Brexit

It seems that the editors of the New York Times will print any nonsense about Britain — the British live on mutton and oatmeal! — so long as it confirms their prejudices about Brexit. ‘With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia,’ Sam Byers wrote on Saturday. The British, who are in fact more tolerant of immigration than any other European people, are supposedly ‘poisoned’ by ‘colonial arrogance’ and ‘dreamy jingoism’. Britain, whose stock market carries more trades per day than Wall Street, is somehow a ‘backwater’.

I’ve had a lot of flak for describing Saturday’s march for a ‘People’s Vote’ as ‘disturbing’. Angry emailers inform me it was actually a super-polite demo at which children and even pets joined hundreds of thousands of adults in a good-natured traipse through central London calling for Brexit to be rethought. It’s true the marchers were polite. And it’s true there were pets. I saw a dog with a ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ sticker attached to its head. But the politeness bordering on tweeness of Saturday’s mass march cannot disguise its true and, yes, disturbing aim — to overthrow a great act of democracy.

A point of significant tension at this morning’s cabinet will be over whether the PM is to allow her ministers and MPs to vote with their consciences on the indicative votes today and tomorrow to find any Brexit – or no-Brexit plan – that a majority of MPs can support AND on the statutory instrument (SI) that will delay the 29 March date in law for exiting the EU. Apparently the whips want a free vote on the SI, so ministers – including some of them – can vote against it and keep their jobs. And more remainy ministers – led by Greg Clark, Amber Rudd and David Gauke – want a free vote on the indicative votes, so they can signal their support for a softer Brexit or a referendum without losing their jobs. How will the PM jump?

Ever since MPs first voted to trigger Article 50 everyone has been told that Britain, by law, will be leaving the EU on 29 March. And if that date was ever to change, then Parliament would have to vote for it to change. That's the British constitution which can be summed up in eight words: 'What the Queen-in-Parliament enacts is law.' As the Supreme Court debacle reminded us, only Parliament can change laws that Parliament makes.  So unless Parliament can approve a new Brexit plan, then we leave on Friday next week. Only this week it all got a bit complicated. After the Prime Minister sought an Article 50 extension in Brussels this week, EU leaders offered her two options: 1. For Article 50 to be extended until May 22 on the condition May passes her deal 2.

At the moment, the Brexit deal isn’t going to pass. As I say in The Sun this morning, getting it through was always going to be tough, but the errors that Mrs May has made this week have made it even more difficult. As one Secretary of State puts it, ‘She would have been much better off spending three days in bed.’ By putting no deal back on the table, she encouraged the ERG—the Brexit hardliners in her own party—to believe that voting against her deal would get them what they want. Her speech on Wednesday night criticising MPs was also ill-judged, given that they are who she needs to win over. It was particularly mistaken given that May had turned down an invitation to address her own MPs that evening.

For many people, next Friday was supposed to be a celebration. Boris Johnson spoke about an ‘independence day’ marking the beginning of a new era of national self-confidence. But as we approach 29 March, not even ardent Brexiteers can claim that there is anything to celebrate. Theresa May has been reduced to asking, or rather begging, the EU for an extension to Article 50 — something that the EU has said it will grant only if Britain can provide a good reason for needing the extra time. So far, the Prime Minister has not provided one, apart from the prolonging of every-one’s agony. When parliament voted to enact Article 50 two years ago, the challenge seemed daunting but perfectly possible.