Stephen Laws: How attempts to postpone Brexit could create a constitutional crisis - and drag the Queen into it | Conservative Home

Stephen Laws: How attempts to postpone Brexit could create a constitutional crisis - and drag the Queen into it | Conservative Home

Sir Stephen Laws QC, Senior Research Fellow at Policy Exchange and former First Parliamentary Counsel, writes:

"So suppose the Speaker did allow an attempt to bypass the financial Standing Orders and allowed a Bill to pass that contravened them, and so to proceed to the Lords and be passed there. What would happen when the Bill then fell to be submitted for Royal Assent?

"The question would inevitably arise whether the Government could reassert its wrongly denied constitutional veto on such a Bill by advising the Monarch not to grant Royal Assent to the Bill? Would it even, perhaps, think that it actually had a duty to ensure that a Bill that had been passed in contravention of fundamental constitutional principles did not reach the statute book?

"It is a sacred duty of all UK politicians not involve the Monarch in politics, but might a Government in that situation think that this was precisely the last resort for which the Royal Assent process is retained? How should the Monarch react to such advice? The answer is not straightforward and the prospect of it needing to be considered in a real-life political crisis is a constitutional scenario of nightmares."