• An interesting take from the Financial Times.
    Now that Cameron has popped smoke, they might never actually pull the pin on Article 50. No matter how much they might want us to, the remainder of the EU cannot force us to invoke it, as the notification has to come from the government of the specific country (as I understand it, please prove me wrong if I'm mistaken).
    All the people in the running to be the new tory leader are frantically weighing up the odds. Is it worse, politically, to be the person who negotiated Britain out of the EU, or to be the person responsible for the breakup of the UK and the facilitator of an independent Scotland?
    The thought of going down in history as the Prime Minister who lost Scotland might mean that the article 50 question just sort of hangs in limbo, and the nightmare scenario is that we remain in an EU which hates us for fucking them about, but can't actually get rid of us before someone from our government volunteers to eat the massive shit sandwich which this could well turn into.

  • Vs one from the bbc:

    The European Council - representing the 27 other member states - could trigger the negotiating process as soon as the prime minister discusses Brexit with other EU leaders.
    Paragraph two of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty says that "a Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention".
    Once this happens, the leaving state has up to two years to negotiate a withdrawal agreement.
    The treaty does not say how this process of notification should happen.
    It has always been assumed that this would come in the form of a letter from the prime minister to Donald Tusk, the European Council president, and the timing would be in the hands of the British government.
    And a European Council spokesman reiterated on Saturday that triggering Article 50 was a formal act which must be "done by the British government to the European Council".
    "It has to be done in an unequivocal manner with the explicit intent to trigger Article 50," a spokesman said.
    But Professor Wyatt, who has represented clients in hundreds of cases before the European courts, said that EU lawyers might consider any discussion about Brexit between Mr Cameron and Mr Tusk and other EU leaders as effectively notifying the European Council of the UK's intention to leave.

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