Article 50 process on Brexit faces legal challenge to. Legal steps have been taken to ensure the UK Government will not trigger the procedure for withdrawal from the EU without an Act of Parliament.
The case is being brought by leading law firm, Mishcon de Reya, on behalf of a group of clients. Following publication of articles on the subject this week Mishcon de Reya has retained Baron David Pannick QC and Tom Hickman to act as counsel in this action, along with Rhodri Thompson QC and Anneli Howard. Words mean little when the columnists come to power. When a doctor MP has an opinion about the NHS, he or she (say, Sarah Wollaston) is usually listened to attentively.
The same goes for lawyer MPs, economist MPs, academic MPs on their own special subjects. It’s time to question our notions of Britishness and patriotism. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
So, according to his tireless amanuensis James Boswell, said Dr Samuel Johnson on the night of 7 April 1775. In the Tory laundry basket, Michael Gove is the dirtiest item. In the notorious words of Michael Gove: “People in this country have had enough of experts”.
But have they had enough of expert shits? Shares in kitchen companies fell sharply this morning as Michael Gove launched his bid for No 10. Firms hoping for a post-Brexit boost from Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine – who famously regarded Ed Miliband’s kitchen design as the most useless thing about him, and would be only too happy to rip out her former friend Samantha Cameron’s stainless steel effort at No 10 – may well be disappointed. Early days, of course, but Gove’s behaviour looks to have been judged simply too unpleasant and distasteful for the Conservative party. High praise indeed. “With the best will in the world,” ran a leader column dripping with anything but, “we cannot see Mr Gove as a prime minister for these turbulent times.” For his campaign slogan, Michael has decided against, “Welcome to politics, bitch!” The Queen has said what Cameron can’t: the EU is worth fighting for.
The Queen, as a constitutional monarch, is supposed to be above politics, but when it comes to the most profound issues facing the UK she isn’t quite.
When Downing Street had a panic attack over the Scottish referendum, she was encouraged to speak out on the issue, and – after much semantic to-ing and fro-ing between No 10 and Buckingham Palace – urged voters in Scotland to “think very carefully” about the decision. The code worked: the UK was saved. For the moment at least. Now, as her nation comes to another fork in the road, she has intervened again, though this time it is less clear at whose behest. At a state banquet in Berlin on Wednesday, she made a speech that went far beyond her usual Christmas Day platitudes. Michael Gove v Boris Johnson: the key players. Sarah Vine Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had been in talks for days about running on what many Tory MPs had regarded as a dream ticket after their successful campaign to leave the EU.
But they reckoned without the influence of Gove’s wife. For non-Daily Mail readers unaware of Sarah Vine, illumination came on Wednesday when the email she wrote to her husband expressing anxieties about his planned political alliance was passed to the media. Seemingly sent by accident to a member of the public, the email lapsed into intermittent capital letters to tell Gove he needed specific promises to guarantee his support for Johnson as Tory leader. “Do not concede any ground,” it ended. Vine and Gove met when both were writers for the Times with close connections to Tory circles. When they married in 2001, George Osborne and David Cameron were among the guests.
She does, however, sometimes write about her marriage, especially with Gove co-heading the leave campaign. Paul Dacre. Katyboo1's Weblog. It is day four in the Big Brexit house.
I had hoped after Friday’s absolute catastrophe of a day that the country might somehow magically rally over the weekend. I mean, when you plunge your country into possible ruin on the promise of a golden future that will allow it to rise like a phoenix from the flames, you have a plan, right? As it turns out, you don’t. The only person that seems to have any plan at all, and be acting on it rather than just spouting meaningless Churchillian rhetoric is Nicola Sturgeon, and I can’t even vote for her. I was distraught and angry on Friday. ‘Gosh. I'd better get up’: how Michael Gove woke to shock news of Brexit.
While much of the nation stayed up into the small hours of Friday 24 June, mesmerised by every new set of results, one of the chief architects of Brexit went to bed at 10.30pm and apparently slept soundly – until Michael Gove’s phone rang on his bedside table at 4.45am and an excited voice said: “Michael, guess what?
We’ve won!” According to his wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, what happened next sounded more like a scene from an Ealing comedy than the end of the world as we knew it. Cameron tells EU leaders they must offer UK more control over immigration. David Cameron told Europe’s leaders that they will have to offer the UK more control over immigration at the end of a fractious day where politicians across Europe clashed over the meaning and consequences of last week’s Brexit vote.
The British prime minster used his last Brussels summit to tell Angela Merkel, François Hollande and other European heads of government that anxieties about unrestricted freedom of movement were at the heart of the decision by Britons to reject the EU. This is now Project Betrayal – and we are all victims. This is the great betrayal.
Just about everyone feels betrayed from every possible perspective. As the pound plunges, sending oil and food prices up while wages stagnate, with shares and pension values falling, the country is seeing the consequences of being mortally betrayed – by the self-indulgent members of a government who brought this calamity down on all of us.
Some who voted leave will feel betrayed by the unfolding economic tremors after they were told to ignore the warnings of Project Fear. Recession threatens a huge loss of jobs; banks decamping; airport, rail and house-building projects suspended; airlines issuing profits warnings; credit card companies reporting a dive in spending; a quarter of Institute of Directors companies freezing recruitment. I keep finding people already affected. I hear of children in primary schools anxious and weeping because they are foreign, have foreign parents, or fear for their foreign friends. Boris Johnson looked sick - because he has no idea how to fix the national disaster he's bequeathed us.
Well, Michael Gove was right about the experts being wrong. Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit - Political Economy Research Centre. The geography reflects the economic crisis of the 1970s, not the 2010s It became clear early on in the night that Leave had extraordinary levels of support in the North East, taking 70% of the votes in Hartlepool and 61% in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analysing this, as if anger towards elites and immigrants was simply an effect of public spending cuts of the past 6 years or (more structurally) the collapse of Britain’s pre-2007 debt-driven model of growth.
Why the Article 50 notification is important – Jack of Kent blog. 25th June 2016. View from Wales: town showered with EU cash votes to leave EU. “What’s the EU ever done for us?” Zak Kelly, 21, asks me this standing next to a brand new complex of buildings and facilities that wouldn’t look out of place in Canary Wharf. It’s not Canary Wharf, though, it’s Ebbw Vale, a former steel town of 18,000 people in the heart of the Welsh valleys, where 62% of the population – the highest proportion in Wales – voted Leave. To go there – along a new dual carriageway – and stand next to the town’s new sixth form and training college, a glass and steel architectural showpiece next to its new leisure centre, a few hundred yards away from a new train station, is to stare into the abyss of the UK’s failed Remain campaign.
Even Kelly, who has just finished a training session on a brand new football pitch, backtracks slightly after asking that question. “Well, I know … they built all this,” he says, and motions his head at the impressive facilities that are all around us. And change is now coming. There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Where was the champagne at the Vote Leave headquarters? The happy tears and whoops of joy? If you believed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the Brexit vote was a moment of national liberation, a day that Nigel Farage said our grateful children would celebrate with an annual bank holiday. Johnson and Gove had every reason to celebrate. As a lifelong English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life.
Britain cannot leave Europe any more than Piccadilly Circus can leave London. Hugo Young: why Britain never sat comfortably in Europe. This is the story of 50 years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid. It is the history of an attitude to history itself. Dismal, lifeless, spineless – Jeremy Corbyn let us down again. As shock waves ricochet across the country, expect few tears for the prime minister’s downfall. Who are we? Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, speaks to the press after it was announced that Britain has voted to “Leave” the European Union—a result that Farage had campaigned for.
Westminster, London, 24th June 2016 ©Matt Dunham/AP/Press Association Images. I want my country back. Britain is not a rainy, fascist island – here’s my plan for ProgrExit. In the progressive half of British politics we need a plan to put our stamp on the Brexit result – and fast. A pyrrhic victory? Boris Johnson wakes up to the costs of Brexit. “If we are victorious in one more battle … we shall be utterly ruined.”