Change tack or face defeat, May told
london — Prime Minister Theresa May was under growing pressure on Sunday to change her plan for Britain to leave the European Union to avoid defeat in a parliamentary vote.
With both Britain and the EU suggesting an agreement is close, eurosceptic lawmakers and a leading member of a small Northern Irish party that props up her Conservative government made new threats to vote against the terms of the deal she is working on with Brussels.
The vote in parliament, most likely to come later this year, is gearing up to be the biggest showdown in the lengthy negotiations to leave the EU, Britain’s biggest shift in foreign and trade policy in more than 40 years.
May, who was attending a ceremony to mark 100 years since the end of World War One, found some support from ministers in her cabinet, but it would be hard for her to ignore the growing calls to change tack after a minister resigned and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party threatened to rebel. “If the government makes the historic mistake of prioritising placating the EU over establishing an independent and whole UK, then regrettably we must vote against the deal,” Steve Baker, a leading eurosceptic and former minister, wrote alongside the DUP’s Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson in the
newspaper. The main battleground is over a so-called backstop to prevent the return of a hard border between the British province of Northern Ireland and European Union-member Ireland. —