Stepping back from the brink over Brexit

LAST week, we welcomed Theresa May’s plan for what looked a lot like a soft Brexit. As has happened so many times before, though, a week is a long time in politics, and the resignations of Brexit secretary David Davis and foreign secretary Boris Johnson, coupled with President Trump’s deplorable intervention, have left the prime minister looking vulnerable to a leadership challenge.

What would ousting her now achieve? Many Britons were duped by hopes that Brexit was a simple matter of declaring independence and sauntering off into a bright new day. It was never going to be like that. Politics is not magic.

Writing today in our sister paper, the Mail On Sunday, Mrs May outlines clearly and cogently what her Brexit White Paper actually proposes. Freedom of movement, the biggest and deepest issue in the referendum, will end. So will the UK’s contributions to the EU budget. The European Commission’s control over vast areas of Britain’s law-making will go.

Mrs May’s opponents are not united, and have no known alternative plan, so the shape of a pragmatic Brexit, giving much to the leave side but not forgetting the remainers, is becoming clear.

As Mrs May says, Brexit was never about refusing to trade with the EU, merely the right to strike independent trade deals with countries outside it.

The EU’s muted response to Mrs May’s White Paper means the coming weeks of negotiation will be difficult and possibly dangerous. Nobody wants a no-deal Brexit. Despite brinkmanship on all sides, the fact is the UK needs the EU, the EU also needs the UK, and the interdependence of Ireland and the UK – on levels commercial, economic, cultural and even familial – are so deep that allowing any schism to happen would be unforgiveable.

Mrs May enunciates starkly that the UK will not tolerate a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, or between Britain and Northern Ireland. As she correctly states, the legacy of Brexit cannot be the unpicking of the Good Friday Agreement.

This is a time for calm. It is time for everyone to step back and make pragmatic compromises. Certainly, from Ireland’s point of view, Mrs May’s plan makes the most sense. We have no stomach for seeing what a successful challenger to her premiership might offer in its place.