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Brexit: What happened on Tuesday? – BBC News

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Eleven Supreme Court justices just became the most important people in Britain’s Brexit endgame.

On Tuesday, September 17, 2019, the UK Supreme Court opened a three-day hearing to decide whether Boris Johnson broke the law when he advised Queen Elizabeth II to shut down Parliament for five weeks in the run-up to the October 31 Brexit deadline. It’s a case with no modern precedent, pulling together two lower courts that reached opposite conclusions on the same question. Whatever the eleven justices decide will determine whether MPs get their five weeks back — or whether prorogation stands.

• Lady Hale convened an exceptional 11-justice panel — a bench size used only once before, in the 2016 Article 50 case — to hear the challenge.
• The hearing merges two conflicting rulings: England’s High Court dismissed Gina Miller’s challenge as non-justiciable, while Scotland’s Inner House of the Court of Session ruled on September 11 that the prorogation was unlawful.
• Lord Pannick QC opened arguments for Miller, telling the court the five-week suspension was an unlawful abuse of the royal prerogative designed to stop MPs scrutinizing the government during a critical constitutional stretch.

A Question of Law, Not Politics

Lady Hale, president of the Supreme Court, set the tone before a word of legal argument was heard. She reminded everyone watching — inside the courtroom and among the demonstrators gathered outside — that the justices were not there to rule on Brexit itself. Her framing was deliberate: this was about the limits of executive power, not the merits of leaving the EU.

“A serious and difficult question of law.”

That line from Lady Hale did a lot of work on day one. It drew a hard line between the constitutional question — can a prime minister’s prorogation advice be reviewed by judges at all — and the politically charged fight over Brexit timing that has consumed Westminster for months. Readers following the broader fallout can track the wider story in our World News coverage.

Two Courts, Two Verdicts

The reason this case landed in front of an 11-justice panel is that the lower courts couldn’t agree. The High Court of Justice in England and Wales sided with the government, ruling that Johnson’s prorogation advice was a political act beyond the reach of judicial review, and dismissed businesswoman Gina Miller’s challenge outright. Six days before Tuesday’s hearing, Scotland’s Inner House of the Court of Session went the other way, ruling on September 11 that the prorogation was unlawful because its real purpose was to stymie parliamentary scrutiny of the government’s Brexit plans.

That split is exactly why the Supreme Court took the unusual step of hearing both cases together, rather than letting each jurisdiction’s ruling stand on its own. A decision either way will settle the law across the whole of the UK — not just Scotland or just England and Wales.

The Arguments Inside Court One

Lord Pannick QC, representing Miller, argued that a suspension of this length — five weeks, running straight through the final stretch before the October 31 deadline — was calculated to keep MPs from doing their job at the worst possible moment. Government lawyers pushed back, insisting the prorogation was a routine act of political discretion, needed to clear the decks for a new legislative agenda, and not something for judges to second-guess.

Justices spent much of Tuesday probing both sides on two practical points: whether the executive’s advice to the Queen is reviewable by courts at all, and, if the prorogation is found unlawful, what remedy the court could actually order. Those questions matter as much as the politics — for continuing developments on the legal and political fight, our News & Politics section has the latest.

With three days of hearings scheduled and a ruling expected soon after, Westminster is bracing for whichever way the eleven justices land — because if they side with Miller and the Scottish court, MPs could be back in the Commons before the Brexit deadline even gets close.