My Lords, I do not know what people will feel like in two years’ time. We know that the demographics will have changed and that young people will be coming on to the electoral register and, as we all know, young people have taken a very different view about our leaving the EU to that taken by older people who will no longer be able to vote.
I have two specific questions to ask the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that the Supreme Court’s judgment was that Article 50 was irrevocable—a view just reiterated by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I thought that the Supreme Court judgment was rather more nuanced than that: that because the parties to the action were prepared to use that as the basis for forming their judgment, they had not tested the arguments on the irrevocability or otherwise of Article 50. So there was a clear statement that they had not tested that argument.
On Second Reading, I asked the noble Lord what the Government’s views were on that. In a very skilled response at the end of the debate, he said that it was the firm policy of the Government not to turn back having triggered Article 50. The noble Lord knows that that was not the question I asked. We are not asking about the firm policy. What we need to know is the Government’s legal view on the revocability or otherwise of Article 50. That is a crucial question because if the issue does come back to Parliament, we will be in a very different position if it is revocable. I ask the question, and hope that this time I might have the answer.
My second question is about the position whereby the Government have sought to bypass Parliament, as indeed they did, by saying that the prerogative powers were sufficient to trigger Article 50. It did indeed take private individuals, represented by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to go to court to prevent the Government going beyond their powers and bypassing this Parliament. The Government had assumed they had powers by using the prerogative, and the Supreme Court was able to disabuse them of that.