The April 12 Brexit leave date has now passed, and Great Britain is still paying around £I billion a month to be a member of the European Union. Even this was a delay to the previous March 29 deadline, and now it has been moved again to October 31 – Halloween Day.
Those dates were supposedly set to give an ultimatum to the EU to make concessions on trade, or else, the U.K. would be leaving without a deal and revert to World Trade Organization terms and tariffs.
“No deal is better than a bad deal,” Prime Minister Theresa May said over 100 times. So, why did she then flinch and delay exiting? Conservative MP Owen Paterson claims “the government was never going to countenance no-deal.”
Some threat anyway when she had to plead with the EU to set the date. But what if the “no-deal exit” wasn’t intended to threaten the EU after all, but rather her own Parliament?
What if the deadline was really put there to force members of Parliament to vote for her withdrawal agreement? Either that, or they would be responsible for Britain “falling off a no-deal cliff edge and into the abyss,“ et cetera, et cetera.
When her bluff was called and the vote still failed, she pleaded some more with the EU to extend the date to give her colleagues more time to come around.
May and her long-serving “Remain”-voting finance minister, Philip Hammond, have been working to modify the result of the Brexit referendum ever since she took office in 2016.
Alarm bells should have rung in July 2018, when she cajoled Cabinet ministers into accepting an EU-friendly plan that she had secretly drawn up with nonelected civil servants. This so undermined the negotiating position of her Brexit minister, David Davis, that he resigned a few days later.
Although the Chequers Plan as a whole was rejected by MPs and in Brussels, some parts of it made it into the Withdrawal Agreement she later signed with the EU.
MPs have since voted against that deal three times, but as the margin of defeat keeps narrowing, from 230 to 149 to 58, she aims to bring it back a fourth time, or more if needed.
Three years after the referendum, Britain is still a member of the EU and Parliament has taken “no-deal” off the menu. The only choices left for MPs now are to vote for her agreement or abandon Brexit altogether.
The deal has been criticized for potentially separating Northern Ireland from the U.K. and keeping Britain subject to ongoing EU controls without any representation: a “vassal state” as leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg has described it.
Her latest overtures to the Labour Party to help get her deal through could also lead to Britain staying in the EU Customs Union and unable to make its own trade deals.
This is downplayed by Philip Hammond who recently gloated: “In a year’s time, when this is behind us and people are focused on other things, all this will be forgotten.”
Job done, or so he hopes. But Brexit supporters are fighting back.
A group called the English Democrats has brought a case to the High Court to rule that Britain has already left the EU, as there was no basis in U.K. law for changing the original March 29 default exit date.
And there is now Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, which aims to become the EU’s worst nightmare and then wants to challenge the British two-party system.
Farage hopes to do well in the upcoming EU parliamentary elections, which Britain will now have to participate in at a cost of over £100 million.
With 17.4 million largely disillusioned “Leave” voters out there to try to appeal to, could a post-Brexit Britain see Farage becoming its prime minister one day?
Andrew Davies is a U.K.-based video producer and scriptwriter.
