MPs have voted in favour of a Brexit withdrawal bill for the first time – but killed off Boris Johnson’s proposal to ram it through Parliament, thereby derailing his plan to leave by Halloween.
The Commons voted by 329 votes to 299 – a majority of 30 – to approve the prime minister’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) in principle, six months after killing off Theresa May’s equivalent version.
However, the PM then lost a vote on his proposed timetable, which stipulated the bill would have to clear all its Commons stages by the end of Thursday in order to fulful his "do or die" pledge to exit the EU at the end of the month, by a margin of 322 to 308.
Mr Johnson then announced the legislation would be "paused", meaning that the EU will now have to grant an extension to Brexit in order to avoid the UK crashing out with no deal in nine days' time.
Good morning and welcome to The Independent's live coverage of events at Westminster.
PM wants to push Brexit bill through Commons in three days
Boris Johnson is urging MPs to back his Brexit deal as he launches a final bid to force through legislation in time for the UK to leave the EU with an agreement on 31 October.
However the government faces a fierce parliamentary struggle after announcing plans to fast-track it through the Commons in three days, potentially paving the way for the Lords to consider it over the weekend.
They will need MPs to approve a second reading and a “programme motion” setting out the timetable for its passage through the Commons, setting up a crunch vote on Tuesday evening.
There’s a suggestion that Labour could abstain on the bill’s second reading today. If they do, it’s the programme motion vote – the one approving Rees-Mogg’s timetable – that becomes the immediate threat to Johnson’s desperate political need to get out of the EU by Halloween.
Many MPs are deeply unhappy that there is so little time for detailed scrutiny of a such an important bill, which runs to 110 pages with another 124 pages of explanatory notes.
All the details here.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit deadline in peril as MPs revolt against breakneck timetable to ratify
Plan for Commons to complete scrutiny of 110 page document in just three days denounced as ‘abomination’Hague wants PM to ‘reunite’ Tory family by restoring whip to rebels
Former Tory leader William Hague says politicians expelled from the Conservatives must be returned to the party if they vote in support of Boris Johnson’s current Brexit deal.
Johnson removed the whip from 21 of his party’s MPs after they helped defeat the Government on a bill to seize control of the Commons order paper on 3 September.
Lord Hague said: “The decision to remove the whip from them was a great error, and some of them have now been lost to the Liberals and elsewhere, but those who vote for the deal should be readmitted to their party.
“By agreeing to that, Boris Johnson can achieve not only a sensible Brexit deal but also the reuniting of the Conservative family.
“Such a pulling together of Tories will be in the nick of time,” he wrote in a column for The Telegraph, adding that Johnson would next have to govern in the absence of a majority or seek victory in a general election.
Rory Stewart says rebels negotiated with government ‘through the night’
Former Tory Rory Stewart said he and others of the 21 sacked no-deal rebels had been negotiating “through the night” to give parliament more control over the next phase of the Brexit negotiations, including being able to vote for an extension to the trade talks.
He said that “central role” in the trade negotiations would be more important than guaranteeing that the UK remains in a customs union with the EU, which Labour is looking to secure.
The Independent London mayoral candidate said he and other rebels had been negotiating for such a role with Downing Street “yesterday and through the night to try”.
“Parliament should be involved in the mandate, the progress of those and the outcome and determining the extension,” Stewart told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Stewart said he agreed with the European (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill but suggested it needed more than the three days of debate the Government has allocated.
“If we are going to deliver Brexit, we need to deliver it in a way that Brexiteers and Remainers believe was taken through parliament fairly,” he said.
“That doesn't mean extending until the end of the year but it does mean we need a few days to do it properly. If we don't do it properly, we are going to undermine the thing from the beginning.”
Yet Stewart also confirmed he would vote for the withdrawal agreement bill.
Angela Rayner says parliament must ‘take back control’
Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said parliament must be given an opportunity to properly scrutinise the government’s Brexit Bill.
“Parliament has to be at the centre of everything that happens because that’s what we were doing, weren’t we? Taking back control,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“And therefore the control is not for Boris Johnson to have his own little games, it’s about parliament being able to scrutinise and have a say on what happens.”
The shadow cabinet minister said the public should have another say on leaving the EU now a new deal had been struck.
“I also think the British people are being locked out of this. Democracy doesn’t stop and end at one particular point – it continues,” she said.
“I think people are much more aware of the concerns and what could potentially happen to them and their lives. This is jobs, this is people’s livelihoods.”
No 10 warns amendments could wreck the Brexit bill
Labour’s planned amendment to make Johnson negotiate a customs union – plus likely amendments on a confirmatory referendum and a requirement on the PM to ask the EU for an extension to the transition period if we don’t have a trade deal by December 2020 – all threaten to derail the withdrawal agreement bill.
Johnson certainly doesn’t want a Final Say public vote, and there have been suggestions from No 10 that the PM would rather scrap the legislation than accept a customs union with the EU.
The Telegraph reports this morning that Johnson is “expected to abandon Brexit legislation in Parliament rather than accept a customs union or second referendum”.
The Times says Downing Street figures “suggested he would rather drop the legislation than deliver a soft Brexit”.
One Conservative adviser told The Guardian that the PM would not be able to live with a customs union attached to the bill, so it was “not going to happen” – and suggested the success of that Labour amendment would probably lead to another push for an early election.
Peter Kyle, who is set to table a second referendum bill with fellow Labour MP Phil Wilson, told The Independent: “By the time this withdrawal bill is through the House of Commons, we are either going to have a general election or a referendum. Those are the only two outcomes from the next two weeks.”
Nicola Sturgeon attacks ‘so-called’ protection for workers’ rights
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon, sharing a section withdrawal agreement bill, tweeted about the “so-called protection for workers’ rights”.
Raphael Hogarth, from the Institute for Government, has also pointed out the “amusingly weak” provisions on workers’ rights in the bill.
MPs attack ‘abomination’ of three-day timetable for bill
Let’s have a look at what parliamentarians have said about the three-day timetable said out by Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg to get the bill through the Commons.
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “Trying to ram through legislation of this complexity, significance and long-lasting consequences in just three days is an abomination of scrutiny and democracy.”
Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said it was “outrageous” that MPs would not have a chance to properly scrutinise the bill.
“It is outrageous to deny parliament the chance to scrutinise this incredibly important legislation properly – ministers are trying to bounce MPs into signing off a Bill that could cause huge damage to our country.”
The DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson said that the truncated period for scrutiny “does not do justice to what the constituents I represent need”.
The Lib Dem MP Sam Gyimah said: “I actually think there are more horrors lurking in this deal.”
The Tory veteran Ken Clarke said the government needed to stop giving this “sacred quality” to the date of 31 October and allow the House time to scrutinise it properly.
Approving Brexit deal like buying a house, says housing secretary
Using the analogy of buying a house, housing secretary Robert Jenrick said he saw no reason why MPs could not “move quite quickly” to approve Brexit.
“If I had been thinking about buying that house for three years, if I’d been debating it with my wife and family for 500 hours, I think I might be able to move quite quickly when the opportunity arose,” the minister told the BBC.
“I suspect there will be MPs who would not have voted for this even if they had had until Christmas to debate this. The Labour Party front bench, for example, said they were against this Bill long before it was even published.
Asked why there was a lack of guarantees on workers’ rights in the bill, Jenrick said it would be for MPs to decide in the future.
Jenrick added: “We are saying that parliament will decide, and that’s the point of taking back control, isn’t it? Trusting parliament to make important decisions on workers’ rights or the environment."
Jenrick said now was not the time to discuss the future trading relationship with the EU and matters such as the customs union.
“This is a piece of legislation which simply puts into effect in UK law what the Prime Minister has managed to negotiate,” he said. “The critical thing is the future relationship will be subject to a negotiating mandate that will be debated and voted on in the House of Commons.”
Donald Tusk say extension will depend on events in Commons
European Council president Donald Tusk has said whether the EU will grant a further Brexit extension will depend on how MPs vote in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening.
“I am consulting the leaders on how to react and will decide in the coming days. It is obvious that the result of these consultations will very much depend on what the British parliament decides or doesn’t decide. We should be ready for every scenario,” Tusk told MEPs.
Our Europe correspondent Jon Stone has more.
Decision to grant Brexit extension depends on which way MPs vote today, EU says
Donald Tusk indicates that extension would be granted to prevent a no-dealDoes Johnson have the numbers to get ‘programme motion’ through?
There’s a suggestion by the BBC’s political editor the government might not have enough support to stick to its ambitious timetable. That vote on the programme motion is expected early evening.
Guy Verhofstadt doesn’t want ‘another Windrush scandal’
Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, has been tweeting about the need to ensure EU citizens’ rights in the UK before the consent to the Brexit deal.
“We don’t want our EU citizens to become victims in another ‘Windrush’ scandal.”
Lucas: MPs had more time to debate circuses
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas says that MPs had “more time to debate the Wild Animals in Circuses Act ... than they will to decide the future of 65 million people”.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chairwoman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, says the government should be “sensible” and agree to more time.
Juncker: Brexit has been ‘waste of time and energy’
The outgoing European Commission president Jean Claude-Juncker has addressed the European parliament, and has shared his regrets about Brexit.
“In truth it has pained me to spend so much of this mandate dealing with Brexit, when I have thought of nothing less than how this union could do better for its citizens,” he said. “A waste of time and a waste of energy.”
“The Commission has worked tirelessly to negotiate and renegotiate an agreement with the United Kingdom, to respect the UK’s decision to the leave the European Union – we now have a new agreement, which again creates legal certainty for an orderly withdrawal.”
Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party’s leader, has also been speaking in parliament. He claims the deal would reduce the UK “to the status of a colony of the European Union”.
But Farage and Juncker managed to find something to laugh about.
Tusk says EU should treat extension request ‘in all seriousness’
Before finishing his speech in the European parliament, the European Council president Donald Tusk said “we should treat the British request for extension in all seriousness”.
He told the parliament earlier: “One thing must be clear, as I said to prime minister Johnson on Saturday – a no-deal Brexit will never be our decision.”
“I am consulting the leaders on how to react and will decide in the coming days. It is obvious that the result of these consultations will very much depend on what the British parliament decides or doesn’t decide. We should be ready for every scenario.”
Government should stop blaming Bercow
Our editorial today defends Speaker John Bercow’s decision to block the government’s attempt to re-stage a “meaningful”, yes-no vote on his Brexit deal – and get on with the job at hand.
Instead of bombarding the Commons with constant requests for an approval of the whole project, the government should begin attempting to persuade the Commons it has legislation worth voting for.
Crucially, MPs now have the chance to consider putting the deal to the people, via a Final Say referendum.
Read more here:
Editorial: John Bercow has spoken, now the government must get on with the job at hand
In particular, MPs have the opportunity to consider putting the issue – the Johnson deal in essence – to the people via a Final Say referendumCabinet meets for around 40 minutes
Ministers have just left Downing Street after cabinet met at No 10 for around 40 minutes.
Home secretary Priti Patel, Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay, health secretary Matthew Hancock and culture secretary Nicky Morgan all refused to answer questions as they left Downing St.
Business secretary Andrea Leadsom, education Secretary Gavin Williamson, international development secretary Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng also left moments later and did not respond to questions about the Withdrawal Agreement Bill.
Ed Vaizey threatens to vote against government timetable
Tory MP Ed Vaizey warns that the Commons’ leader’s rhetoric is poisoning the debate about the bill – and might even be enough to change his mind and vote the other way of the programme motion.
Nick Boles tables amendment requiring PM to extend transition period
The former Tory Nick Boles, now an Independent MP, tweeted that he had tabled an amendment “to require the government by default to seek an extension of the transition to Dec 2022 unless MPs pass a resolution to the contrary”. He makes clear it is aimed at stopping any chance of a no-deal exit at the end of next year.
Labour MPs will table amendment on Final Say public vote
Labour MP Phil Wilson has said he and fellow Labour backbencher Peter Kyle will be table an amendment today asking for a confirmatory referendum.
Wilson said he would back Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement if he gives the public a Final Say vote on the deal.
“What we’re saying is we’ll help facilitate the passage of this bill through parliament, we’ll vote for it, get it in the statute book, as long as it goes back to the people for a confirmatory ballot so they can compare Brexit, what it is today, with what they were promised three and a half years ago.”
