Just over a month before Brexit, eight members of the Labour Party in Britain’s Parliament have just quit to form a new “Independent Group.” Now, astonishingly, they have been joined by three members of the Conservative party.
Significantly, all of the Labour MPs had been supporters of remaining in the European Union, and all were frustrated by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s continued support for Brexit, among other issues. At the very least, this will split the Labour vote at the next election, and the most prominent Labour defector, Chuka Umunna, hopes that soon other disaffected MPs will join them.
At the same moment, the Conservatives are experiencing their own existential crisis. Last week, Prime Minister Theresa May had to send a letter to her MPs with threats that, if they don’t support her deal, “history will judge them.”
And then, Nigel Farage has formed a Brexit group that garnered over 100,000 new supporters in its first week. With this loosening of party affiliations, Parliament seems to be realigning more along either pro- or anti-Brexit lines.
As the law currently stands, Britain will leave the EU on March 29, deal or no deal. This will occur 3 years after Parliament first gave its consent to hold the Brexit referendum. During that time, there have been numerous attempts to thwart or mitigate the result, yet no amount of delays, threats, or double-deals have succeeded in stopping it.
It can be argued that a no-deal Brexit is the only true form of Brexit, as any type of contract with the EU comes with strings attached. This is possibly why “Remainers” are the keenest to sign one.
A stereotype for politicians is that they crave power, but, although the British public has voted to give the executive more authority than it has held in almost 50 years, strangely, the majority of MPs don’t want it. These “Remainer” politicians would rather see that power reside at much higher levels than retrograde national parliaments, as they now consider them to be.
The key issue of our time is to get the balance right between increasing cooperation between nations and keeping their sovereignties intact. As the Brexit shockwave reverberates across the continent, voters are now increasingly opposing EU efforts to subsume their own countries to make a new European super-state.
As for the economic arguments for leaving, there is a good answer: Britain should sign a new trade deal with the U.S. before it agrees to one with the EU, in order to focus minds in Brussels.
So, I was delighted that a $16.5 billion “Mutual Recognition Agreement” was signed between the U.S. and the U.K. on Valentine’s Day, as a precursor to a new free trade deal.
The problem with May’s deal with the EU is that it is not a free-trade agreement. She would pay the EU $45 billion just to keep access to its markets and to give the EU continued control over the U.K. after it leaves.
Britain has a massive trade deficit with the EU, especially Germany. This means that if WTO tariffs are imposed after March 29, it will negatively affect European countries’ economies far more than Britain’s. Even though it is the importer who pays the 10 percent tax, exporters on the continent don’t want to see Britain react to tariffs by purchasing cheaper goods from elsewhere.
These fears have led to calls to the EU from European manufacturers to stop its hard bargaining, but there are no signs of that as yet.
At some point in the near future, there will be a second vote on May’s deal. She lost the first one on Jan. 15 by a record margin. Since then, she has been trying to bring MPs around by seeking concessions from the EU on the contentious Northern Ireland backstop, but she has had little success there.
If she loses this next vote, as seems likely, the plotting and scheming over Britain’s future will go into overdrive, perhaps until the eleventh hour on that historic Friday at the end of March. When Britons go back to work on Monday, April Fool’s Day, which side do you suppose will feel the biggest?
Andrew Davies is a U.K.-based video producer and scriptwriter.
