Britain 'could leave EU by 22 May if MPs vote for customs
union'
Official close to Brexit talks says EU leaders could sign
off political declaration on 10 April
Follow Monday’s Brexit developments - live
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
Mon 1 Apr 2019 10.09 BST Last modified on Mon 1 Apr 2019
10.27 BST
Guy Verhofstadt described the prospect of a lengthy
extension of article 50 as ‘disastrous’ but still avoidable. Photograph:
Francisco Seco/AP
Britain could be out of the EU by 22 May if the Commons
backs a customs union in Monday night’s indicatives votes, according to
officials close to the Brexit negotiations in Brussels.
With Downing Street’s agreement, a reference to the
intention to negotiate an ambitious customs deal would be swiftly written into
the political declaration and formally signed off at the EU leaders’ summit on
10 April.
Brussels would then expect all the necessary withdrawal
legislation to be passed by parliament by the end of May to avoid the holding
of European elections in Britain.
MPS were due to take part on Monday evening in a second
round of indicative votes on a potential solution to the Brexit impasse.
The prime minister’s deal, in which the political
declaration does not tie both sides to negotiating a customs union, has been
voted down three times – by 230, 149 and 58 votes.
The writing into the deal of a customs union, an idea tabled
by the former Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke, lost by only eight votes when
it was voted upon last Monday along side seven other ways forward, with both
the SNP and the Liberal Democrats abstaining.
“The eight proposals that were rejected earlier will now be
limited and combined with each other and this can be voted on Monday and
possibly Wednesday,” Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit
coordinator, told the Belgian radio station VRT.
“There was almost a
majority in favour of a customs union with the EU. What we expect is that a
proposal could reach a majority around the customs union and then we are
prepared, on the EU side, to renegotiate the declaration and to include that
customs union therein,” he added.
Verhofstadt went on to describe the prospect of a lengthy
extension of article 50, and the need for British MEPs, as “disastrous” but
still avoidable.
He said: “If that political statement is adjusted, I think a
majority can be found in the British House of Commons, because you will get
cross-border cooperation between Labor and the Conservatives.
“That new political statement can then be approved at a
European summit on 10 April and then we will give the British the opportunity
to formalise it in English legislation by 22 May”.
The cabinet is divided over whether the government should
follow parliament’s lead if a majority is found for a customs union.
Over the weekend, the justice secretary, David Gauke, said
the prime minister would have to “look very closely” if MPs back a customs
union in a fresh round of indicative votes.
But on Monday, the chief secretary to the Treasure, Liz
Truss, who is widely believed to be planning a leadership bid, expressed her
opposition to the proposal, falsely claiming that the prime minister’s deal had
lost less heavily when put to the Commons.
Truss insisted a no deal Brexit should remain a possibility.
“We are well prepared for no deal, I don’t have any fear of no deal”, she told
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We are in an era of difficult choices.”
Labour is backing the idea of a customs union but its policy
is to demand a say in the EU’s trade policy. Brussels would likely seek to
avoid a row on this issue ahead of the withdrawal agreement and political
declaration finally being ratified by the Commons.
But one EU official close to the negotiations admitted the
UK would face stiff opposition to anything more than a symbolic consultative
role.
“When you consider EU trade deals are mixed agreements,
there are the member states’ views, the European commission, and the voice of
the European parliament”, the official said. “What can you do with a third
country? Not much.”
Over the weekend, Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson,
suggested that any Brexit deal should be put to a confirmatory public vote to
“bring the country back together”.
Petitions and jokes will not halt this march into Brexit
calamity
John Harris
Our response to the crisis has been too English. By the time
the irony turns to anger, it will be too late
@johnharris1969
Mon 1 Apr 2019 06.00 BST Last modified on Mon 1 Apr 2019
07.37 BST
Illustration by Thomas Pullin
It could conceivably have happened on any day over the past
couple of years, but my own peak of anger about Brexit and its absurdities
arrived last Wednesday. Jacob Rees-Mogg was in the Commons chamber, making
quips about the fact that another Conservative MP had been to Winchester rather
than Eton (“My honourable friend makes a characteristically Wykehamist point –
highly intelligent, but fundamentally wrong” – how we all laughed).
My mind’s eye was still switching back to the spectacle of
Iain Duncan Smith arriving at Chequers in an open-topped vintage sports car.
Meanwhile, there were reports of Theresa May’s address to Conservative MPs
being made all the more dramatic by the sound of her voice cracking: something
conspicuously absent when she has talked about everything from the Grenfell
Tower disaster to her role in the Windrush tragedy, but there we are.
In the classic sense of a very modern word, we are being
trolled. Yet the outward mood of many people opposed to Brexit remains subdued,
weary and fatalistic. As austerity grinds on and the social fabric carries on
fraying, the impossibility of leaving the EU without truly dire economic and
social damage is self-evident. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and – no, really –
Dominic Raab are jostling to get the keys to 10 Downing Street. Our system of
government has creaked to a halt; the official opposition is divided, confused
and often mute. Anger might seem like the most apposite response, but what we
have mostly seen is a strange passivity.
Even on the march for a second referendum a week ago, the
now-customary humour captured on the placards and banners too often seemed to
capture a certain weariness, and the expectation of defeat: “If EU leave me
now, EU’ll take away the biggest part of me”; “Think about the halloumi
prices”; “I’m not one to make a fuss but the past couple of years have been,
quite frankly, farcical”. By the time I came upon an ad hoc sound system
blaring out Kool & The Gang’s Celebration in Trafalgar Square, the
dissonances had become too much to bear. I was in a party of five, and we all
awkwardly joined in. But why? What was there to celebrate? How exactly were we
actually meant to feel?
The answers, perhaps, lay in the fact that we were in
England. Undoubtedly, there was a certain fury in many people’s minds, but the
carapace of irony and self-deprecation that obscured it brought to mind one of
the ingrained aspects of national identity pointed out by the social
anthropologist Kate Fox. In her classic book Watching the English, she writes
about the deep layers of performance and self-mockery that smother even
heartfelt misery and anger: “Even if you are feeling desperate, you must
pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate.”
More generally, she talks about “perverse obliqueness”, “emotional
constipation” and a “general inability to engage in a direct and
straightforward fashion with other human beings”. This has political as well as
personal manifestations. People have spent two years calling for a “people’s
vote” when what they actually wanted was the cancellation of the whole thing.
Pro-remain MPs and campaigners now fixate on Norway-plus, common market 2.0 and
MVs 3 and 4, but too often avert their eyes from the deep questions of history,
culture and what kind of country we are that ultimately define what this is all
about.
Perhaps the framing of an issue of almost unprecedented
importance in terms of arcana shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. At the start
of this whole saga, let us not forget, the official remain campaign could bring
itself to say little more stirring about the prospect of leaving the EU than
the warning that people would be “£38 a week” worse off and that house prices
would fall by “10 to 18%”. And so it has gone on. Brexit demands to be debated
in the most fundamental terms – but England being England, it is too often
reduced to the political equivalent of small talk.
That said, recent(ish) history has had no end of political
causes that attracted an altogether more passionate response, from the struggle
against the far-right upsurge of the late 1970s, through massed shows of
support for CND and the miners’ strike, to the poll tax riot of 1990 – the last
time that street-level politics forced a change of government policy, and an
event I heard a few people muttering about on the people’s vote march. Thirty
years on, we face the final completion of a Tory project started back then, and
the recasting of Britain – or, rather England – as a crabby, racist,
inward-looking hole, and to what response? Jokes, mutterings, clicks, sporadic
Twitterstorms, but nothing remotely comparable.
Some of the explanation lies in two missing actors in this
drama: the Labour leadership – and, with one or two exceptions, big voices in
what is left of the trade union movement. But there are also even bigger forces
in play. Forty years of post-Thatcher individualism have done their work, so
that protest is now not a matter of collective agency (in other words, “we can
stop this”), but the kind of atomised conscience-salving I first glimpsed at
the time of the Iraq war, with the appearance of that deathly slogan “Not in my
name”. Moreover, in a world as over-mediated as ours, each day brings a
different spectacle – a march, a parliamentary vote, some or other drama at the
top – so simultaneously ubiquitous and short-lived that joining everything
together and having any sense of clear meaning becomes all but impossible.
Politics becomes fidgety; strategy is lost amid tactics. To take that down to
brass tacks, even if six million signatures on the petition to revoke article
50 represents a creditable achievement, what should everyone do next?
It is part of the tragedy of Brexit that the opportunists
now pushing the country towards disaster have not only been better at making
their case with big stories and emotional oomph, but have not been convincingly
challenged on that terrain. Whether we are talking about Tory ultra-leavers,
that indefatigable chancer Nigel Farage or the new English fascists among those
who turned up last week in Parliament Square, the same basic point applies:
claims of treason and betrayal – let alone their ludicrous readings of history
– must be contested.
Put another way, I am not sure that the best way to answer
this grim coalition of wreckers is with irony and understatement, an obsession
with parliamentary procedure, and platform lineups featuring Michael Heseltine.
Going back four decades, there might be something in the example set by Rock
Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and a bold, popular, singularly un-English
approach memorably summed up by one of its activists: “For a while we managed
to create, in our noisy, messy, unconventional way, an emotional alternative to
nationalism and patriotism, a celebration of a different kind of pride and
solidarity.”
Out in the everyday world, the ongoing Westminster drama
feels like it only scratches the surface of what is actually going on. And so
the mad riddle of these times goes on, complete with one key mystery: that as
the country drifts and the government falls apart, even the people involved in
anti-Brexit protest and dissent seem confused, and far too quiet – and by the
time our passions finally start stirring, it is likely to be far, far too late.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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