Boris Johnson has a new plan for Brexit
LONDON:TWO days before the Conservative Party’s annual conference, leading Brexiteer Boris Johnson kept up pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May, rubbishing her “Chequers plan” and unveiling what he claimed to be a “better plan for Brexit”.
May is due to face some uneasy moments during the four-day conference in Birmingham from Sunday, when Johnson is scheduled to rally supporters at one event. His resignation from the cabinet and subsequent fulminations are seen as part of a leadership challenge to May.
Johnson’s latest exertion published in The Daily Telegraph on Friday exhorts the UK to “chuck Chequers”, calling May’s plan that seeks continued links with the European Union (EU) after Brexit as “a moral and intellectual humiliation”.
Instead, Johnson put forth his vision of Brexit called “super-canada”, a better version than the free trade agreement that Canada forged with the EU in 2016 after years of negotiations. His version, he said, will honour the mandate of the 2016 referendum to leave the EU.
May and her allies insist the Chequers plan is the only one on the table, which will not only uphold the referendum mandate but ensure the continued economic prosperity of the UK. However, many Conservative MPS opposed to her plan are likely to vote against it when it is expected to be put before Parliament before March 29, 2019, the day of the UK’S exit from the EU.
The entrenched positions on Brexit of groups within the Conservative Party have drawn sharp criticism. The latest round, according to the opposition Labour, showed the ruling party had “run out of ideas” and was allegedly consumed by “internal warfare”.
The Liberal Democrats labelled Johnson’s article a “halfbaked, sloppy rant”, while manufacturers’ organisation EEF said a Canada-style deal with Brussels would be an “unrealistic as a short-term solution”.
Johnson, a former journalist, wrote there had been a “collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people.”