BREXIT Secretary David Davis could be held in contempt of Parliament after the UK Government refused to tell MPs the full impact that leaving the EU will have on the country.
Though the Government finally caved in and handed over reports analysing how Brexit would affect 58 different sectors to a Commons committee, the documents were highly edited, redacted almost to the point of being meaningless.
House of Commons Speaker John Bercow has ordered Davis to appear in front of the Brexit select committee within days to justify keeping Parliament in the dark.
Bercow was responding to furious MPs who argued that the Government was ignoring a vote in Parliament that committed them to hand over the reports in full.
“Not some of the reports, not redacted copies, the full reports,” Labour’s Keir Stalmer said.
The SNP’s Pete Wishart asked the Speaker to consider “bringing contempt motions” against the Government.
“I am sure you are aware of the significance of this, and I know you will deal with this sensitively. This is contempt, and the Government must be held accountable for their failure to comply,” he argued.
Bercow said: “I think when it is suggested that that meeting [between Davis and the committee] should be soon, it means soon, not weeks hence.
“It means very soon indeed. No other diarised engagement is more important than respecting the House, and in this case the committee of the House, which has ownership of this matter and to which the papers were to be provided.”
He added that he would “do his duty” by MPs and would consider requests for contempt.
If that does happen it’ll be the first time since the Second World War.
Davis did not attend Parliament himself to answer the urgent question on the reports tabled by Labour, instead sending his junior minister Robin Walker.
Walker said there had never been 58 separate reports and that it was wrong to say information has been redacted, rather it just hadn’t been included. “We have not edited or redacted reports,” Walker said. “At the time the motion was passed, and subsequently, we were clear that the documents did not exist in the form requested. We have collated information in a way that does not include some sensitive material.”
What little information was published was also passed on to the Scottish Government. Ministers in Edinburgh were also not very happy.
In a letter to Davis, Scottish Brexit Secretary Michael Russell said he had “concerns about both the manner in which these reports have come to us, and their content”.
“The First Minister and I have both been clear that the UK Government’s analysis of the impact of Brexit on sectors or the economy as a whole should be made public,” Russell added.
“It is essential that people across the UK fully understand the consequences of decisions being taken about their future.
“It is disappointing that the UK Government has persisted in keeping this information from being publicly available and have shared with us only on the basis that we don’t release it into the public domain. I urge you to reconsider this approach, be up front with people and publish these reports immediately.”
During the debate in the Commons former Cabinet minister Ken Clarke accused the Government of reducing parliamentary sovereignty to a “ridiculous level”.
He said: “If the Government wished to resist the publication of the papers it had it should have voted against the motion, and if it wished to qualify or to edit the papers that it had it should have sought to amend the motion.
“We cannot allow post-Brexit to start reducing parliamentary sovereignty to a slightly ridiculous level. Would the minister at least consider the possibility of sharing at least with the chairman of the Brexit select committee the papers in the original form they were in when we had our vote before this editing process started?”
The SNP’s Europe spokesman Peter Grant said there was something ironic in how the Government was treating the Commons: “On a day in June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom were asked one question on one day. As a result of the answer they gave to that one question, there is no going back on Brexit.
“On November 1, Parliament was asked one question, but for the intervening 27 days the Government have done everything possible to deny and defy the instruction – it was not a request – that they were given by this Parliament, to which, we are told, sovereignty is being restored by the Brexit process.”
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