Think Trump will help you after Brexit? Bad choice, Hollande tells Britain

THERESA May was handed another blow to her plan to trigger Article 50 tonight after peers inflicted a second defeat on the Government’s Brexit bill.

Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, a supporter of the Open Britain campaign against a hard Brexit, said: “The Lords have rightly stood up for parliamentary sovereignty and refused to write the Government a blank cheque for hard Brexit”.

Government defeated in the Lords by 366 to 268 on whether there should be a “meaningful vote” on Theresa May’s final Brexit deal.

Virtuous and tempting as amendments that seek a unilateral declaration on these matters may seem, they misunderstand some of the complexities that are best dealt with through a reciprocal agreement, and they fail to acknowledge our responsibility to ensure United Kingdom citizens enjoy the same protections as those we will extend to those from the EU.

Cabinet minister David Lidington has said any sign Parliament wanted to limit Mrs May’s room for manoeuvre or was prepared to rethink Brexit if the talks went badly would make “an ambitious, mutually beneficial deal much more difficult”.

MPs are now being urged to uphold the amendment when the Bill returns to the Commons next week.

The peers also called for an enhanced scrutiny process for secondary legislation laid under the Great Repeal Bill to ensure that Parliament was not sidelined by ministers.

Prime Minister Theresa May has said she wants the issue to be dealt with as a priority in upcoming Brexit negotiations but is not prepared to offer a guarantee until other European Union states agree to a reciprocal deal for Britons living overseas.

It will also transpose European Union regulations into domestic law, crucially allowing them to be altered or removed after Brexit.

Lord Lang, a Tory former Cabinet minister, said the Bill would be “an extremely complicated piece of legislation” and the Government might need to be given “wide-ranging powers” over the process of turning European Union legislation into domestic law.

“The sole objective is to ensure the outcome – agreed terms or no agreed terms – is subject to the unfettered discretion of parliament”, he said.

‘There is a long, unpredictable, road ahead that Parliament will have some control over; they need to know just how many votes there are in adopting a pro-EU position.

May’s defeat means that she’ll either have to accept the changes – which she’s argued would weaken her in negotiations – or try to delete the amendments.

Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, a former chairman of the Financial Services Authority, said: “Any idea that the vote of last June reflects the will of the people in some unanimous, all the people together, Una Voce, unanimous, absolute and forever unchanging fashion is. not democratic, but the Brezhnev Doctrine”.