MAY IN FINAL BATTLE TO FORCE THROUGH BREXIT DEAL
THERESA May has issued a lastditch plea for MPs to back her Brexit deal, after Brussels chiefs issued a letter offering assurances that they do not want the controversial “backstop” to be permanent.
Speaking in a factory in Leave-voting Stoke-on-Trent, the Prime Minister said the letter from European Council president Donald Tusk and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker made clear that the backstop was “not a threat or a trap”. And she said she was committed to working with MPs from across the House to ensure that workers’ rights and environmental standards were protected after Brexit.
Attorney General Geoffrey Cox issued advice that EU assurances on the backstop “would have legal force in international law”, and said the current deal “now represents the only politically practicable and available means of securing our exit from the EU”.
But Mrs May’s hopes that the letter would win over enough MPs to rescue her Withdrawal Agreement looked set to be dashed, as the Democratic Unionist Party - which props up her minority administration - dismissed it as “meaningless”.
“Rather than reassure us, the Tusk and Juncker letter bolsters our concerns,” said DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, who called on the PM to demand changes to the Agreement itself.
And Tory MP Gareth Johnson quit as an assistant whip to oppose Mrs May’s plan, saying it was clear there was “no significant change” to the Withdrawal Agreement.
North Somerset MP and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox warned that failure to deliver Brexit would be “a disaster from which we might not recover”.
He told the BBC that while no-deal Brexit would damage the economy it was better than staying, adding: “I don’t regard no-deal as national suicide.
“This is not Dunkirk, this is leaving the European Union.”
But former attorney general Dominic Grieve disagreed, telling the same programme: “It will lead to the break-up of the UK for starters. That seems to me to be a pretty clear indication of a form of national suicide.”
Mrs May warned that MPs would be behaving with the “height of recklessness” if they rejected her Withdrawal Agreement in today’s historic vote, when no alternative deal was on offer which was negotiable and respected the 2016 referendum result.
The Prime Minister said that the presidents’ letter provided “valuable new clarifications and assurances” to address the concerns of MPs who fear the backstop, which is designed to prevent a hard border in Ireland, could become a permanent arrangement which the UK could leave only with approval from the EU.
She said the letter delivered: A commitment from the EU to begin work on a new post-Brexit relationship as soon as the Withdrawal Agreement is ratified;
An explicit commitment that the new relationship does not have to “replicate” the backstop arrangement, under which the UK would remain in a customs union with the EU and be required to observe some of its rules;
Agreement on a fast-track process to bring a new free trade agreement into force, even if some of the 27 remaining members delay ratification;
Acceptance that the UK can unilaterally deliver on commitments made to Northern Ireland, including a “Stormont lock” on new EU laws being added to the backstop.
“The letters published today have legal force and must be used to interpret the meaning of the Withdrawal