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A crucial cabinet meeting to agree on the UK's Brexit bargaining position has been postponed from Thursday to the weekend or early next week amid a dispute over the opportunity to provide full legal advice on support to high level ministers.
Some ministers had estimated that the cabinet could have met late Thursday afternoon to approve Theresa May's plan for Brexit, but the 10th said the decisive meeting would not take place on Thursday or Friday.
Downing Street insisted late Wednesday on the fact that the meeting had not been delayed, even though foreign ministers such as Greg Clark, Secretary of Japan Affairs, and Sajid Javid, Secretary at Home in Seattle, were ready to turn around. .
The firm's Brexiters were keen to know all the legal opinions, especially if they had to subscribe to a customs support system in order to avoid a hard border in Ireland, which could not be removed only by mutual agreement with the European Union at the decisive meeting.
A cabinet source said the prime minister said at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that only a summary of the legal opinion – which underpinned the final protection proposal – would be made available to its members.
The source said Michael Gove had challenged him and demanded that full legal advice be provided to ministers, raising Downing Street's concern about how to respond.
The departmental code makes it clear that, when a legal opinion is attached to Cabinet documents, "the conclusions can be summarized as necessary, but, where appropriate, the full text of the notice should be attached".
Attorney General Geoffrey Cox told colleagues at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that if the UK insisted on attempting to obtain a unilateral exit from the customs security system, the risk of a Brexit without agreement would increase, because the EU did not want to accept that.
His opinion was considered crucial if the government justified agreeing that administrative support could not be jointly abolished by the United Kingdom and the European Union, as several ministers – including Javid; Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt; and Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab – argued that the UK could not stop it.
At the same time, Labor, the Liberal Democrats and May's North-Irish allies in Parliament, the Democratic Unionist Party, went further and demanded that the normal confidential advice on the media be made public.
Sir Keir Starmer, Brexit shadow secretary, said the notice should be communicated to MPs so that they could review the document. He added that any security agreement must be robust, ie "it is essential that MPs have the opportunity to carefully consider the attorney general's legal advice before voting on the issue." final agreement ".
The objective of Labor would be for the councils to be available to MPs, as happened with the Brexit Impact Assessments. They were made available after the Labor Party had imposed their release by a humble motion of address.
This, or an amendment to a bill, remains an option for extracting the legal opinion, but it was understood that the unions wanted to wait for the government's response first. Tuesday, the party has a debate on the day of the opposition allowing him to make a humble speech.
Tom Brake, spokesman for the Brexit Lib Dems group, said: "Refusing to publish a legal opinion on Brexit is flouting the discredited mantra" to regain control, "while Jeffrey Donaldson, duPU, said:" He It is in the public interest to fully understand what is going on here. "
Downing Street stated that there was a longstanding convention that the government was not discussing legal advice, "or their existence".
Friday, in May, will attend commemorations of the First World War in Belgium and France and participate in a working lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Ministers who visited the Cabinet were also allowed to see a copy of the withdrawal agreement, which is the draft treaty that sets out the conditions for the UK's exit from the EU.
However, Downing Street said that the document contained only 95% of the agreements already concluded with the EU and that it contained no very important text regarding the point of support of the Irish border.
A backstop was deemed necessary to avoid a return to a hard border in Ireland if the UK and the EU were not able to conclude a long-term free trade agreement after the end of the Brexit transition period in 2020.
Both the UK and the EU have indicated that they would agree that the UK as a whole remains temporarily in the Customs Union as a support element – leaving only the right of way. an unresolved issue: the mechanism to put an end to support support. Conservatives of Brexiter fear that, without clear exit, it can be used permanently for the United Kingdom in a customs union.
Earlier, May had spoken to Donald Tusk, chairman of the EU council, but neither side wanted to comment on the talks. Tusk had tweeted that he was looking "to take stock of the progress made [the Brexit] speak and discuss the way forward. "
EU sources in Brussels were deeply skeptical about the idea that negotiations were on the threshold of a breakthrough. A senior official said it would be a mistake to "underestimate the incompatibility of views" of the two negotiating teams on how a British customs union could be an alternative in the deal. withdrawal.
The EU wants reasonable commitments from the UK on regulation and would like assurances on the access of the European fleet to the British seas before accepting such a customs arrangement.
But the main decision taken in London was whether it could accept what EU officials privately declared would essentially be an open customs union with the bloc, with only a "review without withdrawal" clause in the final treaty.
