MAY TELLS EU IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS
PM’s ultimatum to Brussels over Brexit
THERESA May yesterday threw down the gauntlet to Brussels to start negotiating seriously as she urged MPs to back her Brexit plan.
The Prime Minister will brief the House of Commons and then her 1922 committee of Tory MPs today in what could be stormy sessions amid Conservative fury at the details released so far.
She will insist it is “the right Brexit deal” and make clear it is now up to
EU negotiators to be ready to step up the pace of talks. She said it was time for Brussels to “get serious and address what we’ve put forward”.
Mrs May said the EU Commission, which is leading talks with Britain, had so far been “very much holding fast to a rigid approach”. However, other leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were beginning to ask about what mattered for their own people.
Dismissing talk of a looming leadership challenge from angry Tories, she declared: “The only challenge that needs to be made now is to the EU to get serious about this, to come round the table and discuss it with us.”
Leading Brexiteer Michael Gove also stepped up warnings to the European Union that Britain will be ready to leave next March without a deal if necessary if Brussels does not mend its ways.
The Environment Secretary, who chaired the Vote Leave referendum campaign and is a focus of Tory anger for supporting the Chequers deal, backed the Prime Minister, saying Brussels will make a no-deal Brexit more likely if it does not show more willing.
Generous
An agreement on Friday that the Government should do more to prepare for a no deal outcome was one concession secured by Brexiteers. Mr Gove was said to have emphasised this to colleagues as well as make clear he backed Mrs May’s approach.
He told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show yesterday: “We’re being generous towards the EU, we’re showing flexibility. If the EU is ungenerous and inflexible then we may have to contemplate walking away without a deal.
“One of the things that we agreed at Chequers is that we would step up the preparations for precisely that outcome to ensure that we will be in a position in March 2019 that if we don’t get the deal we want, to be able to walk away.”
He advised EU negotiator Michel Barnier to “regard the interests of your citizens with the same care and the same attention as our Prime Minister has for the interests of our citizens” and work for a good trade agreement. One source said: “The free trade agreement we are proposing isn’t about compromise with the EU, it’s about challenging them. They won’t find this easy to accept. It’s going to be a negotiation.”
Mrs May is expected to acknowledge today when she briefs the House of Commons that there had been “robust views” around the Cabinet table and a “spirited national debate” in the country since the 2016 referendum decision to leave the EU.
“Over that time, I have listened to every possible idea and every possible version of Brexit. This is the right Brexit,” she will tell MPs. She will stress her plan means leaving the EU on March 29 next year as well as a “complete end to freedom of movement”, restoring the “supremacy of British courts”, no more “vast sums of money” would be sent to Brussels, “instead a Brexit dividend to spend on domestic priorities like our long-term plan for the NHS”.
The deal will also make “frictionless trade in goods, flexibility on services, no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, or between Northern
Ireland and Great Britain”. The UK will also have a “lock” on any new EU rules, while there were commitments to maintain high standards on consumer, working and environment rights while leaving the Commons Agricultural and Fisheries Policy.
Meanwhile, Britain would have the freedom to strike new trade deals around the world, she will say, stressing that people are “wrong” to say that was not the case. The UK will also have an independent foreign and defence policy but with continued security cooperation to keep people safe.
“This is the Brexit that is in our national interest,” she will declare. “It is the Brexit that will deliver on the democratic decision of the British people.”
Conservative MPs were invited into Downing Street over the weekend to be briefed by chief whip Julian Smith and Mrs May’s aides about the deal.
Protect
A source said: “We are saying let us explain the thinking behind this, and why it’s a good deal for Britain that doesn’t breach our manifesto commitments and does allow us to trade with other countries and protect the border and jobs. We have the Cabinet behind it and now we want to get the party and the country behind it.”
A White Paper with full details of what Britain will put to Brussels is due on Thursday. So far the Government has said it entails a “free trade area” for goods and a “common rule book” for industrial and agricultural products with the power for Parliament to reject new EU rules. UK courts will pay “due regard” to EU court rulings on trade.
It also promises that the UK will have an independent trade policy, will leave the Common Agriculture and Fisheries Policies, end free movement and stop paying huge amounts to the EU each year.
Labour shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said the plans had “fudge written all over it. It’s unworkable, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare”.