British Prime Minister Theresa May is due to hold a vote in Parliament on Tuesday over the divorce agreement she negotiated for Britain leaving the European Union.
The UK is due to leave the globe's biggest trading bloc on 29 March, following the 2016 referendum where citizens voted narrowly to exit the EU.
Photo: AFP
The withdrawal agreement (WA) between the UK and EU - covering things such as trade, expat citizens' rights and setting up a 20-month transition period - will only come into force if MPs back it in a vote.
But parliament looks likely to reject May’s agreement, increasing the possibility of a disorderly Brexit, or a Brexit with no deal at all, where Britain would crash out of the EU without any transition structures in place.
May postponed the December vote buying her time to persuade more MPs to back it and to extract some “reassurances” from the EU, but The Guardian's Brexit correspondent Lisa O'Carroll says May still faces defeat.
“As it stands now it looks like she’s going to lose, she may not lose by the margin she would have done a month ago, she has some more Conservatives on her side and she may even have some wins on the Labour party side, but it’s not looking good for her, and everybody expects her to lose next Tuesday,” O’Carroll says.
If parliament rejects her agreement, the Prime Minister must came back with a plan B … and she has little time to do so, O’Carroll says, after parliament invoked an arcane piece of procedure.
“Instead of coming back after 21 days following a lost vote, she now only has three days to do that.”
While it is clear the majority of parliament oppose May’s deal, it is not clear what they would prefer. Opposition to her deal come from both sides of the house, and from remainer and leaver MPs.
“We know there is a majority opposed to her deal, but we don’t know what the majority are in agreement about, we don’t know what the alternative is and that’s a massive challenge,” she told Charlotte Graham-McLay
There is a strong “cohort in parliament”, she says, that will pay any price to get out of the EU.
“And that includes the forecast economic catastrophe, the loss of jobs - their view is that there will be pain, short term and medium term, but in the long-term Britain will triumph once again and be a global state like it was in the past empire and there’ll be sunny uplands for all.
“Those kinds of people are not going to change their mind, they’re going to vote against it.”
Meanwhile in the real world, UK’s Brexit chaos is having a negative impact on the economy. Carmakers Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Honda have both said they will cut jobs.
“The first (JLR) announced very big redundancies as a result partly of Brexit and the second announced a six-day closure in the six days after the 29th of March but that doesn’t seem to have had any impact in Westminster.”
O’Carroll, who has travelled the UK talking to people from all walks of life about Brexit, says what has become clear is that the referendum in 2016 was about many things, but it wasn’t about Britain’s relationship with the EU.
“Somebody said on a panel I was on this week said the reality is Brexit was never ever about Britain and Europe it was about something else; it was about neglect, the feeling that there’s been an elite in London running the country without bothering to carry rest of the nation outside of the big conurbations with it.
“You’ve got a nation that has had ten years of austerity, it’s not been felt in London it’s certainly not in the Westminster bubble, it’s felt in poor areas where you’ve got food banks, poverty increasing, homelessness and that’s what people want fixed - whether they got that through Brexit or not is a different question. People are feeling the cause of the leave vote is still there and has not been addressed.”
O’Carroll says the right time to ask the question on whether to leave or remain is now - two and a half years on from the referendum.
“That goes back to the point about the second referendum those who favour it say even if it came back that the leave side won again, but by a very small margin, at least you could say this time round that people knew what they were voting for - they didn’t know what they were voting for two and a half years ago.”
