One option down, two to go
British lawmakers have rejected their first option on Brexit and now get to vote on no deal or, possibly, a delay
Who would have thought three years after Britain voted to leave the European Union that lawmakers still wouldn’t agree on how to do it?
Parliament overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s revised Brexit deal yesterday in a vote of 391 to 242, the second time she has suffered such a major defeat.
Last-minute negotiations with EU leaders were not enough to secure the support of hardliners in May’s own Conservative Party — 75 Tories voted against their leader.
The loss raises questions not only about May’s authority but how Britain would exit the trading bloc. With just over two weeks before the Brexit deadline, the options are narrowing.
Parliament will vote today on whether to leave the EU on schedule, on March 29, without a deal — a scenario that could create economic havoc for Britain and, to a lesser degree, Europe.
Boris Johnson, the former Foreign Secretary and a leading Tory Brexiteer, argued in favour of a nodeal Brexit yesterday. While acknowledging “that is in the short term the more difficult road”, he said “in the end it’s the only safe route out of the abyss and the only safe path to selfrespect”.
But there doesn’t seem to be the stomach in Parliament for it. More likely, lawmakers will push to keep trying for a managed withdrawal. In that case, they will vote tomorrow on whether to request a delay from leaders of the EU’s remaining 27 member states.
European leaders have suggested that they would grant a delay, but they have warned that their patience is not infinite.
Europe “will expect a credible justification for a possible extension and its duration”, said a spokesman for European Council President Donald Tusk. “The smooth functioning of the EU institutions will need to be ensured.”
Top EU negotiator Michel Barnier, showing his frustration, tweeted that with the British Parliament paralysed, “our ‘no-deal’ preparations are now more important than ever”. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters after meeting with May in Strasbourg on Tuesday that the EU was not willing to reopen talks. “There will be no new negotiations,” he said.
May also seemed to have reached her limit on talks. Her voice was nearly gone yesterday — a spokesman blamed a cold.
“I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight,” May said.
Conservative lawmakers, she said, would not be whipped to vote one way or another on whether to leave with or without a deal — today’s poll would be a so-called “free vote”, meaning that lawmakers don’t have to vote along party lines.
She noted that while leaving without a deal is the default legal position, she and her Government would prefer “an orderly Brexit”.
“Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face,” she added.
“The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension and this House will have to answer that question. Does it wish to revoke Article 50?” May asked the House of Commons, meaning no Brexit. “Does it want to hold a second referendum? Does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal?”
May has said previously that if an extension beyond March 29 were necessary, it would be granted only once by the EU, and that it shouldn’t go beyond the end of June.
Anti-Brexit lawmakers hope that if Britain’s departure is delayed, momentum will build for a second referendum — a do-over — to ask voters whether they really want to leave.
Although opposition Labour Party has endorsed a second referendum, there does not appear to be majority support for it in Parliament.
Speculation was rife about what would happen to May now.
Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour party, said that May had “run down the clock” and that her deal was “clearly dead”. “It’s time that we have a general election and the people can choose who their government should be,” he said.
Charles Walker, a Conservative politician, told the BBC before yesterday’s vote that if May’s deal were rejected, “as sure as night follows day, there will be a general election within a matter of days or weeks”.
In Madrid last week, a senior politician told me that he was watching the Brexit crisis with growing astonishment. “England, the mother of parliaments,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve looked up to them for so long.”
Meanwhile an Italian friend who arrived in London on a delayed train — French customs officers are having a pre-Brexit strike at the Gare du Nord in Paris, delaying London-bound trains and demanding extra compensation — was also amazed. “We think our democracies are weak, elsewhere in Europe. But even if you took a bunch of Italians, Poles and Hungarians, kept them up all night and got them drunk, they still wouldn’t come up with anything as disastrous as what we are seeing in the House of Commons.”
Another week, another historymaking vote: Yesterday, the British Parliament rejected, again, Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, an arrangement that would have given Britain a reasonably smooth transition period out of the European Union. It was a deal that pleased no one, but some saw it as a way out of a dilemma. The fact is that the British narrowly voted to leave the EU, but they have never agreed about which kinds of relationships should replace it.
It’s worth pausing to reflect on the damage already done by the Brexit debacle, and I don’t mean the harm to the economy. Far worse is the damage done to Britain’s reputation as a serious international player, a competent negotiator of treaties, a reliable ally, a voice for sense in the world — and a representative democracy.
All across Europe, people are reassessing their views of Britain, its politics and above all its politicians. Since the referendum in 2016, all of the key Brexit-negotiating jobs have been held by people who campaigned in favour of leaving the EU. Universally, they turned out to be ill-informed and second-rate. European negotiators in Brussels, accustomed to clever British diplomats, have been amazed by how ill-prepared the Brexiteers have been, how little they understood about Europe, about treaties, about trade. It will be a long time before they assume, as they once did, that Britain is a serious country to reckon with.
But in the long term, the damage that has been done to British democracy inside Britain might be even worse. The astonishing display of incompetence will not increase the respect that people have for politics or politicians. It won’t inspire them to vote, or to become engaged in public life, or to respect those who do.
Back in December, Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s former senior civil servant in Brussels, made a widely quoted speech in which he declared that it was time for British politicians “to wake up from the dream and face the facts”. Three months later, the dream continues; the facts have not been faced.
The problem is not Europe: The British Parliament is simply incapable of deciding what it wants to do.
One of the reasons why many British voters chose to leave the European Union was because they distrusted European institutions. Of all the many costs of Brexit, this was one I did not foresee: That it could wind up damaging the nation’s faith in its own institutions too.