No love lost on Valentine’s Day
WHILE Brussels wants to put Brexiteers on the road to Hell, Theresa May has already reached purgatory. The Prime Minister faces another punishing round of parliamentary torment next week when she updates the Commons on the EU withdrawal negotiations. She is set to spend Thursday enduring a series of Commons votes on her Brexit policy. Love will not be in the air at Westminster this St Valentine’s Day.
With no sign of a revamped Brexit deal to put to Parliament, Mrs May is expected to table a sparsely-worded Government motion asking the Commons to note her progress that will be open to amendments from backbenchers. She went through the same procedure at the end of last month. Like a 1970s television schedule, the daily Commons order paper is increasingly filled with repeats.
Pro-Brussels MPs have yet to decide whether to use Thursday’s showdown as another opportunity to try to pass a binding motion ruling out a no-deal Brexit. Labour MP Yvette Cooper and former Tory minister Nick Boles were thwarted in their attempt to do so last month. They are understood to be discussing the possibility of trying again with different tactics. “The feeling is that the ball is in the Prime Minister’s court. People are waiting to see what she comes back with, if anything,” a spokeswoman for Ms Cooper said.
AND Jeremy Corbyn is likely to use the votes to push his rival Brexit plan for keeping the UK tied into the EU’s customs union and single market rules for ever. The Labour leader put forward a blueprint this week just as the Prime Minister headed to Brussels to press EU chiefs into reopening negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement. It was a calculated attempt to undermine her negotiating position by floating the possibility of a Commons majority for a Brexit in name only that would delight the bloc’s leadership.
The latest parliamentary manoeuvring to seek to reduce the Prime Minister’s options comes at a time when the Government should be turning up the pressure on Brussels. EU Council President Donald Tusk’s sneering suggestion on Wednesday that the leaders of the 2016 EU referendum campaign deserve “a special place in hell” is being seen by diplomats as a sign of pent-up frustration. If anyone is descending into Satan’s realm at present, it is the EU’s leadership.
France and Italy are sinking into recession, threatening to drag the rest of the bloc with them. And a poisonous diplomatic spat between the French and Italian governments signals a deepening crisis engulfing the European federalist project.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s ambassador to Rome was summoned back to Paris this week in response to Italian ministers cheering on the “gilets jaunes” antigovernment protests bringing havoc to France.
In the version of Hell faced by Macron, Tusk and other federalist fanatics, the devils wear yellow vests. Anti-establishment protests are spreading across the continent. In May, those protests are almost certain to fuel a surge towards antiEU parties in elections for the European Parliament. Brussels and Strasbourg need to brace for an influx of MEPs who take inspirations from the yellow vests and other mass movements.
FOR Mr Tusk and his fellow bureaucrats, a political inferno is crackling into life that will make the Brexit deadlock feel like a minor irritation. They do not want to still be fretting about the Northern Irish backstop as the flames of protest reach the heart of the Brussels machine.
“They want to get Brexit done,” one official close to the Brexit negotiations told me after Mrs May’s meetings with Mr Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels on Thursday. “There was an overwhelming sense in the room of let’s just get this over and done with,” the source added.
That sense of impending crisis in Brussels gives Mrs May leverage in her quest to overhaul the Withdrawal Agreement. The last thing she needs is another round of parliamentary mischief that could tie up her negotiating hand.