Dawn Butler
Main Page: Dawn Butler (Labour - Brent East)
Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek your guidance on the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday to the House, in which she stated that
“leaving the election to 2020 would mean that we would be coming to the most sensitive and critical part of the negotiations in the run-up to a general election. That would be in nobody’s interests.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2017; Vol. 624, c. 685.]
If we had stuck to the fixed term for this Parliament, the general election would have been in 2020. The negotiations, therefore, would not have been in the run-up to the election. They would have finished. Does the Prime Minister need to explain to the House that her plans for negotiating our exit from the European Union will go beyond those two years, as promised to the House?
Mr Speaker
I think there is a degree of linguistic licence available to, and sometimes deployed by, Members in all parts of the House, including those who sit on the Treasury Bench and on the Opposition Front Bench. If the Prime Minister felt the need to clarify her remarks she could do so, but I have no sense that she feels any such need. I hope the hon. Lady will understand if I say that I do not think this is a matter into which it would be proper for me to intrude. It is substantially a matter of interpretation and debate. The hon. Lady, with some skill, has used her opportunity to flag her concern and it is on the record. I know how persistent a terrier she is, so if she is dissatisfied doubtless she will pursue the matter.