Government could fall on the EU vote, admits Hunt
JEREMY Hunt yesterday refused to rule out the Government collapsing if MPs reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal and leave Parliament deadlocked.
On BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show, the Foreign Secretary acknowledged no one could predict the aftermath of a defeat for ministers in the so-called “meaningful vote” on the Brussels negotiations in the Commons next month.
Asked “Could the Government be brought down?”, he said: “It’s not possible to rule out anything, and that’s why all of us have to say, what do your constituents actually want in this situation... it’s all about the balance of risks.
“This isn’t a perfect deal for everyone but does have a lot of what everyone wants.”
Mr Hunt admitted the vote was “looking challenging but a lot can change over the next two weeks”.
He added: “The thing people wouldn’t forgive us for is if we got to 30th March next year and we hadn’t left the EU or we hadn’t put ourselves on a course to end free movement of people, the thing that mattered to most people.”
Mr Hunt, who voted Remain in the referendum, also refused to say Britain would be better off under Mrs May’s deal than staying in the EU.
“I think we will not be significantly worse off or better off, but what it does mean is that we get our independence back,” he said. “My colleagues in the House of Commons will be looking at this and will say that we have got between 70 and 80 per cent of what we want. Can this be a staging post to getting 100 per cent of what we want? Particularly being an independent trading nation, a sovereign Britain ploughing our furrow in the world.”
The Foreign Secretary added: “If we turn this deal down it is not automatically the case that Europeans will agree to negotiate a better deal.”
A second EU referendum, he said, would be “profoundly undemocratic”.
His fellow Cabinet minister James Brokenshire said MPs should back the deal or risk taking the UK “back to square one”.
He told the Sky News Sophy Ridge On Sunday show: “It is important for people to get behind the deal that we see being approved today, allowing us to move forward on to all of those things that the British people want us to do, all of the domestic priorities.”
Asked if the deal was better than EU membership he said: “It does give effect to the vote of the British people.”