As I am sure most Stemians are aware, the UK finds itself with a hung parliament after our General Election and this is a difficult predicament considering we need to carry out our Brexit negotiations. Unfortunately the political landscape is now dominated by uncertainty and the 'minority government' are going to be seriously side tracked by just trying to watch their own backs.
To pull us out of the quagmire we find ourselves in politically, my idea (and am sure many others also have been thinking about this approach) is to set up a cross party commission to be responsible for Brexit.
We get that voted on in our hung parliament. My suggestion is to make the commission long lived - e.g. it’s a 5 year appointment and the commission probably needs to exist for 10. There is no reason why you couldn’t include members who are not politicians. For example, we should be considering areas like agriculture, fishing, science and technology, climate change and nuclear power in great detail. So experts in these fields should triage the various operational issues that fields might have have with Brexit. I don't know how you would make that work - perhaps expert involvement will have to be a 'jury service' type compulsory involvement for those that are wanted to contribute. Complex problems will take complex solutions, but it seems that incorporating subject matter experts in that committee is one of the hardest things to crack in terms of setting all this up quickly to deal with Brexit.
Parliament should have to vote on actions the committee come up with - but that is not a decision at the end of the process. That is them voting to make law (or amend / reject) each of the various areas which require new legislation to be made that the committee deal with along the way.
For me this is a logical way forward, and ring fences some great people to deal with Brexit, without having it cripple the day to day functioning of our political system. Clearly at times there will be bottlenecks where parliament just have too many items to legislate upon, but at least the commission can be the goto place for all things Brexit, and people might relax a bit more if they felt it was a cross-party, proportionately-represented group who are going to represent everyone in the country rather than just those that share the political affiliations of the current government.
I firmly believe this would work as a way to deal with Brexit, which is best handled by our most intelligent and diplomatic negotiators, as a separate things, and then having parliament just rubber stamp what they want to put forward. The majority of issues would be concluded without much fuss, and for sure there will be contentious issues that will seize up the political wheels here and there, but at least things would be moving forward in most areas.
I am sure some of you might strongly agree or disagree with what I'm suggesting - I'm happy to have a vigorous debate about this as long as we keep it civil :-)
