Accompanied by leave campaigner Chris Grayling (background). Home Secretary Theresa May launches her Conservative leadership campaign. Stefan Rousseau / Press Association. All rights reserved.Theresa May says today in her statement announcing a leadership bid that there should be no triggering of the article 50 process until a negotiating strategy has been resolved. That must be right, but she also asserts there will be no general election before 2020. Is it really constitutional, democratic or right that the mechanism for determining the future relationship of our country with the EU and the world at large will be a Conservative party leadership election that does not even feature Boris Johnson, the man who was widely assumed to take over the leadership and the negotiation? Or should we demand a wider democratic input into the terms on which we re-align with Europe?
Of course Theresa May is right that the Article 50 process must not be hastily commenced. We need to decide what we want from the Brexit negotiation before we start negotiations. The Article 50 process is stacked against the UK. The whip hand of the EU member states is that once it is activated, the UK ceases automatically, after two years, to have any of the obligations, but also any of the benefits of EU membership. The only means of avoiding that outcome are either to agree a withdrawal deal with a heavily qualified majority of the European Council (for the purposes of a vote, this means the Heads of State of the member nations) or else obtain unanimous agreement to an extension of time for negotiations. Any small bloc can impede a deal and more threateningly, any single member country can veto an extension of time for negotiations once the withdrawal process is initiated. Article 50 even dictates that the country triggering article 50 is not entitled to participate in the talks concerning its exit. Because a withdrawal agreement would cut across all sorts of lines of competence, it is likely that every individual member state will have to ratify it. In short, Article 50 ensures that the country which has triggered its exit is in no position to make any demand that might meet with resistance. Theresa May is right to be cautious about entering into such a doomed negotiating position without an idea of the strategy for negotiation.
Several EU figures have said there will be no pre-article 50 discussions outside the procedure stipulated by article 50. That is no doubt the case. However, that does not mean from the UK’s perspective that a rapid start to the process is required. The people of the UK are entitled to take time to clarify the shape of the post-exit Britain that we want to achieve (though there is clearly a need to minimise periods of uncertainty).
