No-deal ‘more likely’ after May defeated again
THERESA MAY has said a no-deal Brexit is “more likely” after Tory Eurosceptics condemned her to another humiliating Commons defeat.
The brief Tory truce over Brexit was shattered as 66 Conservatives – including Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab – abstained in a vote to endorse the Government’s approach to Brexit negotiations, which Mrs May lost by 303 votes to 258.
The result was a serious blow to Mrs May’s chances of winning concessions from Brussels over the Brexit deal. She had told the EU that a vote in favour of her strategy last month gave her a “stable majority” for the deal she wanted to broker, but that majority was wiped out at a stroke by her 45-vote defeat.
Brexiteers from the European Research Group of Tory MPS refused to back a government motion that followed a day-long Brexit debate because
they believed it meant no-deal was being taken off the table. The ERG claimed that the result proved that the only way Mrs May can get a deal through Parliament is if she persuades the EU to drop the Northern Ireland backstop completely and replace it with “alternative arrangements”.
But Mrs May, who was absent from the Commons chamber when the result was announced, insisted that the net result was to make no-deal more likely.
Deflecting the blame on to Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, who had ordered his MPS to vote against the Government, a Downing Street spokesman said: “By voting against the Government’s motion, he is in effect voting to make no-deal more likely.”
Mrs May acknowledged that “there was concern from some colleagues about taking no-deal off the table at this stage” and that the Commons still wanted “legally binding changes to address concerns about the backstop”, the spokesman said.
Mr Corbyn, who wants Mrs May to agree to a customs union with the European Union, seized on the result to insist there was now “no majority for the Prime Minister’s course of action” and that “without a coherent plan she cannot just keep running down the clock and hoping something will turn up”.
The ERG last night used the result to turn up the pressure on the Prime Minister to accept the so-called Malthouse compromise as her preferred option to break the Brexit impasse.
Supported by Brexiteers and Remainers in the Conservative Party, it calls for the backstop to be removed and replaced with a plan for a freetrade agreement with the EU.
Jacob Rees-mogg, the leader of the ERG, said: “The message is that there is a majority for the Malthouse compromise, but the Government needs to work with its backbenchers rather than against them.” He added: “The Government can get the Malthouse compromise through, but it needs to adopt it and push for it. Then there is a majority in Parliament for it.”
However, Richard Harrington, the business minister, described the Malthouse plan as “fanciful nonsense” in an interview with The House magazine last night, in comments that will do nothing to bring the various Tory factions together.
A Labour amendment calling for a meaningful vote on a revised deal to be held by Feb 27 was defeated by 322 to 306, while an SNP amendment that would have ordered an extension to Article 50 was defeated by 315 to 93.