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Now a crossbench peer, Kerr said parliament, including himself, would “not have the guts” to vote down any government bill triggering article 50, the start point for the two-year EU negotiations.
At most, he said, parliament would add conditions such as requiring ministers to set out their negotiating objectives in a green paper and report back regularly on the progress of the talks.
He said that if the UK fell out of the EU without an agreement – the so-called cliff edge – “the result would be a disaster, a bonanza time for lawyers, emergency session of parliament, a huge amount of the British statute book collapses if the 1972 European Communities Act agreement that took us in and our adherence to the EU treaties is abrogated. It means massive uncertainty for economic operators.”
In a frank speech at the London School of Economics, he said there was a growing chance that the UK and EU heads of state would not reach an agreement. Kerr claimed “the fog in the channel is getting thicker all the time”, adding even if an agreement was reached by spring 2019 there was a chance “a demob happy European parliament” in its final months before elections in 2019 would refuse to ratify the deal. He put the chances of a deal within two years as now lower than 50%.
Kerr challenged those who claimed an interim deal would be easier to negotiate, saying that would still require an agreement on the long-term destination. [...]
Kerr said: “In my view as an ex-negotiator, interim agreements are only feasible when you have a permanent agreement. The interim agreement covers a gap before the permanent agreement comes into force and while the ratification process takes place.
“No one concedes something in an interim agreement that they would not be prepared to concede for a permanent agreement ... In a transition or a bridge, you have to know where you are going, and have a second pillar on the other side of the river, and that is just as hard to negotiate.”
Kerr said the supreme court case about parliament’s right to trigger article 50 was, in practical terms, a sideshow. “The number of us in parliament who will have the guts to vote against triggering article 50 is very very small. There is Ken Clarke and there is probably someone else.,” he said. [...]
Kerr said an association agreement with the EU, similar to the one negotiated with Ukraine, was the best option. He said a phased agreement was possible with different timetables for different events, but warned a deal in which the UK tried to stay inside the customs union for specific sectors was likely to be ruled illegal by the World Trade Organisation. New trade deals would take as long as seven years to negotiate once the UK had left the EU, he said. [...]