Maybe May is a Martyr
What if Theresa Chose this path all along?
There was much whispering in the Christmas break at the end of last year, before Article 50 was triggered in March, that the UK Prime Minister told close colleagues and advisors that she didn’t mind looking silly and stupid in the short term when under pressure to release titbits of her Government’s position papers for Brexit. She was, allegedly, sure of where she was and her plan was to release on a need to know. She could take the slagging today for a brighter tomorrow?
Today, does May contribute to be that martyr for the European cause?
‘Hard’ Brexit was inevitable. A ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ rhetoric was writ large across the UK’s communications.
Now, post election, a weaker position appears to be emerging.
Three months ago, the British prime minister triggered a snap general election to increase her slender majority in parliament. She said that this was necessary in order to be able to negotiate Brexit from a stronger, more resolute position. Instead, today, May stands weaker; her Conservative party lost seats and she now leads a minority government propped up by the ten members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.
This weakened position has ‘forced’ her away from the ‘have cake and eat it’ ideal of a ‘hard’ exit of the EU’s single market and customs union, control over how EU citizens are allowed to settle in, freedom from the judgements of the European Court of Justice yet also securing a “bold and ambitious free trade agreement with the European Union”. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, wouldn’t have tolerated that anyway.
It has also removed the ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ proposal as the catastrophic prospect of being excluded from access to good, services, personal health programmes and even an ability to fly from the UK to ANY European country (EU Open Skies Programme).
It has, instead, placed a nod towards going so ‘soft’ with the Brexit that the votes in the parliament are there that would carry a proposal to abandon It all and stay in the EU after all. This has been talked up by many MPs privately, and by a few publicly. Sir Vince Cable, almost certain to be the new leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, is one of them. Now, former prime minister Tony Blair has also weighed in.
It wont happen. It can’t it wont receive the universal support of the Parliament that the Prime Minister needs.
What is now likely, as Round 2 of Brexit talks conclude in stalemate of the final amount that the UK will need to give to the EU to settle the ledger upon leaving, is a third option; that the UK leaves the EU with none of the difficult issues resolved, and the two sides agree to keep the current day-to-day arrangements in place for a transitional period. Maybe three years. Possibly as high as five years.
As a result, the UK can abide by the rules of the single market, programmes such as Open Skies, and so on, pending a future final agreement on these issues. This would require the UK to maintain free movement with the rest of the EU and to keep paying into the EU budget.
The Leave Conservative MPs won’t like this and could defy the whip and vote against it. But the ‘Remainers’ will be satisfied. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the Labour Party could likely either or abstain, because it would mean that for the transitional period, the UK’s relationship with the EU would be almost exactly what Labour proposed for the long term in its recent election manifesto.
So the Prime Minister who ‘doesn’t mind looking funny’ could actually be a martyr for the cause that keeps Britain on the remain side (her original side) of a Brexit and push the short term decisions into the never never — the desire of every modern day politician.
