Britain’s Brexit chaos: Vote on hold, and future is fuzzy
Prime minister wants more EU assurances
LONDON – Britain finally approves a deal to leave the European Union. After months of fraught negotiations, Britain rejects Brexit. Prime Minister Theresa May abruptly resigns. She defies calls to do so. There’s a snap general election. There’s a new Brexit referendum. There’s no vote at all. There are two.
Chaos.
All the above options and more are possible if and when Britain’s Parliament votes on whether to formally accept an agreement that would see the United Kingdom leave the 28-nation economic and political bloc in March. The vote was supposed to take place Tuesday, but May postponed it Monday to avoid defeat.
May told lawmakers she would seek “additional assurances” from the EU over the deal. No new date for the vote was given. The British pound hit a 20month low against the dollar at $1.2515 as investors reacted nervously.
“It will be an important week for the fate of #Brexit,” Donald Tusk, the Polish politician who serves as the head of the European Council, the body that sets the EU’s overall political direction and priorities, said in a tweet Sunday after a phone call with May.
Tusk could have added: Nobody has any idea where Brexit will stand by the end of it.
After May abandoned the vote, Tusk said the EU would not renegotiate the deal, although it was willing to “facilitate U.K. ratification.” Tusk called a meeting of the European Council in Brussels for Thursday. He said “time is running out.”
The easiest option for May is a straight pass, which would mean Britain would leave the EU on March 29 although there probably would be a two-year transition period.
British lawmakers – who dislike May’s plan for reasons ranging from protests that it doesn’t go far enough to disentangle Britain from the EU to complaints that they never wanted Brexit in the first place – are likely to vote down the draft deal.
If the vote fails – if it even happens – it would open a dizzying array of Brexit-related possibilities:
❚ If May loses the vote by a relatively small margin, she could go back to EU leaders yet again and ask for additional concessions in a bid to win over her skeptics, then send any revised terms back to the 650-seat chamber and ask it to reconsider.
❚ If she loses by a large majority, say
100 votes or more, May could offer to hold a second Brexit referendum to ask the public whether it wants to remain in the EU or exit. The first referendum, in 2016, was close (52 percent vs. 48 percent backed Brexit), and though polls show momentum has swung toward the anti-Brexit camp, it’s still within the margin of error.
❚ May could call a general election and effectively make the contest a proxy vote on her EU deal.
❚ May could be forced out of office. It would take 48 lawmakers from her ruling Conservative Party to trigger a vote of no confidence.
❚ She could just resign. There’s another easy option for May, who spent days insisting the vote would go ahead despite high levels of opposition from parliamentarians inside and outside her party.
It’s one she’s highly unlikely to pursue, partly because it could be perceived as subverting the democratic process.
The European Court of Justice, the EU’s top court, ruled Monday that Britain can unilaterally halt Brexit without having to consult the EU’s other 27 members.
If it wanted to, in other words, Britain could just say, “Stop, Brexit, I want to get off.”