No more time for procrastination
For the third Monday in less than a month Theresa May will face the House of Commons to promote her Brexit deal as MPS and the country grow increasingly exasperated with her procrastination. The first time was her return from Brussels after EU leaders signed off on the Withdrawal Agreement she had negotiated the previous weekend. The expectation in Downing Street was that while there would be objectors among the diehard Brexiteers, there would be enough grudging support to work on in the subsequent days ahead of the meaningful vote in the Commons. But she encountered far greater hostility than she had anticipated, which has only hardened as time went on.
Faced with this opposition, she returned last Monday to announce that the vote due for Tuesday was to be abandoned, pending further talks with the EU, since it was clearly not going to get through Parliament. She would seek further assurances about the operation of the Northern Ireland border “backstop” provision.
After surviving a no confidence motion in the interim, Mrs May will today report back on what happened when she asked the EU to help her out at the weekend, only to be rebuffed. Or at least that is how it appeared. The Prime Minister remains adamant that her deal is not just still extant but the only option that avoids either no deal or no Brexit.
She is now intent upon continuing negotiations past Christmas and into the New Year in the hope that the assurances she seeks will be turned into some form of stand-alone protocol, or codicil to the main agreement, and convince MPS to support it.
Is any of this feasible? Given the way the negotiations have been handled so far it is hard to have any confidence that the Prime Minister will be able to obtain a legally binding guarantee that the UK will be able unilaterally to end a temporary backstop arrangement. Without such an undertaking, the DUP will not vote for the deal and there seems little likelihood of winning support from MPS in other parties.
However, the view of MPS needs to be tested. As Liam Fox, the Trade Secretary, suggested yesterday, this could be done with a free vote, since it is a Parliamentary and not a party matter to resolve. Running down the clock until no other options are available, as the Prime Minister apparently wishes to do, cannot continue and Mrs May will be told as much in the Commons today.