May faces no-confidence vote after crushing Brexit defeat
British leader ‘has completely lost control of the process’
Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a humiliating defeat Tuesday over her plan to withdraw Britain from the European Union, thrusting the country further into political chaos with only 10 weeks to go until it is scheduled to leave the bloc.
The 432-202 vote to reject her plan was one of the biggest defeats in the House of Commons for a prime minister in recent British history and it underscores how, under May, the prime minister’s office has lost ground in shap- ing important policy. Now factions in Parliament will seek to seize the initiative, an unpredictable new stage in the process of withdrawing from Europe, known as Brexit.
“She has completely lost control of the process, and her version of Brexit must now be dead, if she loses by 230 votes,” said John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institute.
Immediately following the vote, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, citing the “sheer incompetence of this government,” announced that he was offering a motion of no confidence, which will be heard Wednesday.
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That could in theory lead to a general election, but few analysts believe he can muster the necessary votes.
Indeed, just after Corbyn’s announcement, May’s coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party, and the European Research Group, an alliance of pro-Brexit Conservative lawmakers, said they would support the prime minister.
The reaction in Brussels was muted but the theme was clear: Tell us, at last, what you really, really want.
“If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, wrote in a Twitter post.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said on Twitter: “I urge the UK to clarify its intentions as soon as possible. Time is almost up.”
Before the vote, lawmakers in both the Conservative and Labour parties were being urged to put country before party to resolve the stalemate. Yet the problem remains that, even if they did, there is no clear path forward that can command a majority in the Commons.
In her final appeal in Parliament, May impressed on the lawmakers the importance of the vote facing them. “The responsibility on each and every one of us at this moment is profound,” she said, “for this is a historic decision that will set the future of our country for generations.”
Like most others, though, the prime minister has no easy answers about the way forward. She has signaled that she will appeal to the European Union in Brussels for concessions and try again to win parliamentary approval, but the bloc is unlikely to grant her any.
After the thumping in Parliament, May did accede to a tactic that some Cabinet members had been urging, calling for nonbinding “indicative votes” that will allow members of Parliament to freely express their preferences for the various Brexit plans being bandied about.
Springford of the Center for European Reform said that process raised the possibility that if Parliament coalesced around a clear proposal for the future, May could try to negotiate such a result with the European Union. To win support from the Labour Party, it would mean accepting a “softer” Brexit that would keep closer economic ties to the European Union.
Corbyn would then be on the spot, forced to decide whether to work with May on Brexit or bow to pressure from within his party for a second referendum.
“I think it’s now between a softer Brexit and a second referendum,” said Springford, who added that he did not believe the government could pursue a no-deal result.
Negotiating the withdrawal from the European Union has been May’s singular focus since she became prime minister, displacing social problems like housing and health care.
But her failure to build consensus behind a single vision of Britain’s future outside the 28nation bloc has allowed painful divides in the country to deepen. With no consensus behind any one pathway, and a vanishing window for further negotiation, more radical solutions are rising to the fore.
One group of lawmakers is campaigning for a repeat referendum, which could overturn the mandate to leave, and another favors leaving the European Union on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement, a move that experts warn could lead to shortages of some foods and an economic downturn.
May expected to lose the vote, having lost the support of many of her own lawmakers. But her surrogates scrambled, as late as Tuesday, to rally lawmakers to her side, in hopes of keeping the margin narrow enough to try again for parliamentary approval.
Earlier in the day, the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, raked his eyes over the back benches of the House of Commons and rebuked Parliament, in a boom- ing voice, for contemplating a sudden and unregulated end to 45 years of integration with Europe.
Beseeching his fellow Tories to get behind May’s plan, Cox asked: “What are you playing at? What are you doing? You are not children in the playground. You are legislators, and it is your job. We are playing with people’s lives Do we opt for order? Or do we choose chaos?”
The environment secretary, Michael Gove, was equally dramatic in a morning radio interview, warning lawmakers that “if we don’t vote for this deal tonight, in the words of Jon Snow, winter is coming,” a reference to Game of Thrones.
But critics of the deal were equally adamant, saying that May had emerged from two years of negotiations with an agreement that satisfied no one. Dominic Raab, who stepped down as May’s Brexit secretary in November, described her agreement as “wracked with self-doubt, defeatism and fear.”
“This deal before us can’t end the grinding process — it can only prolong it,” Raab said. “It would torment us and our European neighbors for the foreseeable future.”
Under normal circumstances, a British prime minister would be expected to resign after losing a vote on their flagship policy, but the Brexit process has so unsettled political conventions that May could survive to make revisions and pitch her deal again.