LONDON, March 25 — Britain’s bickering parliament has splintered into rival factions over the direction of Brexit, cutting across traditional party loyalties and forging strange alliances.
With the Brexit deadline postponed briefly, parliamentary mathematics remains difficult to predict ahead of this week’s anticipated votes on the way forward.
Here is the current political lay of the land.
May loyalists
In the second vote on the divorce deal struck between Prime Minister Theresa May and EU leaders, three-quarters of the 314 Conservative MPs voting backed her agreement.
The March 12 numbers were up on the first vote held on January 15, when less than two-thirds supported it.
However, across the whole of parliament, the first vote ended in a 432-202 overwhelming defeat and the second vote went 391-242, still leaving May well short.
Government members would have to resign to vote against the deal, while some on the backbenches just want to see a deal done and the nagging uncertainties vanquished.
May hopes that more MPs join them, under the joint pressures of time and of fear that their version of a purer Brexit will be subverted by those who want no deal or no Brexit at all.
Backstop die-hards
The key stumbling block in ensuring full Conservative support for the deal is the “backstop” solution for keeping the border open between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.
May’s minority government relies on the 10 votes of the DUP, a small Northern Irish party that supports Brexit but bitterly opposes the “backstop”.
They are joined by scores of Conservative veteran eurosceptics who say the stop-gap arrangement would tie Britain into an open-ended customs union with the EU, turning it into a “vassal state”.
There are few signs that the DUP will soften their opposition. If they did, many Conservative hold-outs would follow suit.
No deal
The hardest of the Conservative eurosceptic hardcore likely numbers dozens.
These opponents of May’s deal think London’s best bet is to make a clean break with Brussels without any binding deal, allowing Britain to immediately set lower tariffs for trade outside the EU and finalise deals with the rest of the world.
They champion free-trade rules and see government warnings about border chaos and an economic recession as scaremongering.
No no-deal
There is very little MPs can agree on but ruling out a no-deal Brexit managed to garner majority support in the House of Commons — just.
On March 14, MPs voted by 312 to 308 to reject a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances.
This group spans the political divide. The “no no-dealers” are mostly centrists who have either long opposed Brexit or grown frustrated with May’s inability to win over critics at home and abroad.
Second referendum
Calls for a second Brexit referendum rang out almost as soon as the Leave camp won the first vote.
However, the option does not have a majority in parliament, nor, according to polls, widespread public support.
Its proponents argue that May’s deal doesn’t deliver what was advertised during the campaign and that Leave voters didn’t know what they were voting for.
MPs from across the parties back the People’s Vote campaign and many joined a huge protest in London this weekend organisers estimated topped a million attendees.
May calls the idea undemocratic, but finance minister Philip Hammond yesterday described it as “a coherent proposition and it deserves to be considered along with the other proposals”.
However, there is no agreement about what question another ballot would ask —— or what would happen if Brexit won again. — AFP
