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Alternate Brexit Plans Rejected; Theresa May Offers to Step Down
LONDON — In a last-ditch effort to try to get Parliament to pass her plan for Britain to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday offered to step down and allow another prime minister who has the confidence of her party and lawmakers to negotiate the final details.
Mrs. May’s stunning overture to her fellow Conservatives came just as Parliament tried to sideline her and come up with its own plan for Brexit, as the process of leaving the bloc is known.
But when lawmakers held a series of nonbinding votes on Wednesday night on eight different options for Britain’s future relationship with the European Union, none mustered a majority.
Mrs. May is so unpopular and has lost so much authority within her party that her offer to step down, if her plan is approved, was greeted with relief by Tory lawmakers.
“I have heard very clearly the mood of the parliamentary party,” Mrs. May told Conservative lawmakers gathered in a meeting room in Parliament. “I know there is a desire for a new approach, and new leadership, in the second phase of the Brexit negotiations, and I won’t stand in the way of that.”
Several past critics, including Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, said they would now back Mrs. May’s plan, which Parliament has already overwhelmingly rejected twice. But it still faces long odds.
A number of hard-line Brexit supporters were holding out, and more important, so was the Conservatives’ ally, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.
If lawmakers seem unified around the idea of Mrs. May’s departure, nothing else is certain.
In the nonbinding votes, the most popular options were motions to stay in a customs union with the bloc and to hold a referendum on any Brexit deal that is finally hammered out.
Mrs. May’s plan would maintain customs and trade arrangements with the European Union until at least the end of 2020, and ultimately envisions cutting most of those ties.
But it does not detail what would replace them, leaving open the vital question of Britain’s relationship to the European Union.
If Mrs. May’s plan is approved, the battle over the details of Brexit will be fought first in a leadership struggle in the Conservative Party and then by all the other parties and factions that have scrapped with one another throughout the last two years.
The prime minister did not specify when she would step down. But the European Union has approved an extension in the Brexit process to May 22, if her plan gained approval, and that date could become the start of the leadership contest, which has been unofficially underway for some time already.
The eight options that lawmakers voted on were selected by the Speaker of the House, John Bercow, including several that would keep Britain closely tied to the European Union, in a so-called soft Brexit.
All of this is unfolding before an increasingly frustrated and cynical public that is asking questions about British democracy and the political elite, and whether either is capable of governing in the national interest. In the meantime, the world looks on at Britain’s follies in bewilderment.
“If you compared Britain to a sphinx, the sphinx would be an open book by comparison,” Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament on Wednesday at a meeting in Strasbourg, France. “Let’s see how that book speaks over the next week or so.”
Since becoming prime minister in 2016 with ambitions to tackle social divisions, Mrs. May has been dragged down by the Brexit quagmire and, after losing her parliamentary majority in a 2017 election, has seen her authority ebb away.
Her advisers had urged her to offer to step down as the only way to garner enough votes to force her plan through Parliament. Many Conservative lawmakers have lost confidence in her leadership, and the strongly pro-Brexit faction wants one of its own to oversee the next, critical round in negotiations with the European Union.
Lawmakers have already twice rejected the Brexit agreement that Mrs. May painstakingly negotiated with the European Union, each time by large margins.
Last week, European Union leaders agreed to Britain’s request to delay its departure, which had been set to take effect on Friday, to avoid a chaotic exit without a deal in place.
But time is short, and Europe has grown frustrated with the deadlock. Under the terms of the postponement, if Parliament does not accept Mrs. May’s deal, the new deadline will be April 12.
The European Union is “expecting the United Kingdom to indicate a way forward,” Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, said at the meeting in Strasbourg.
But European leaders reiterated that they were still open to a long Brexit delay — perhaps two years — if, as Mr. Tusk said, “the U.K. wishes to rethink its Brexit strategy.”
That delay would have to be agreed to by the April 12 deadline.
Mrs. May’s plan could return to Parliament later this week if she gets more pledges of support like that of Mr. Johnson’s.
But most important for the plan’s fortunes is the opinion of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, or D.U.P., whose 10 lawmakers usually support the government but currently oppose Mrs. May’s Brexit blueprint.
Her plan contains a “backstop” to ensure against a hard Irish border that the party has vehemently resisted, saying it would lead to the dissolution of the United Kingdom and the unification of Ireland.
One influential Brexit hard-liner, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said on Tuesday that he would back Mrs. May’s plan if the D.U.P. went along. With that seeming increasingly unlikely, on Wednesday he said he would vote in favor if the party merely abstained.
On Wednesday, the leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, a Conservative lawmaker, told the BBC there was a “real possibility” that Mrs. May’s plan could return for a vote as soon as Thursday.
Still, a third effort to pass it would be a very tall order. Mrs. May would need to win the support of about 70 lawmakers who have already voted against it twice.
If she managed that, she would almost certainly have quashed Parliament’s rebellion and ensured that at least some form of Brexit would take place relatively soon.
Wednesday’s votes were never expected to yield a firm result. There is a better chance of that happening on Monday, when Parliament is expected to vote again on the most popular options from Wednesday’s voting.
If that happens, lawmakers will then seek to forge a proposal that a majority can at least live with, and answer critics who complain that while Parliament knows what it doesn’t like, it has been incapable of saying what it does.
Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting from London.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/world/europe/theresa-may-resignation.html
2019-03-27 23:19:18Z
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