Legal Advice: Prorogation

Drew Hendry Excerpts
Wednesday 25th September 2019

(5 years, 1 month ago)

Commons Chamber
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Geoffrey Cox Portrait The Attorney General
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I completely agree. This House’s actions are bringing it into discredit. It is abandoning almost all reasonable precedent. The time has come for a general election, and to resist it is immoral, unparliamentary and undemocratic, but that is the decision that the Opposition have taken. Let us wait and see what the electorate make of it, but I hope they will understand that the Government are trying to fulfil the mandate of those 17.4 million people. We will never cease until we succeed.

Drew Hendry Portrait Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
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It is reassuring to see that we are indeed carrying on where we left off. As a senior lawyer, does the Attorney General agree that any attempt to describe the considered, unanimous and unambiguous decision of the Supreme Court as a constitutional coup is nothing more than constitutional bull?

Geoffrey Cox Portrait The Attorney General
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I am not sure I could have put that language in a parliamentary way. The Supreme Court’s decision was legitimate, perfectly reasonable and proper. We should be proud of our judiciary and proud of its independence in all jurisdictions—I apply that to the inner house, the outer house, the divisional court. Lawyers will disagree on some of those complex and fundamental principles, and that is what has happened here.