USA TODAY International Edition
Vote delay on Brexit muddies its future
Prime Minister May has options, not all good
LONDON – Britain finally approves a deal to leave the European Union. After months of fraught negotiations, Britain rejects Brexit. Prime Minister Theresa May abruptly resigns. She defies calls to do so. There’s a snap general election. There’s a new Brexit referendum. There’s no vote at all. There’s two. Chaos.
All the above options and more are possible if and when Britain’s Parliament votes on whether to formally accept a deal that would see the United Kingdom leave the 28-nation economic and political bloc in March of next year. The vote was expected to take place on Tuesday, but May postponed it Monday to avoid defeat.
May told lawmakers she would seek “additional assurances” from the EU over the deal. No new time frame for the vote was given. The British pound hit a 20-month low against the dollar at $1.2515 as investors reacted nervously to the political gridlock.
There were earlier signs things were not going as planned.
“Of course we can improve this deal, and the prime minister is seeking to improve this deal,” Britain’s Environment Secretary Michael Gove told BBC radio on Monday.
“It will be an important week for the fate of #Brexit,” Donald Tusk, the Polish politician who serves as the head of the European Council, the body that sets the EU’s overall political direction and priorities, said in a tweet on Sunday after a phone call with May.
Tusk could have added: Nobody has any idea where Brexit will stand by the end of it.
After May abandoned the vote, Tusk said the EU would not renegotiate the deal, although it was willing to “facilitate UK ratification.” Tusk called a meeting of the European Council in Brussels for Thursday. He said “time was running out.”
May and the EU already have signed off on the critical issues accompanying the country’s EU divorce, such as how much Britain will need to pay to leave the bloc (about $50 billion), what rights EU nationals living in Britain will have after the separation in March and the thorny question of the land border between Northern Ireland (part of Britain) and Ireland (part of the EU). Decades of EU-facilitated trade and travel across the 300-mile-long strip of land is a key cog in ensuring peace between Northern Ireland’s Irish Catholic community and its British Protestant one.
The easiest option for May is a straight pass, which would mean Britain would leave the EU on March 29, 2019, although there would likely be a two-year transition period.
But British lawmakers, who dislike May’s plan for reasons from they don’t think it goes far enough to disentangle Britain from the EU to they never wanted Brexit in the first place, are expected to vote down the draft deal.
President Donald Trump, who has said Brexit “is a good thing,” also said that May’s proposed Brexit agreement “sounds like a great deal” for the EU.
Still, if the vote fails, it would open up an array of Brexit-related possibilities:
❚ If May loses the vote by a relatively small margin, she could go back to EU leaders and ask for additional concessions then send any revised terms back to the 650-seat chamber.
❚ If she loses by a large majority, May could offer to hold a new Brexit referendum in which the public was asked if they want to remain in the EU or exit.
❚ Another possibility in the event May loses by a large majority is she calls a general election and effectively makes the contest a proxy vote on her EU deal.
❚ May could also be forced out of office. It takes only 48 lawmakers to trigger a vote of no-confidence. A major parliamentary defeat might be enough for Conservative Party pro-Brexit challengers to make a move against her.
❚ She could resign. While May has stayed on the path of vowing to “deliver” Brexit, she campaigned against it in 2016’s vote.
❚ May could accept defeat and, assuming she wins any challenge her to leadership, decide that Britain will leave the EU without a withdrawal deal. This would mean that the moment Britain leaves the EU, it would have no formal arrangements in place with the bloc for how to deal with trade, food standards, road safety, medicines and other regulations. Four million EU nationals living in Britain would technically not have permission to work and live there.
There’s another option for May. The European Court of Justice ruled Monday that Britain can halt Brexit without consulting the EU’s other 27 members.