BREXIT TALKS IN DEADLOCK
Latest round breaks down in just an hour as fears grow of Cabinet revolt
BREXIT talks came to a juddering halt last night after the EU rebuffed Theresa May’s demand for a ‘break clause’ to prevent the UK being locked in the customs union for ever.
With just 48 hours to go before a crunch EU summit designed to agree the UK’s exit terms, talks were suspended – leaving hopes of striking a deal on a knife-edge.
Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab briefly raised hopes of a breakthrough when he travelled to Brussels for unscheduled talks with his EU counterpart Michel Barnier yesterday.
But the talks broke up inconclusively after just over an hour.
EU diplomats had briefed that a deal would be completed yesterday, apparently confident that the UK would back down.
But, with Cabinet ministers threatening to resign unless Mrs May secures a ‘get-out clause’ from the Irish backstop plan, Mr Raab was ordered to hold the line.
‘Better to go down fighting’
Teams of officials are said to have reached a tentative agreement early yesterday.
But they were sent back to the drawing board after Mr Raab warned the wording would be politically unacceptable in London and Belfast. It came as:
Former Brexit secretary David Davis urged Eurosceptic ministers to quit rather than accept a deal that would keep Britain shackled to the EU for ever;
Cabinet sources warned that our courts would be forced to treat the final deal as ‘superior’ to UK law.
Failure to strike a deal this week would pile pressure on Mrs May to abandon her Chequers proposals.
Government sources last night said a breakthrough was still possible, but warned the two sides still have ‘big issues to overcome’.
Mr Barnier said ‘key issues’ remained unresolved, despite ‘intense efforts’. A planned meeting today at which Mr Barnier was due to brief diplomats from the 27 member states on the outline of a deal has been cancelled.
The deadlock centres on the Northern Ireland border. A backstop plan for a so-called ‘temporary customs arrangement’ would effectively keep the whole UK in the customs union until a technical solution can be found.
Brussels has refused to contemplate a firm ‘end date’ after which the UK would be guaranteed to be free. But senior Cabinet ministers warned Mrs May last week that they would not accept a situation that could leave the UK in the cus- toms union indefinitely. Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday hinted at British proposals for some form of break clause which would allow the backstop to be reviewed and ended in future.
He refused to name a firm end date, but told the BBC: ‘You can set conditions under which the point at which the arrangements come to an end.’
Eurosceptic MPs last night piled pressure on Cabinet ministers to resign rather than accept any further concessions.
Several senior ministers have indicated they could resign over the backstop plans, including Andrea Leadsom, Esther McVey and Penny Mordaunt.
Mr Davis said it was time for his former Cabinet colleagues to ‘exert their collective authority’ and prevent Mrs May signing up to a ‘completely unacceptable’ proposal.
He was supported by Tory Eurosceptic Nadine Dorries, who called for him to be installed as ‘interim’ PM, saying it may be ‘the only way to deliver Brexit’.
Fellow Tory Andrea Jenkyns said: ‘It is better to go down fighting and honouring the democratic decision of our people than to be long remembered for waving a white flag.’ But Tory vice chairman James Cleverly urged ministers to use their position to influence Brexit policy. ‘They should use that position to put their ideas forward, I would suggest that’s a much more constructive and helpful way of influencing the negotiations,’ he told Sky News.
A Cabinet source said there was also growing unease over a briefing to senior ministers last week from the attorney general Geoffrey Cox, who is said to have warned that the final deal would have an elevated status in UK law.
This would make it much harder for those MPs to make wide-ranging reforms after next March.
‘This is a big deal,’ the source said. ‘Those people who just want to get out now and sort it out later are pretty worried about it.’
Meanwhile, reports claimed that Tory plotters were just four names short of the 48 MPs needed to force a vote of no confidence in Mrs May’s leadership.
But there was a ray of hope for the PM as former Labour minister Caroline Flint indicated that she and other Labour moderates could back her Brexit deal in the Commons.
Last night, a Government spokesman said: ‘In the last few days UK and EU negotiators have made real progress. However there remain a number of unresolved issues relating to the backstop.’
THIS is not a conversion column. It is not ‘My journey to Brexit’ or ‘A Remainer repenteth’. What follows is a resignation to reality. I voted to stay in the European Union for economic reasons and because I wanted to give two fingers to Nigel Farage and his odious hate-mongering.
I still remember the spasm of dread that gripped my stomach on results night as the Leave votes piled up, and how it snapped in hot hatred at four o’clock the next morning when Farage appeared on television to boast that Britain’s ‘independence’ had been won ‘without a single bullet being fired’.
It was a crass reference as, far from this sweaty triumphalism, Brendan Cox was cradling two babies whose mother had been snatched away in a hail of bullets eight days earlier.
Two years later, my contempt for the bounders, chancers and self-promoting wide boys who pushed Brexit has not subsided. It has been joined, however, by a growing unease with those I once considered ‘my side’.
This gnawing niggle began life as the occasional frustrated sigh whenever a prominent Remainer would caricature Leave voters as ignorant, insular and even racist.
Snobbery
There was and remains a sour snobbery at work here. Remainers were sophisticated and educated, unlike those rubes who read the tabloids and were voting to chuck out foreigners and re-bend their bananas. Remainers weren’t taken in by promises on the side of a bus; they weren’t the sort of people who travelled by bus.
Caroline Flint made this point on Sophy Ridge’s Sky News programme yesterday morning. The Labour MP campaigned for Remain but her Don Valley constituents voted Leave overwhelmingly and she rebuked fellow MPs for the ‘patronising’ and ‘offensive’ way they speak about 52 per cent of the electorate.
What is troubling is how quickly disdain for demographics has turned into disregard for democracy. Referenda are almost always a bad idea. By their very nature they are divisive. We are not the United States, where sovereignty resides in ‘We the people’ and plebiscites are common from state to state. In the United Kingdom, the Crown in Parliament is sovereign and we elect parliamentarians to take decisions on our behalf.
But when MPs make an exception and take a question to the country, they are saying in effect: ‘This decision is too big for us. It is for you, the electors, to make the choice’. Doing so then balking when the voters make the wrong choice is an anti-democratic hissy fit.
The People’s Vote is an organised tantrum, flailing its arms with the rage of a three-year-old denied a Happy Meal. At first, the campaign claimed to be for a plebiscite on the terms of Brexit but its most visible champions have long since abandoned that pretence.
They are out to overturn the result of the referendum and, as the EU itself has shown in the past, they are prepared to make the people vote as often as necessary until they come back with the correct answer. The People’s Vote is the political wing of Continuity Remain.
Is that such a bad thing? Look at what’s coming out of Downing Street and Brussels. We don’t have a government so much as a nervous breakdown with its own fleet of ministerial cars. No 10 seems incapable of striking a deal that will satisfy its backbenchers, the DUP or voters.
If Brexit was the work of Parliament, it could perhaps be stopped by MPs and Theresa May might, after a power of grovelling, get Brussels to accept a withdrawal of her Article 50 letter. But Brexit was a decree from the British people. They instructed the Government – albeit narrowly – to take us out of the EU. That instruction must be honoured if the democratic will is to carry any force. Those who seek to overturn Brexit cannot get past this point. The people got it wrong and must be protected from an act of wanton self-harm. Thus does paternalism attempt to bolt the gate after the populist horse has made it clean across the field.
The governing class cannot pick and choose which election outcomes are enforced. Undermine the legitimacy of the ballot box once and you undermine it for good. The consequences, especially given the strength of feeling at work, could be severe. Brexiteers who point this out are condemned for scaremongering and raising the spectre of street violence. Such talk is irresponsible, we are told. Except when Remainers warn of a resumption of terrorism in Ulster. Then it’s OK.
Uptight
The Brits are a nation of uptight law-abiders who feel compelled to confess to four bank robberies and the acid bath murders every time a passing constable says ‘hello’. They would not riot over a Brexit denied, but they would become angrier and perhaps seek more radical political outlets for that anger. Frustrating Brexit to stave off dire consequences would be like trying to douse a kitchen fire with a canister of kerosene.
I favour the softest Brexit possible, one where the UK is a member of the single market and the customs union. However much hard Brexiteers want to slash and burn all our ties to Europe, the ballot paper asked only about our membership of the EU, an arrangement that can be annulled without hacking away at the economic and trade institutions vital to job creation and prosperity in the UK.
Freedom of movement is a holy writ of the European project but a savvier government could have – perhaps could still – carved out a compromise. We look to be heading for a much harder Brexit but I live in hope and in the real world, where politicians will be held accountable if they make us significantly poorer.
The public made a decision on June 23, 2016. That was the People’s Vote. It is up to Parliament to deliver the least worst rendering of their choice, not to rue bitterly that the wrong sort of people voted the wrong way.