
Shortly afterwards, the Prime Minister justified her calling of a snap election in 2017 (Chapter 5), by arguing—on shaky empirical grounds—that parliament was standing in the way of Brexit. But the election weakened her position, resulting in a minority government, dependent on a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Northern Ireland DUP. The closeness of the result raised hopes among former Remainers that Brexit might be blocked, which further fuelled polarization and discouraged the spirit of compromise required to navigate the subsequent stages.
May’s early positioning (her initial ‘red lines’) incorporated the demands of her party’s hardliners—including that the UK should leave the Single Market and Customs Union. But when formal negotiations with the EU began (Chapter 6), her team came to recognize the trade-offs, particularly concerning the protection of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Avoidance of a hard border on the island of Ireland would require continued close alignment with the EU, which was unacceptable to hardline Brexiteers, while a ‘border down the Irish Sea’ between Great Britain and Northern Ireland was unacceptable to unionists, and in particular the DUP.
These difficulties, and May’s rhetoric that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, raised concerns about failure to reach an agreement with the EU, and a possible no-deal Brexit. That would imply a hard border for Northern Ireland, and likely severe economic consequences. Partly to avoid it, a small number of moderate Conservative rebel MPs backed demands for a ‘meaningful vote’ in parliament on the final Brexit plan (Chapter 7). The extent of Conservative splits became very apparent when David Davis and Boris Johnson resigned from May’s Cabinet over her ‘Chequers’ proposals in July 2018, and further ministers departed in November over her final Brexit deal. The primary sticking point was the ‘backstop’—a compromise arrangement to avoid the border problem, demanding significant future all-UK alignment with EU rules (plus some special arrangements for Northern Ireland). When MPs voted on this deal in January 2019 it was overwhelmingly defeated, by 432 votes to 202. More than a third of the parliamentary Conservative Party—118 MPs—opposed it, 90 of whom were former Leave supporters. Most former Conservative Remain supporters, in contrast, voted for the deal.
There followed months of parliamentary wrangling, during which May’s deal was defeated twice more (Chapter 8). Crucially, hardline Conservative Brexiteers (dubbed the ‘Spartans’) repeatedly refused to accept it. May expressed strong frustrations with parliament, but never explicitly criticized her backbench opponents. Boris Johnson)—who had voted against the deal on the first two occasions—responded by arguing that it was ‘wrong in every sense to blame MPs for blocking Brexit’.
At this point, Conservative backbench moderates took further action to avoid a no-deal Brexit, including through backing temporary suspension of ministers’ control of the Commons agenda to facilitate ‘indicative’ votes on alternative Brexit options. But with near-universal Conservative opposition to every option, they were all defeated. Meanwhile, other parties continued to reject the deal. All that MPs could agree on was instructing Theresa May to negotiate extensions to the Article 50 period. The polarization and failure to compromise which characterized this period was painfully summed up by senior Conservative Brexiteer Charles Walker, who commented that ‘the losers do not know how to lose and the winners do not know how to win’.
It was in these circumstances that Boris Johnson—who had adopted a mantle as the authentic voice of Brexit, denouncing May and voting against her deal—was elected in her place (Chapter 9). Parliament entered its 2019 summer recess immediately afterwards, without any formal test of confidence in Johnson. Before its return, he requested a five-week prorogation, potentially to help facilitate a no-deal Brexit. This led to the second government defeat in the Supreme Court on a Brexit-related matter. Before the court case, Johnson had stripped the whip from 21 Conservative MPs (17 of whom had consistently voted for May’s deal), for facilitating what he dubbed the ‘Surrender Act’—a non-government bill requiring pursuit of a further Article 50 extension unless parliament voted for a Brexit plan.
This parliamentary blocking of a no-deal Brexit drove Johnson to agree an alternative deal with the EU, which was put to the House of Commons in October (Chapter 10). It was essentially a package previously rejected by Theresa May, which included close EU alignment for Northern Ireland only, thus requiring a ‘border down the Irish Sea’. Rather than subjecting the deal to parliamentary scrutiny, Johnson demanded a new general election, which was eventually conceded by MPs. He fought this on a slogan to ‘get Brexit done’, and a manifesto which—in direct contradiction to his own earlier comments—accused MPs of ‘refus[ing] to deliver Brexit’, and of ‘thwarting the democratic decision of the British people’. The Conservatives won an 80-seat majority, and the UK’s exit from the EU followed on 31 January 2020.
This story clearly contains many contradictions. In particular, Johnson’s rhetoric that parliament had failed to ‘get Brexit done’ was fundamentally inaccurate. He himself had voted with the hardliners against May’s deal on the basis that it wasn’t an authentic Brexit. They dismissed it instead as ‘BRINO’—Brexit in name only. But this group never had a detailed plan of its own. A ‘pure’ Brexit, eschewing all EU regulatory alignment, would have required a hard border on the island of Ireland, and presented major obstacles to an ambitious trade deal with the EU. May’s negotiated compromise sought to avoid these risks, while delivering on the Leave result. Johnson only ‘got Brexit done’ by returning to a version of the deal that May had rejected, due to the problems that it threatened for Northern Ireland. This central disagreement about what Brexit should mean was facilitated by the original lack of clarity in the referendum. But it took place between May’s government and Johnson’s supporters—not between the institution of government and the institution of parliament. The Conservative MPs who blocked May’s deal, including Johnson himself, believed that they were defending Brexit, rather than undermining it. This made it wholly misleading to blame parliament for ‘thwarting’ Brexit, when those involved had in fact used parliament to pursue an argument with May’s government. Yet this was the story that Johnson’s manifesto told, profiting from a growing anti-parliamentary rhetoric that had developed under her premiership.
Summing up, a saga that began with demands to enhance the sovereignty of parliament gradually developed into one where parliament was vilified. The central arguments over Brexit were always—and indeed remain—those inside the Conservative Party. However, it suited most of these internal protagonists for parliament to get the blame.
Meg Russell is Professor of British and Comparative Politics and Director of the Constitution Unit at UCL.
Lisa James is a Research Fellow in the Constitution Unit.
© Meg Russell and Lisa James
Adapted extract from The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit published by Oxford University Press in March 2023, available in paperback and eBook formats, £25.00