MAY FACES THE AXE IN BREXIT CUSTOMS UNION ROW
DISAGREEMENTS over our future customs relationship with the EU have put the Conservative Party on the brink of a civil war that “could be the end of Theresa May” as Prime Minister, a senior Tory has warned.
As MPs return to Parliament today, Mrs May is facing a stark warning that Brexiteers will not put up with her plans to create a new partnership with the European Union which could tie Britain to Brussels rule for years to come.
That comes after a weekend during which Mrs May sent Remainer Business Secretary Greg Clark out to television studios to defend her plans.
He claimed that thousands of jobs could be lost at manufacturers such as car maker Toyota if the customs partnership does not happen.
But Environment Secretary Michael Gove, the former leader of Vote Leave, hit back by backing a Twitter thread attacking the controversial proposal.
Mr Gove described as “helpful” a series of posts by former aide Henry Newman – now director of the Open Europe think-tank – that described resurrecting the customs partnership as “surely misguided”.
Mrs May is understood to support a plan devised by controversial civil servant Olly Robbins that would turn Britain into the EU’s tax collector in an attempt to sort out customs problems after Brexit and create a frictionless border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Many thought the plan was “dead” after a Brexit “war cabinet” last week when Home Secretary Sajid Javid joined Brexiteers to vote down the option.
Last week, the Daily Express revealed that if Mrs May ignores them on this issue, Brexit Secretary David Davis is likely to resign.
If that happens other ministers are expected to follow, and senior backbenchers have said there will also be the 48 signatures needed from Tory MPs to trigger a vote of no confidence in Mrs May’s leadership.
Last night a senior Tory MP said: “That threat [of a vote of no confidence] has not gone away. This could be the end of Theresa May.
“She may not realise it but we are on the brink here. She needs to listen to her parties and her Cabinet who have given a very strong message.”
Senior Tory Brexiteers have been lining up to hit back at attempts to tie Britain to EU customs arrangements and the single market. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, writing on the Conservative-Home website, said: “Despite the crucial Cabinet subcommittee on Brexit negotiations and strategy deciding that the scheme isn’t fit for purpose, some in Downing Street are, incredibly, now briefing that after a few tweaks it can be presented again.”
Former Brexit minister David Jones also warned: “They ought to understand the customs partnership is dead and finished and they should give up.”
Labour, the Lib Dems and Scottish National Party are hoping to get together with Tory Remainers including Anna Soubry to vote through an amendment to the trade bill forcing Britain to stay under Brussels rule in a full customs union.
This would turn Britain into a country like Turkey which has no say over its trade policy and cannot create separate free trade agreements with outside countries.
‘She may not realise it, but we are on the brink here’
IT’S said that what separates human beings from animals is that we learn not to repeat our mistakes. Well there are exceptions to every rule. Remember Project Fear? In the Brexit referendum campaign the key message of the Remain camp was that if we dared to vote Leave the roof would fall in on us. The country would be plunged into recession. Jobs would go overnight. Investment would dry up. And the City would decamp en masse to Frankfurt.
The then chancellor George Osborne even unveiled a draft budget that he said he would have to implement within days of a Leave vote. Public spending – especially on the NHS – would have to be slashed and taxes increased to plug a supposed £30billion “black hole”.
It was all of course – every dot and comma of it – utter rubbish. It was political campaigning at its worst: using entirely spurious suppositions to engender as much fear as possible in the hope that supine voters would be cowed into supporting Remain.
But 17.4 million voters told Mr Osborne and the rest of the Remain campaign what they could do with Project Fear. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Remainers would have learned their lesson? You’d think that they’d have learned we won’t be bullied by scare tactics into submitting to their Euro-fanaticism. But no.
THE Remainers appear to have ignored every lesson from their own, awful, referendum campaign and instead adopted as their strategy a playbook of the world’s worst political advice, beginning by adhering to the motto: “If it hasn’t worked once, try again.”
Because Project Fear is back. This weekend Business Secretary Greg Clark said that we have to have a customs union with the EU – or a “partnership” as the Remainers call it because they think the word is less objectionable to the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit – because thousands of jobs would be lost if we negotiated our own trade agreements.
He went on to say that the so-called transition period, due to end in 2021, could be extended, again because it might be the only way to save jobs. In a classic piece of political double-speak he said that of course he wasn’t talking about extending the transition. No, no, no. How could anyone think that?
“It wouldn’t be a question of extending the transition. It would be, as it were, implementing as soon as you can do. There will be different parts that can be done immediately. There will be things that will take more time.” In other words, extending the transition. This is what we are up against: Remainers who will say the very opposite of what they mean because they know they can’t be open about how hard they are fighting Brexit.
Last week, for example, a majority of the so-called Brexit War Cabinet made clear to Theresa May that her preferred option of the UK remaining in a customs union with the EU should be dropped.
Quite right too. The worst possible outcome of Brexit would be to notionally leave but to nonetheless remain in a customs union. That way we would have zero influence on the EU’s trade policy but would be forced to abide by it – and be completely unable to make any deals of our own.
Making our own trade deals was a crucial part of the Leave campaign. The slogan “take back control” goes to the heart of the debate. And it is sophistry of the very worst kind to pretend, as the Remainers do, that this is all an entirely separate argument from the argument over leaving. The two are intertwined.
But despite the Brexit War Cabinet adopting the only sensible stance – that leaving the EU means leaving the EU’s customs union too – Remainers simply won’t accept Brexit. So they have turned again to Project Fear.
Mr Clark is a decent man but like so many Remainers he cannot abide the prospect of Brexit. And so on Sunday he said that a customs union is “still on the table, still a live option”. He went on to talk about the 3,500 people employed by Toyota, implying that if we were outside a customs union those jobs would vanish. In one sense this is all very odd. That is the very definition of Project Fear: attempting to put the fear of God into us that the economy will grind to a halt outside a customs union.
In public Mrs May has apparently been unambiguous. This weekend she repeated her pledge that we would leave the single market and customs union.
SHE spoke of her “determination to make a success of Brexit by leaving the customs union and building a new relationship with the EU that takes back control of our borders, our laws and our money”. But read those words carefully. If we leave “the” existing customs union only to join “a” newly agreed customs union then we have supposedly fulfilled Mrs May’s pledge.
This is the kind of game playing that has led to politicians being held in contempt. The referendum was clear. Pretending it was about the difference between “the” and “a” customs union fools no one but does take us all for fools.
You might have thought the battle for Brexit was won when 17.4 million of us said we wanted to leave. As we’ve seen this week, however – and the House of Lords has shown – that was the first in a long series of battles. The revival of Project Fear is the latest attempt of the Remainers to stop Brexit.
‘They should have learned their lesson’