100day Brexit countdown to who knows what
The Tories are at each other’s throats, Labour is equally divided. All anyone can agree on is that nobody agrees on anything,
JUST over a year ago, in her new year message, Theresa May promised to use 2018 to maintain what she said had been the steady progress towards Brexit achieved during the previous 12 months. Delivering on the referendum result in a sensible way was, she claimed, what both Leavers and Remainers clearly wanted her to do.
Since then, May has lost one foreign secretary, two Brexit secretaries, and six other government ministers over Brexit. The past year has been one of constant unremitting crisis.
Now, Theresa May’s tortuously negotiated and hugely unpopular Brexit deal with the EU cannot even be put to a vote in Parliament, because the Government knows MPs will throw it out. Parliament is gridlocked. No majority exists for May’s Brexit deal, or indeed any other kind of Brexit that anyone can think of, including no deal.
The Tory party is at war with itself, as is Labour, over how and, increasingly, whether Britain should now leave the EU at all. Businesses are in despair because, with less than 100 days to go before Britain departs from the world’s largest trading bloc and single market, noone can tell them what the new rules under which they will soon have to operate will be.
The British Chambers of Commerce says the ‘‘no deal’’ outcome it increasingly fears would mean ‘‘chaos for firms on any number of fronts, including customs, tariffs, disorder in their supply chains, and recognition of qualifications’’. Its director general, Adam Marshall, says current ‘‘lack of clarity’’ is already forcing firms to make ‘‘tough business judgements . . . such as opening warehouses and distribution hubs on the continent, applying to European regulators and setting up legal identities — this means that jobs and investment intended for the UK are being diverted out’’.
Economic growth is slowing and the stock market has fallen more than 1000 points since the middle of the year. Increasingly, people are beginning to wonder whether the ‘‘good Brexit’’ that the Prime Minister promised a year ago can be delivered at all.
At the start of the year, the idea of a second referendum was not talked about seriously by more than a few MPs, and had little support among the public at large. Today, however, amid the chaos, going back to the people to ask them what to do is seen by many more as a possible way out of the impasse, and even by some senior Conservatives as May’s best option for getting her deal through.
A second vote is under active discussion inside 10 Downing Street, although this is officially denied.
May now intends to hold the ‘‘meaningful vote’’ on her deal in midJanuary, and try to wring enough concessions and clarifications out of the EU over the Irish backstop to convince the Democratic Unionists and more of her own MPs to back her. The EU, away on its Christmas and New Year holiday for the next fortnight, does not, however, appear overly keen to move at all on matters of substance.
The option the Government will present will be between May’s deal and no deal, between leaving with a twoyear transition and falling off the cliff into World Trade Organisation rules, or no Brexit at all.
Downing Street also hopes to be able to win over some Labour MPs in leavesupporting seats whose constituents want to see Brexit delivered.
Divisions in Jeremy Corbyn’s party over Brexit make it even more difficult to predict what will happen in the next three months.
Were Corbyn himself to be an enthusiastic backer of a second referendum, then another public vote could well win the approval of a majority of MPs in parliament. But the Labour leader, a lifelong Eurosceptic, appears hugely reluctant to back a second vote, despite the fact the party agreed at its annual conference in Liverpool in September that one should become an option if it could not force a general election.
Yesterday there was a ferocious backlash against Corbyn from Remainbacking party supporters after the Labour chief gave an interview to the Guardian in which he suggested Brexit would go ahead, even if Labour were to win a snap election.
With less than three months to go, it is not just the alltooevident divisions within the Tory party that are preventing a Brexit solution from coming into view, but the increasingly wide ones that exist in Labour, too. — Guardian News and Media
❛ chaos for firms on any number of fronts including customs, tariffs, disorder in
their supply chains, and recognition of qualifications.