President Poonami

This video is extraordinary to watch again now. In 2019, @JMPSimor explained to @mrjamesob the constitutional paradox at the heart of Brexit: the referendum was advisory, so the courts would not quash the result, even though the legal challenge argued it had been tainted by proven unlawful campaigning. She told @LBC that, had the referendum been legally binding, the result could have been set aside. So Britain was left with this absurd position: The referendum was not legally binding enough to be invalidated but it was treated politically as binding enough to take us out of the European Union. And that was not the only unresolved constitutional issue. My own 2018 judicial review, Webster v Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, challenged the missing Article 50(1) decision, the lawful decision to withdraw that had to precede notification. Parliament expressly authorised notification under Article 50(2), but never expressly enacted that antecedent decision. The courts refused permission in both cases. Now we are being told by the Prime Minister @andyburnham that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This changes the context again. It does not automatically undo Brexit. But it makes one thing impossible to avoid: Britain needs a statutory public inquiry into the referendum, the intelligence, and the Article 50 decision-making process. We need documents. Witnesses under oath. The Cabinet record. The intelligence assessments. The legal trail. Because ten years on, the question is no longer simply whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is whether the British public and Parliament were ever told the full truth about how it happened.