So where does it go from here? Parliament doesn’t want the backstop but also doesn’t want no-deal, but the EU says it won’t negotiate a new withdrawal agreement. Is parliament just hoping that the EU will reverse their stance? Seems risky given that no-deal is gonna be a lot harder on the UK than it would on the EU.
Yes, that is exactly what they are hoping, by the same logic that presumed that the UK could negotiate a better deal than it was currently getting with full EU membership.
So what does the 317-310 vote against “no-deal” Brexit actually mean? If there ends up being no-deal, then that’s not something Parliament realistically controls, right, unless something else is agreed upon.
Maybe I am confused, but it seems like if the two of us are trying to reach an agreement on a car purchase, but we agree first that we will make a deal on this car and that “no-deal” is not an option. But we still have to agree upon a price. What if we don’t agree on a price? What did our earlier agreement mean if we cannot agree on a price?
You would assume that it means they would just cancel the whole thing if no deal is reached, but at this point who the hell knows.
If there’s no deal, that would mean a hard border, right? Is it at all possible that come March 28th and there’s still no deal, the EU will accept a deal without the backstop? Hope I don’t sound too ignorant.
It means nothing - the way it was worded it is just a statement of intent. There were more substantive amendments voted on tonight, but they did not pass.
But only the hardest of hardcore Brexiteers want a no-deal, right? So why so many “no” votes to the non-binding proposal?
Honestly mate, at this stage, your guess is as good as mine.
There’s no chance of the EU reversing its stance, and nobody in Parliament seriously expects any renegotiation. There are obvious things the UK would be doing if it expected or wanted a renegotiation over the backstop, and they’re not doing any of them.
Which means that those who supported this amendment can, I think, be divided into two main camps.
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Those who hope for a no-deal Brexit and expect it to happen, but see this amendment as useful in positioning them to blame the EU for it.
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Those who don’t want a no-deal Brexit and see the value in this amendment as being that it will enable to the government to come back to Parliament in two weeks or so and say “See? We gave it our best shot, but nothing doing. This deal, backstop and all, really is the best that is attainable”. And they hope that enough MPs will then choose this deal as a lesser evil than a no-deal Brexit.
Not much. It’s an expression of distaste for no deal, but distaste on its own won’t avert no deal.
Precisely. Not liking no-deal is meaningless. The only meaningful thing would be liking something else more than you like no deal, and liking it enough actually to choose it. That could be May’s deal (or it could in theory be a different deal, but that seems very unlikely to happen) or it could be revoking the UK’s decision to leave the EU.
It meant nothing.
If Brexit proceeds, yes.
It’s theoretically possible, but it’s not going to happen. It’s more likely that the UK will accept the deal with the backstop, or call off Brexit, or seek to defer their departure date.
(I’m not saying that any of these things will happen, or are likely to happen - just that they are more likely to happen than the UK conceding a withdrawal agreement without a backstop. Of all the possible endings for this story, that is the least likely.)
It must be said that even if there was some taste among the EU members governments and the staff for some renegotiation, the chaos and the instability of the British government as it is now would take it away as it is so painfully clear that you have no consensus on anything and a government that is indeed a zombie government
It is a complete shambles…
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
As a friend of mine pointed out on Twitter, we seem have approached this task in the following order:
- Agree to leave the EU on a certain date
- Negotiate the terms of leaving on that date
- Attempt to agree a negotiating position
It’s an embarrasing shambles and it is rightly making people question whether it’s even possible to do business with us.
It is unlikely that following withdrawal, when we attempt to make deals with the EU, the US and others, that our reputation for being reliable and consistent negotiating partners will have recovered. One thing that might do it, and I stress might, is the complete implosion and destruction of the Conservative Party. Throughout this process they have jointly and severally demonstrated malice, ignorance, incompetence, wilful denial of the facts, triviality, bad faith and a willingness to abandon the national interest in favour of party or even factional advantage. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the recovery of Britain’s political infrastructure after this, but I simply cannot see how we can continue with the Tory party as currently constituted being one of the major parties of government.
I’d go a bit further and add:
- Reflect on what Brexit is for and try to find some agreement on what objectives the UK should hope to achieve by Brexiting
That made me laugh, but it isn’t really true. The British government, Parliament and people did start with a very clear and succinct negotiating position: we want all the benefits of EU membership, while dropping most of the obligations. It isn’t the execution of the negotiations which is the problem here.
The Conservatives deserve to emerge from this mess with their reputation for pragmatic economic competence in tatters. However, we should vigorously reject the emerging narrative that Brexit has failed because of Tory incompetence. There was never any way that Brexit could succeed, it is an inherently flawed objective. Mrs May’s red lines, which are the reason for her specific failures, are not unreasonable given our expressed goals - without them you really do have Brexit in name only. Again, while other failure modes were possible, success was not an option.
The hard fact is that the EU, and specifically the single market, is enormously beneficial for the citizens of the member states, both economically and (for want of a better expression) socio-politically. The single market simply could not work without deep political integration and a pooling of sovereignty.
TLDR: demanding the benefits of the EU single market while rejecting the consequences of the EU single market is a toddler’s dream.
Well, perhaps we could say that while the Brexit movement was initially united in aspiring to a fantasy Brexit, when actually faced with the task of delivering Brexit and therefore required to choose a deliverable Brexit, there were unable to agree on the choice, since they had (and indeed still have) no shared understanding of what the point of Brexiting was.
A single market could easily work without any further forms of integration, if that were the desire of the countries involved - and indeed, that would probably be better overall, as the weaker economies wouldn’t be suffering from being unable to control their currencies, or being unable to set laws and standards that are appropriate for them. A single market does not require everything to be made to the same standards, nor to be made in countries with specific laws or social practices.
However, the EU has made it clear that membership of their specific single market requires that. Which is a shame, as it means Europe as a whole is weaker than it could be, but still better off than it would be with no single market at all.
Remaining in this specific single market, but with no political say over the way it’s handled, is absurd - almost as absurd as leaving it would be. There is really no sensible choice other than to remain in the EU and hope to change the way it functions, ideally reverting to a solely trade based organisation rather than a political one. But even if that proves impossible, the damage cause by leaving won’t be worth the gains.
No, because a single market without agreed-upon and enforced common standards is not feasible. The mechanisms that create and enforce those standards are the mechanisms of sovereignty.
*No *say? In the EU, the UK has as much say as any member. If you’re advocating for the UK to dominate, well, the years of empire are long gone, and never really applied to Europe anyway.