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15 November 2018
Issue: 7817 / Categories: Features , Brexit
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All Out War (Pt 3): why has Brexit policy failed?

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​Can the Duke of Wellington stop Brexit?

  • With policymakers stymied by Brexit, a legal mechanism—the Victorian criminal offence of ‘open and advised speaking’ contained in s 3 of the Treason Felony Act 1848—could provide a way out.

Boris Johnson complained in September that ‘there has been a collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people,’ (Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2018). Lawyer and writer David Allen Green has also commented on this failure: ‘The Article 50 process means that the UK leaves the EU by automatic operation of law on 29 March 2019, unless something exceptional and currently unforeseeable happens. This is the fundamental legal truth which informs almost all the current politics about Brexit… [The] reason why legal (and legalistic) issues have become so important—almost determinative—in Brexit is because of the complete failure of UK policy’ (Jack of Kent blog, 11 September 2018). Professor Mark Elliott, an academic who

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