May’s backstop plan a non-starter
British PM’s efforts at working out a better plan with EU finds little favours
The issue over the backstop plan in Britain’s exit from the European Union has turned out to be the most controversial one in recent months and days over the entire Brexit debate.
The backstop is primarily a safety net to help ensure that trade and commerce between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland continues unhindered in case no trade deal materialises between London and Brussels by the time the UK exits the 28-member bloc in March.The backstop will guarantee that there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland in case of a no-deal Brexit.
Last Tuesday, members of the parliament were due to vote on the terms of Britain’s exit from EU, as proposed by the British Prime Minister, Theresa May. However, sensing that
she probably did not have the numbers to push through with her Brexit plan on the floor of the parliament, the vote was postponed by May, who went on to win a vote of confidence from her Conservative MPs the following day. Soon after winning the vote of confidence, May promised to reopen negotiations with EU officials to have a better backstop plan, though current reports point to the contrary.
But what is the backstop? Gulf News explains.
Despite a series of setbacks last week to the leadership and government of United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May, senior British Cabinet ministers still believe their Brexit deal can be approved by parliament.
Originally, that deal was supposed to have been voted on by members of parliament on Tuesday, but the plan was never put to a vote as May postponed it, acknowledging she didn’t have enough MPs to back it.
With the UK due to leave the European Union on March 29, May postponed the key vote until early in the New Year — before a deadline of January 21.
Instead of voting on the Brexit bill on Tuesday, Conservative MPs voted on Wednesday on a party motion of no confidence in May — a divisive ballot that saw her win by 200 to 117 — meaning one-third of her party opposed her.
In an attempt to win more concessions from the EU, May spent Thursday and Friday in Brussels meeting the European leaders. Speaking yesterday morning, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the British parliament could back Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal if lawmakers received assurances from the EU, but warned that a ‘no-deal’ Brexit was still on the table.
After May’s visit to Brussels, however, that likelihood seems remote. May addressed the EU summit for an hour and, according to agency reports, succeeded in alienating many fellow leaders after making a series of ambitious proposals to appease her domestic critics, including a one-year time limit on the Irish backstop.
“This debate is sometimes nebulous and imprecise,” JeanClaude Juncker, EU commission president said. “When it comes to the future relationship, our British friends need to say what they want, rather than asking us what we want.”
Another EU diplomat claimed that there was even a suggestion that it might have been better if May had lost the no-confidence vote.
“She didn’t know what she wanted,” the diplomat said.
Prime Minister Theresa May emerged from the latest European Union summit last Friday with no major breakthrough in her negotiations over the United Kingdom’s exit from the Brussels-based club. In this sense, the last few weeks of political drama in Westminster and Brussels have only ‘kicked the can down the road’, and the UK remains in Brexit gridlock.
May’s trip to Brussels on Thursday and Friday came as no obvious headway was made in discussions over her pleas for a legally binding assurance that the Brexit backstop over the Irish border will not be an inescapable “trap”. To be sure, new ideas were considered, including looking for a start date for the hoped-for future UK-EU trade relationship post-Brexit, as opposed to seeking an end date for the Irish border guarantee which many UK MPs want to secure so that it is clear that this could not last indefinitely.
But nothing concrete was, ultimately, agreed. And European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker reconfirmed last Friday that there can be no renegotiation of the proposed withdrawal treaty.
This disappointment for May comes after she won last Wednesday a UK Conservative leadership confidence vote with 200 of her party’s members of parliament supporting her, while a larger than anticipated 117 dissented. While Wednesday’s result allows the prime minister to stay in power, in the immediate term at least, she remains in a politically precarious position with massive Brexit challenges ahead.
To be sure, last Wednesday’s vote had some good news for May. The 63 per cent of Conservative MP votes that May won is around the same as the 66 per cent that the then prime minister John Major had got in 1995 when he fought a leadership contest. Major went on to serve around two more years in Downing Street which underlines that, under normal circumstances, May could survive as prime minister for some time.
In part, this is because there cannot now be another Conservative leadership challenge for 12 months. Yet, May could still be forced to depart in the first few months of 2019 in what is an enormously difficult Brexit context. She acknowledged this after winning the confidence vote in what she said had been a “long and challenging day”.
One key reason May survived is that she pledged to step down before the next general elections, which is currently scheduled for 2022. This way, the prime minister won support from some MPs who believe she is an election liability, but deemed that she is the best person in coming months to try to get a Brexit withdrawal deal after two years of negotiations.
Intra-Conservative ballot
One possible trigger for her departure, for instance, could be a parliamentary ‘noconfidence vote’ — as opposed to the intraConservative party ballot that took place last Wednesday. Here, the official opposition Labour Party is considering its options following support for such a move from other parties, including the Scottish Nationalists.
With May now back in London, she must make the biggest political call of her premiership: On her new strategy to get the withdrawal deal over the line. This follows the postponement of the expected vote in the House of Commons last Tuesday.
As she acknowledged last week, if the vote had gone ahead last Tuesday, as initially planned, it would have lost by a “significant margin” — probably by 100200 votes and would probably have meant the end of May’s time in Downing Street. In these circumstances, the vote will now be postponed till next month and it will
take a massive political effort now to try to get it over the line. What all of this underlines is that, despite May’s victory last Wednesday, she is even more politically isolated and weakened than before after not being backed by around a third of Conservative MPs. This shows she is now besieged and getting her agreement through parliament looks harder than ever.
The continuing divisions within the electorate on these issues are underscored in polls that now generally show more people favouring EU membership than not, and the country split over whether maintaining access to the European Single Market (akin to a Norway-style deal), or being able to limit migration (as a Canada-style deal would allow), should be the key objective in Brexit negotiations.
Britain therefore remains badly divided and still heading towards what could still be a hard, disorderly Brexit that would see no withdrawal deal agreed. In this sense, this week’s political drama has only ‘kicked the can down the road’. Fundamentally, the UK is likely to remain in Brexit gridlock into the New Year period.