Barnier door closes on May’s Brexit plea
Under-fire PM warns MPs of looming crisis
THERESA May’s plea for the EU to hand her a lifeline and change the backstop was brutally rejected by its chief negotiator last night.
The Prime Minister appealed directly to EU leaders urging them to support alterations she needs to appease the DUP and her own MPs.
Theresa May said: “Now is the moment for us to act.”
But Michel Barnier said the EU would not take the heat for the stalemate. He added: “We are not interested in the blame game, we are interested in the result.”
Barnier said Brussels was ready to offer the UK the chance to exit the customs union without the EU’s permission – but only if other parts of the backstop designed to ensure no hard border in Ireland were kept.
This would mean Northern Ireland having different rules to the rest of the UK.
Earlier, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt warned Brussels that a failure to co-operate could “poison” relations with the EU for years.
While Barnier’s latest proposal would make legally binding commitments of assurances the EU offered in January, it will not go far enough to convince Tory Brexiteers.
And the DUP have said they cannot vote for anything that imposes a border down the Irish Sea.
A party source last night said: “We’ve been clear from the very start, anything which would see Northern Ireland treated separately from the UK will not get our support and we will be reiterating that to the PM.”
Facing a second historic defeat, May attempted to blame the deal’s likely failure on Jeremy Corbyn as she warned about a looming “crisis” if MPs don’t come to her rescue.
She said: “If MPs reject the deal, nothing is certain. It would be at a moment of crisis. MPs would immediately be faced with another choice – either we leave the EU with no deal on March 29 or we delay Brexit and carry on arguing about it.”
May said the Labour leader was “not really interested in finding a solution”.
Corbyn said that his discussions with Michel Barnier and others had convinced him Labour’s deal could be negotiated with Brussels. The Labour leader said the Tory deal will “make us all worse off and we could never support it”.