Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Live / Labour Party split: Jeremy Corbyn warned he now faces a wave of new resignations with party in disarray

Three Conservative MPs have quit the party to join the Independent Group founded by former Labour MPs.

In what will be seen as a rebuke to Theresa May, Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen said the Tories had lurched to the right, adopting Ukip policies and pursuing a hard Brexit.
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The group said they intended to sit as independents, like the eight MPs who have also quit the Labour. “There will be times when we will support the government, for example, on measures to strengthen our economy, security and improve our public services,” the three MPs said. “We will continue to work constructively, locally and nationally, on behalf of our constituents.”

Soubry is a former government minister who sat in David Cameron’s cabinet, while Wollaston is chair of the Commons health and social care committee.

Allen, who was elected in 2015, recently embarked on an “anti-poverty tour” around Britain with the former Labour MP Frank Field.

Their departure from the Conservatives leaves May with an even slimmer Commons majority as the prime minister attempts to win support for her Brexit deal in the coming weeks.

The government has been accused of breaking its promises after it emerged that key trade deals would not be ready by Brexit day in a no-deal scenario.

Whitehall documents reveal agreements with Japan, Algeria and Turkey will not be rubberstamped by March 29 – despite Liam Fox’s assurance that deals would be ready at “one second after midnight in March”.

It comes as Labour and the Conservatives were both braced for fresh walkouts after 11 MPs formed a breakaway group in protest at the direction of their parties.

Meanwhile, Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay has travelled to Brussels with attorney general Geoffrey Cox for last-ditch talks, while Jeremy Corbyn and his top team are also in the Belgian capital for meetings.

Theresa May is facing the most serious cabinet revolt of her premiership next week, with as many as 25 members of the government ready to vote for a Brexit delay unless she rules out “no deal” – in a move that will challenge her to sack them.

Rebel Conservatives believe there are now enough MPs across the House of Commons to pass an amendment that would require May to extend article 50 rather than allow the UK to leave without a deal.

At least four cabinet ministers, almost a dozen junior ministers and many others on the government payroll are understood to be prepared to back the motion proposed by the Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin and Labour’s Yvette Cooper, due to be debated on Wednesday. A senior source close to those plotting the rebellion said there was no way the members of the government would resign voluntarily and May would have to sack them.

The move comes with moderates emboldened by the formation of the Independent Group, which some see as providing leverage to push back against the influence of the European Research Group of hardline Brexiters.

The cabinet ministers David Gauke, Amber Rudd, Greg Clark and David Mundell told the prime minister in a private meeting earlier this week that she would have to delay Brexit if there was no Commons majority for her deal by 27 February.

Speaking in Edinburgh on Thursday, Mundell told an audience he would do “everything I can and whatever I deem necessary to prevent a no-deal Brexit”, and refused repeatedly to rule out resigning from the cabinet if necessary.

May has already survived two rounds of resignations by the Brexit-supporting cabinet ministers David Davis, Boris Johnson, Esther McVey and Dominic Raab, but a wave of sackings would plunge the government into crisis at a crucial time for the Brexit talks.

Pro-Brexit MPs said the outcome of next week was unpredictable but, if it came to the vote, May would have to get rid of the rebellious ministers.

One cabinet source said: “It would be a huge mistake not to sack them. It would be effectively conceding we had lost control of the party.”

To avert a crisis, No 10 is racing to secure changes to May’s withdrawal deal with the EU that will satisfy hardline Eurosceptics and the Democratic Unionist party, enabling parliament to approve it. Their central demand is the removal of the Irish backstop from the text of the agreement because it could indefinitely bind the UK into a customs union.

Downing Street sources said the prime minister ideally wanted to hold a parliamentary vote and win approval for her deal early next week, but sources conceded time was running out to pull off such a move.

She is heading to a meeting of world leaders, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh at the weekend in a last-minute effort to break the deadlock. The key to the talks is whether they can find a solution to allow Geoffrey Cox, the attorney general, to change his legal advice that the backstop is indefinite. However, Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, told reporters in Brussels he was “not very optimistic” about the progress of talks so far.

“If a no-deal would happen – and I can’t exclude this – this would have terrible economic and social consequences, both in Britain and on the continent, and so my efforts orient in a way that the worst can be avoided,” he said.

If May does not manage a breakthrough by Wednesday, several senior cabinet ministers are pushing her to give assurances from the dispatch box that she is so close to a withdrawal deal that there is no need to consider the possibility of Brexit without one any more. “If you think you can get a deal with the EU by early April, what’s the point of crashing out on 29 March?” said one source close to the rebels.

However, that strategy risks infuriating the DUP and hardline Eurosceptics, many of whom favour a no-deal Brexit and would want to see the text of an agreement with the EU before removing that possibility.

Three MPs in the ERG – Priti Patel, Maria Caulfield and Anne-Marie Trevelyan – wrote a joint article for the ConservativeHome website on Thursday, saying: “Nothing changes the fact that, as the prime minister herself has said, we need to see meaningful, legally-binding changes to the Withdrawal Agreement, removing the backstop.

“We remain open-minded as to how this is achieved, but it must be a treaty-level clause that brings about substantive legal changes. It cannot simply re-emphasise the temporary nature of the backstop, because the attorney general has already said that it could ‘endure indefinitely’.”

One source close to a soft-Brexit minister said there would be “fireworks” either way as next week is the point at which May will have to throw her lot in with either them or the ERG.

The soft-Brexit rebels are particularly buoyed by the idea that the power of the ERG was waning because they would no longer win a no-confidence motion against the prime minister, given that the new Independent Group MPs would be likely to abstain to avoid an election – and their price would be a second referendum.

At the same time as ministers are threatening to resign, May is also facing the possibility of more MPs quitting the party, after Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen joined the Independent Group citing her Brexit policy and the destruction of the modernising wing of the party. With her working majority down to just eight, May called in two potential defectors – Phillip Lee, a former health minister, and Justine Greening, the former education secretary – to Downing Street in a bid to persuade them to stay.

The prime minister also wrote back to the defectors saying she “did not accept the picture you paint of our party”, arguing it was still a “moderate, open-hearted Conservative party in the one nation tradition”.

Greening said earlier that she would stay in the party “for the moment”, while Tobias Ellwood, a defence minister, also gave a sympathetic statement about the three defecting Conservatives. “Losing three colleagues raises serious questions about our brand, our core mission and ownership of the very soul of our party which we must address,” he said. “If we have any ambitions of winning support beyond our base we must remain a centre right, inclusive, vibrant and progressive party.”

Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, is unlikely to quit, but said he would have to leave the party if the government implemented a no-deal Brexit. He told the Guardian “the numbers are there” for May to be defeated on the Cooper-Letwin amendment unless she rules out a no-deal Brexit.

On Wednesday, Philip Hammond repeatedly refused to say whether or not he would resign as chancellor if May decided to pursue a no-deal Brexit.

Ireland is accelerating preparations for a no-deal Brexit amid growing alarm that parts of the Irish economy could face severe disruption and even collapse – and that the UK hopes to leverage that prospect to wring concessions from the European Union.

Leo Varadkar’s government is due on Friday to publish a mammoth omnibus bill incorporating 16 pieces of legislation to try to shelter Ireland from the doomsday scenario of the UK crashing out of the EU.

The parliamentary marathon in Dublin will begin amid increasingly fraught warnings of a hammer blow to agriculture, food processing, transport and other industries.
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LONDON — Brexit. Brexit? Brexit! BREXIT!? The Backstop! Norway Plus! Canada Minus? The Cooper Amendment! The Malthouse Compromise? The Kyle-Wilson Amendment! Hard Brexit! Soft Brexit! No deal? Brexiteer! Remoaner! BREXIT!!?? Aaaargh.

It has come down to this with a few weeks to go until the March 29 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union, as it voted to do almost three years ago: a jumble of jargon, jousting and gibberish, with everyone sucked into the vortex of confusion, to the exclusion of every other issue in the world. Britain’s biggest political parties are splintering, and there is clarity only on the fact that nobody has a clue what is about to happen.

So much for the panacea offered in 2016 by leaders of the Vote Leave campaign — a land of milk and honey in which an island liberated from European shackles would become “Global Britain,” money would flow, impetigo would be cured, children would become more beautiful, the soil more bountiful, and the world Britain’s oyster. These days, the fantasy has sagged into a mumbled, “Well, Brexit is not the end of the world.”

Not quite. “Leaving and going somewhere are not the same thing,” Sam Gyimah, a Conservative politician who quit the government of Prime Minister Theresa May late last year in protest at her proposed accord with the 27-nation European Union, told me. “Nobody agrees on where we should go.”

May’s deal, overwhelmingly rejected by Parliament last month, is a fudge. It leaves the nature of Britain’s future relationship with the European Union to be decided over the next two years. Everything — the fate of the customs union, of the single market, of the Ireland-United Kingdom border — remains unresolved under this proposal that May is now scrambling to rescue.

Article 7 of May’s proposed agreement — call it the disempowerment clause — says that after March 29, European Union law “shall be understood as including the United Kingdom” except as regards “the participation in the decision making and governance of the bodies, offices and agencies of the Union.” In other words, things remain as they are except that Britain loses “its voice, its vote and its veto,” in Gyimah’s phrase, as it embarks retrospectively on negotiating what its on-time exit from the union actually means.

“It would be the greatest voluntary transfer of sovereignty in memory,” Pat McFadden, a Labour M.P. opposed to Brexit, told me.

So much for the “Take Back Control” slogan Brexiteers wielded in 2016 to foist every frustration of voters onto Brussels. In fact, the best the Tory government could come up with over negotiations consuming the entire political energy (and untold treasure) of this country is a kick-the-can measure designed to avert the calamity of a no-deal Brexit.

This, absent an accord or deferral, would involve Britain crashing out of the union on March 29 into a void. Bring it on! So say the hard-line Tories in May’s party, their appetite for destruction not yet sated. Many of them are members of the European Research Group, an entity whose anodyne name masks its pro-Brexit zeal. It has apparently never heard of a multinational supply chain.

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Honda’s recent decision to close a plant in Swindon with the loss of 3,500 jobs — unrelated, it says, to Brexit (ha-ha) — and Nissan’s recent retrenchment are signs, along with slower growth and lower investment, of the price Britain has already paid for uncertainty. No-deal Brexit would turn uncertainty into mayhem.

So May maneuvers to save her deal, chiefly by adjusting the “backstop,” an insurance policy to preserve an open border in Ireland that has enraged hard-line Brexiteers because they see it as a Trojan horse for keeping Britain in the customs union through all eternity.

Jeremy Corbyn, the feckless Labour leader, maneuvers to keep his fingerprint off the British exit he not-so-secretly favors, while the majority of his party wants to remain in the European Union and eight M.P.s quit to form an independent group in Parliament to protest his policies.

Yvette Cooper, a leading Labour politician, pushes a bill to defer the March 29 deadline; and two other Labour M.P.s, Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, have drawn up an amendment that would see the House of Commons approve May’s accord on condition that it is put to a second referendum. (As for the Malthouse Compromise and forms of a soft or free-trade Brexit modeled on Norwegian or Canadian ties to the union, consign them, dear reader, to the vast T.M.I. Brexit archive).

The bottom line is simple: Brexit has been, is and will be a disaster for Britain. The 2016 vote was manipulated through lies. A country that has benefited from its 46-year participation in a union of more than a half-billion Europeans is drifting toward a self-amputation understood by few, opposed by the young, abetted by a dissembling anti-American Labour leader, driven by little-England Tory right-wingers holding the country for ransom, and, according to polls, no longer wanted by the majority.

Here are the odds in descending order of likelihood: An adjusted May accord secures parliamentary approval; the March 29 deadline is extended; no deal; a second referendum. Fight on! The best option, now that the country has sobered up, is to put Britain’s real future to a second people’s vote.

Theresa May has vowed to Tory grassroots activists that she will not allow the referendum vote for Britain to leave the EU to be frustrated.

The prime minister is flying to Egypt for an EU-League of Arab States summit where she is expected to hold talks with key EU figures as she battles to break the deadlock in the Brexit talks.

Downing Street has played down hopes of a breakthrough during the course of the two-day gathering in the Red Sea resort, despite the presence of major players including the European Council president, Donald Tusk.

The prime minister is pressing for changes to the Northern Ireland backstop which she hopes will finally convince MPs to back her Withdrawal Agreement following last month’s crushing Commons defeat.

Ahead of her departure, No 10 released details of her speech to a closed meeting of the National Conservative Convention (NCC) in Oxford on Saturday, when she told supporters the government’s focus on delivering Brexit must be “absolute”.

Her comments came after three pro-EU cabinet ministers signalled they could back moves in parliament to delay Britain’s withdrawal to prevent a “disastrous” no-deal break.

The intervention by Amber Rudd, Greg Clark and David Gauke led to calls for their resignations by furious Tory Brexiters - comments said to have been echoed in private by some cabinet ministers.

Northern minister John Penrose warned taking no-deal off the table could undermine May’s efforts to secure concessions on the backstop.

“It could torpedo Brexit completely, leaving us in a ‘Hotel California’ Brexit, where we’d checked out but could never leave,” he said in an article for the Sunday Telegraph.

“We’d have built an enormous elephant trap for ourselves, and there’d be no way to climb out.”

MPs are preparing for a potentially crucial series of votes on Wednesday which could see parliament seize control of the Brexit process if May cannot secure an agreement with Brussels by mid-March.

However, the Sunday Times reports the votes could now be shelved in the wake of the latest cabinet divisions.

In a joint article, Rudd, Clark and Gauke said it was clear a majority of MPs would back an extension to the Article 50 withdrawal process rather than see no deal.

However, in her address to the NCC, May insisted it is vital the government maintains its focus as the negotiations reach their final stages.

“Our focus to deliver Brexit must be absolute. We must not, and I will not, frustrate what was the largest democratic exercise in this country’s history,” she said.

“In the very final stages of this process, the worst thing we could do is lose our focus.”

With party loyalties strained to breaking point following the resignations of three Tory MPs to join a group of Labour defectors in the new Independent Group, May warned against more internal blood-letting.

Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston all complained they had been targeted in their constituencies because of their pro-Remain views, in some cases by former Ukip members who had switched to the Tories.

However, May said: “We are not a party of purges and retribution. We called a referendum and let people express their views – so we should not be seeking to deselect any of our MPs because of their views on Brexit.

“Our party is rightly a broad church – on that and other issues. And we will only save our country from the threat of Jeremy Corbyn if we remain one.”

On Wednesday, the Commons is expected to consider an amendment tabled by Labour MP Yvette Cooper and Conservative former minister Sir Oliver Letwin enabling the House to extend the Article 50 withdrawal process if there is no deal by mid-March.

A similar amendment was defeated by MPs last month, but there is speculation that enough Tory rebels, alarmed that there is still no deal in place, could be prepared to back it this time round for it to pass.

Downing Street has said if there is no deal by Tuesday, the prime minister will at that point make another statement to the House and table an amendable motion to be debated and voted on the following day.

However, it is unclear whether that will be enough to stave off a revolt by MPs alarmed at the prospect of no deal – including potential ministerial resignations.

LONDON (Reuters) - The spiritual leader of the Church of England may lead five days of prayer with other Churches after Britain’s March 29 exit from the European Union in an attempt to ease Brexit divisions, The Sunday Times reported.

The 2016 Brexit referendum showed a United Kingdom divided about much more than the European Union, and has fueled soul-searching about everything from secession and immigration to capitalism, empire and modern Britishness.

Under plans discussed by the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby wants to pray in public with the leaders of the Catholic, Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed churches on the day after Britain leaves.

“I would hope that it will resonate with the wider nation, that this is the time for turning to something deeper in the human spirit than legal arguments and philosophical discussions, and to seek wisdom from God,” a senior Church of England source was quoted as telling the newspaper.

With the clock ticking down to March 29, the date set in law for Britain to leave the EU, the United Kingdom is in the deepest political crisis in half a century as it grapples with how, or even whether, to exit the European project it joined in 1973.

MPs may have to wait until 12 March for a meaningful vote on the government’s final Brexit deal, Theresa May has said, in an intervention which will deepen splits in her cabinet.

The prime minister confirmed on Sunday that she would not hold the crucial vote this week as she flew to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, where she is due to discuss Brexit on the margins of an EU summit with Arab leaders.

It comes in a critical week for May, when many in the House of Commons had been expecting to vote on her deal.

Without a reworked withdrawal agreement to bring back to MPs, the prime minister has promised to table an amendable motion – which will allow backbenchers another chance to try to block a no-deal Brexit.

May said: “My team will be back in Brussels on Tuesday. As a result of that, we won’t bring a meaningful vote to parliament this week, but we will ensure that that happens by 12 of March. But it’s still within our grasp to leave the EU by the 29th of March and that is what we are planning to do.”

LONDON (Reuters) - The British government is considering different options on what to do if parliament fails to approve Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal to leave the European Union by March 12, a government official said on Monday.

May’s decision to push back a vote on her deal, which she is trying to change in talks with the EU, has triggered reports that she may be forced to extend Article 50, which launched the two-year Brexit negotiating period, beyond March 29.

She has so far stuck to her line that any extension would only defer a decision on Brexit rather than solving the impasse in parliament over whether to approve the deal.

The government is “considering what to do if parliament makes that decision (does not pass the deal)”, the official said when asked about a possible extension.

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