26 March 2019

The Guardian: Calls grow for public inquiry into Brexit

Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, said an inquiry was needed into “the biggest humiliation since Suez, certainly since the IMF crisis [in 1976]”. The cross-party peer said he believed the civil service “is both expecting and preparing for this”. [...]

Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser and former head civil servant in the Foreign Office, cited the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. “Chilcot took a long time, but it was cathartic,” he said. “The report was widely seen to have done the job and I think you can say the British system is better for it. I think the handling of Brexit has been such a failure of the process of government, with such wide ramifications, that there needs to be a searching public inquiry.[...]

Many figures are already pointing to May’s early decision to set out strict red lines that seriously limited Britain’s ability to negotiate. John Kerr, Britain’s former EU ambassador who drafted the article 50 process of leaving the bloc, said: “Those red lines laid down in 2016 emerged with no consultation with the country, the devolved assemblies, parliament or with the cabinet. Then there was the decision to trigger article, 50 still with no agreement in cabinet of where we wanted to end up.”

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