A New Normal? Parliament after Brexit
| Author | Brigid Fowler |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2041905820911750 |
MARCH 2020•POLITICAL INSIGHT41
The Parliament that sat from the
middle of 2017 until almost the
end of 2019 will go down in history
as an extraordinary Parliament. It
comprised the longest parliamentary session
since the English Civil War, immediately
followed by the shortest since 1948. It
encompassed the rst calendar year since
1974 to have two Queen’s Speeches, the rst
Queen’s Speeches held in the autumn since
2009, and the latest Queen’s Speech in a
calendar year since at least 1900. October 2019
saw the rst Saturday sitting of either House
since the invasion of the Falklands in 1982.
In just a few months in early 2019, the
Conservative government suered some of
the biggest defeats in the House of Commons
since the start of the twentieth century. The
most notable, on 15 January 2019, saw Prime
Minister Theresa May’s rst ‘meaningful vote’
on the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement go down
to a record defeat, by 230 votes. There was also
the rst explicit Commons condence vote
since 1994. In December 2018, the Commons
found the government in contempt of the
House apparently for the rst time in UK
parliamentary history, after the government
failed to comply with a ‘Humble Address’
requiring it to publish the full government
legal advice on the Brexit deal.
A New Normal?
Parliament after Brexit
After a Parliament characterised by record defeats and constitutional
chaos, Brigid Fowler examines how parliamentary procedure might
change after Brexit.
Such abnormalities were symptoms of the
underlying problem: the government’s lack of
a House of Commons majority and a cross-
party non-government backbench majority
opposed to ‘no deal’. This situation generated
two further extraordinary developments
that seem likely to have lasting eects on
Parliament after Brexit.
First, in terms of Parliament’s constitutional
position vis-à-vis the executive and the courts,
there was the government eecting, and then
the Supreme Court voiding, what would have
been the longest prorogation of Parliament
since 1950. In its judgement, the Supreme
Court arguably elevated Parliament’s ability
to scrutinise and hold the government to
account to a constitutional principle.
Second, in terms of the workings of the
House of Commons, there were multiple
controversial procedural moves by the anti-
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