Is there a deadline for letters to the Committee?
It’s an open-ended threshold, currently set at 48 letters. Apparently once the threshold is reached the Chair of the 1922 will contact all the letter writers to confirm their intentions - after all some of the letters could be quite old. From the outside it seems quite a murky process but the Conservative Party, like all political parties in the UK, operates on private club rules, so they can do whatever they want really.
Pretty much. But then you could say the same about most of the rest of the members of the House of Commons.
UDS, thank you for those detailed posts on the Irish border issue. Very helpful in understanding the concerns.
The reason May will continue in power is simply that there’s no clear candidate to replace her.
Boris Johnson? Jacob Rees-Mogg? Michael Gove? David Davis? Andrea Leadsom? Amber Rudd? None of them can muster more than a handful of supporters among Tory MPs. There is no general feeling that any of them could do a better job than May. And any change of leadership at this stage would itself be a major problem.
So they’ll stick to the principle
Always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
Do we expect Parliament to acceot the deal, given the CBI seems to have endorsed it?
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Time will tell. But the concerns of industry seem to carry little weight with the ultra-brexiters, so I don’t think the CBI endorsement (which was not in the least surprising) will be decisive.
A distinct possibility is that Parliament will reject the deal at the first time of asking, but early in the new year, after experiencing panic in the financial markets and economic stresses caused by businesses activating no-deal contingency plans, Parliament will accept it subject to a few cosmetic tweaks so that honour can be satisfied. That, for what it’s worth, is my sense of the most likely course. Or, at least, slightly more likely than either a general election, a further referendum or a crash-out Brexit. The evident inability of the ERG to launch its putsch against May stiffens my sense a little; they are a noisy but ineffective shower.
But since my sense was also that the 2016 Brexit referendum would be lost and Clinton would be elected, you might not want to place too much reliance on it.
Spain is threatening to veto the Brexit deal over Gibraltar.
From the BBC:
Spain is not the only EU country unhappy with the deal. From the Guardian yesterday:
So it’s not a done deal from the EU side. There is still plenty of negotiating to be done - all of which will make it more difficult to get it through the UK Parliament.
For those interested, there’s a Brexit quiz to see which deal you would prefer.
As and when they make a complete spectacle of themselves, I likely will. But it’s generalising like that has the effect of letting the ERG off the hook for the specific, recent, much-publicised clown show they’ve demanded we pay attention to for the last week.
This is still just the Withdrawal Agreement.
I think both sides know that the difficult horsetrading will come when negotiating the UK-EU trade deal that is intended to replace the current EU trading arrangements. There is scant mention of this in the WA. That will take years and you can expect all kinds of objections and delays from member states with some gripe will have their say.
The UK will be paying into the EU for the duration of the WA. No WA would means a sudden budget crisis for the EU to deal with that would have far more effect than these objections.
If the EU could not authorise the WA or it does not get through the UK parliament it would all have to start again with a lot of frustration. It looks a lot more uncertain on the UK side.
Here’s NPR on May and her Brexit woes: Brexit Negotiations Provide A Great Challenge To May's Leadership : NPR
Oh, I’m not disagreeing with you.
According to this article in the Express, not only has the Committee not received the necessary 48 letters, the chair has hinted that he’s not received letters from some of the MPs who have been hinting in the press that they’ve sent in a letter.
So some hon. Members appear to be … prevaricating …
Linky?
I’m American, but took it out of curiosity. I got an 86% match for Remain, 77% for Norway, 48% for the current deal, 38% for Canada Plus, and 22% for No Deal.
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I also took the survey, and while I can’t remember the exact numbers, my highest match was for the Norway Plan. (Also an American.)
Spain doesn’t have a veto over the Withdrawal Agreement now being discussed.
They’ve been promised (by the EU) a veto over the application to Gibraltar of the future relationship agreement (talks about which have barely commenced).
This is a political commitment by the EU, not an entrenched legal right. Their current position is that they’d like to see this written into the withdrawal agreement, which would (a) turn it into a legally enforceable right, and (b) make it binding on the UK as well as on the EU.
If they don’t get their way on this (and they probably won’t) they are threatening to vote against the Withdrawal Agreement. But that won’t scupper it; on the EU side, the Withdrawal Agreement needs approval by a qualified majority of the member states; it doesn’t need unanimous agreement. The Spaniards know this, which is why voting against the WA allows them to register the strength of their concern and put down a marker for the future relationship discussions, but without derailing the entire process at this point.
Legally, only one country can torpedo the Withdrawal Agreement on its own: the UK.
Politically, one other country can do so: Ireland. Unlike the Spanish, the Irish have been promised a veto over the Withdrawal Agreement of it fails to contain terms which will prevent a hard border in Ireland. It’s unlikely that the Irish will have to deploy the veto, however, since the EU negotiations have been firm all along that they won’t agree terms of any draft Withdrawal Agreement that don’t include this.
Here’s the link re letters to Committee of 1922
American: I got 83% no deal, 78% Canada Plus, 65% Government’s Deal, 30% Norway Deal, and 19% Remain.
Some of those questions amazed me. Why wouldn’t a sovereign country like the UK want absolute authority to conduct activities within their own borders and not pay for EU domination?
Why can’t the EU simply be a free trade zone without all of the extra bureaucracy? The U.S. would vote such a thing down 90-10.
Sorry for the hijack.