‘Done by lunch’: Johnson gets Brexit bill passed
U.K. out of the EU by the end of January
LONDON • With a boisterous majority of Conservative lawmakers hooting and hurrahing behind him, Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday won Parliament’s backing for his Brexit deal, allowing him to forge ahead with his promise that Britain will leave the European Union next month.
Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill should take the country out of the EU by the end of January, after expected approval in the House of Lords and final ratification in the weeks ahead. Then comes an 11- month “transition period” to allow Britain and the EU to hammer out trade, security, migration and other aspects of their new relationship.
While campaigning, Johnson often boasted that the deal he secured with European leaders in October was “oven ready.” On Friday, he urged lawmakers: “The oven is on. It is set at gas mark 4. We can have it done by lunch or late lunch.”
The vote result was 358 to 234. Gone are the late- night crunch votes that confronted Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May. Undermined, challenged and bucked by “remainers,” Tory rebels and arch- Brexiteers in her own party, she had to face the ignominy of seeing her Brexit deal repeatedly voted down.
Johnson, too, faced a series of embarrassing Brexit- related defeats in the fall, when he faced a hung Parliament. But his landslide win in last week’s election put him in control.
He has hailed his Brexit deal as his own creation. After Friday’s vote, inside the House of Commons chamber, the prime minister appeared to sign copies.
But it is approximately 95 per cent his predecessor’s deal — with the exception that Johnson caved to European demands to find a way to protect at all cost a peace accord in Ireland.
Johnson did what May swore no British prime minister would do, which was to allow for a regulatory and customs border within the United Kingdom. In Johnson’s deal, that new border runs down the Irish Sea.
No matter. Johnson now has the votes, and he does not need to kowtow to his former governing partners in the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, who have complained the deal endangers the union.
Opposition Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn called the deal “terrible” and said his side would not back it. But Corbyn is on his way out and no longer in a position to change the path of his party or the country.
Six Labour members voted for Johnson’s Brexit bill, while more than 30 abstained.
There was grumbling — and marked distrust — from the opposition that Johnson’s government had deleted compromises that were in the bill before he won his whopping majority. The bill no longer has the same commitments on workers’ rights and environmental standards, or the guarantee that child migrants in Europe could reunite with family in Britain.
The updated deal also sets what critics say is an unrealistically tight deadline to secure a new free trade deal.
European Parliament vice president Pedro Silva Pereira told the BBC that 11 months to negotiate a complex trade deal “is unprecedented.”
“It is a different situation,” he said. “We come from a level of economic integration which has no comparison with other trade agreements that we’ve done before. But we also have a different and difficult issue to settle, which is the level of regulatory disalignment.”
In the rest of Europe, national leaders and the European Parliament both need to approve the withdrawal deal before it can come into force, a process that is likely to be uncontroversial but that will probably still take until the end of January.
Meanwhile, EU trade negotiators are sharpening their knives. Formal talks are expected to start in March.
EU leaders were mostly quiet in the aftermath of Friday’s parliamentary vote, but European Council president Charles Michel on Twitter called it an “important step.”
But he added that Britain needs to be willing to adhere closely to European regulations, known as the “level playing field,” to reach a trade deal with the 27-nation bloc. Johnson has vowed to break free from EU rules, a step Europeans say would force them to throw up barriers to British business that want to sell to the continent.
“A level playing field remains a must for any future relationship,” Michel wrote in his tweet.
British l egal scholar Prof. Catherine Barnard explained: “The EU doesn’t want a big player right on its doorstep undercutting its standards and having lower labour costs and lower consumer protections and lower environmental standards.”