May pleads with EU to delay Brexit
Exactly 1000 days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, and nine days before it is scheduled to walk out the door, Prime Minister Theresa May hit the pause button yesterday, asking the bloc to postpone the United Kingdom’s departure until June 30.
EU leaders, who are exasperated by Britain’s Brexit melodrama, will only grant the extension if May can win the UK Parliament’s approval next week for her twice-rejected Brexit deal. Otherwise, the UK is facing a chaotic ‘‘nodeal’’ departure from the bloc within days, or a much longer delay that May says she will not allow while she is in power.
May, who has spent 21⁄2 years trying to lead Britain out of the EU, said it was ‘‘a matter of great personal regret’’ that she had to seek a delay to Brexit.
In a televised statement from 10 Downing St, she said she shared the frustration felt by many Britons who had ‘‘had enough’’ of endless Brexit debates and infighting. She blamed Parliament for the deadlock, and warned that if MPs did not back her deal it would cause ‘‘irreparable damage to public trust’’.
In a letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, May acknowledged that the Brexit process ‘‘clearly will not be completed before 29 March, 2019’’ – the date fixed in law two years ago for Britain’s departure.
She asked to delay Britain’s withdrawal until June 30, and said she would set out her reasons to EU leaders at a summit in Brussels today.
Her long-shot plan is to hold a third vote in Parliament on her deal next week, then use the EU-granted extension to pass the legislation needed for an orderly departure from the EU.
‘‘As prime minister, I am not prepared to delay Brexit any further than June 30,’’ May told the House of Commons – a hint she could quit if Britain is forced to accept a longer pause.
Tusk said he thought a short delay to Brexit ‘‘will be possible, but it would be conditional on a positive vote on the withdrawal agreement in the House of Commons’’.
Tusk made clear what other EU leaders have long hinted: the EU is unwilling to give Britain more time unless the government can find a way out of the Brexit impasse.
EU leaders are united in saying that the divorce deal it spent more than a year and a half negotiating with Britain can’t be renegotiated. But the deal has twice been rejected twice by hefty margins in Britain’s Parliament, amid opposition from pro-Brexit and pro-EU MPs.
May had planned to try again this week to get the agreement approved, until the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that she can’t ask Parliament to vote on the deal again unless it is substantially changed.
She is likely to do that next week – within days or hours of Britain’s scheduled departure – by arguing that circumstances have changed and the speaker’s bar on a third vote no longer applies.
Tusk did not say whether the EU would be willing to grant a long delay to Brexit if Britain changed course and abandoned May’s deal for a new approach.
But a shift to a ‘‘soft Brexit’’ would infuriate the pro-Brexit wing of May’s divided Conservative Party.