Crisis on horizon as Number 10 bids to overcome impasse
WITH EXACTLY 100 days to go to the scheduled date of Brexit, leading voices on both sides of the debate have warned of crisis unless the correct path is found through the current uncertainty.
Conservative MP Steve Baker, inset, warned that Theresa May’s Government would fall if it tried to halt or delay Brexit, or called a second referendum, which required an extension of the two-year Article 50 process of negotiating withdrawal.
But Labour’s David Lammy said the
Prime Minister was heading for “disaster” from which neither she nor her party would recover if she tried to dodge growing pressure for a so-called People’s Vote, and allowed the clock to run down to a no-deal Brexit on March 29.
Mr Lammy, a supporter of Best for Britain, said Mrs May had to confront the fact that there was no majority in Parliament for the deal she has negotiated with Brussels, or for any other proposed deal, such as Norwaystyle single market membership.
If there was no second referendum, the next most likely outcome was departure without a deal – even though there is “certainly” no majority in Parliament for that – he said. “The political confusion amounts to a constitutional crisis,” said Mr Lammy.
He said it would be “futile” for MPs to express their preferences on alternative deals in an “indicative vote”, as this would simply eat up more time without producing a decisive result.
“I believe that politics is stuck and when politics and the political establishment is stuck, in our system the only way to unlock it is to go back to the people in the hope that we get a clear instruction from the British population,” he said.
While that could be done through a General Election, a clearer route would be a second EU referendum, he said. But Mr Baker, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, said voters would be “horrified and disgusted” if they were asked to revisit their decision.
“I think people in their millions would have the realisation that I had 10 years ago, that we have entered a kind of post-democratic age where the establishment governing the country, the technocratic elites, don’t really care what you vote for, they just plough on with their projects regardless.”