British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a growing threat that she could be forced to delay Brexit, a move that risks a showdown with eurosceptics in her Conservative Party just weeks before the UK is due to leave the EU.
With the Brexit crisis going down to the wire, May has been struggling to get the kind of changes from the EU that she has said she needs to get her divorce deal through a deeply divided British Parliament and smooth the country’s biggest policy shift in more than 40 years.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where the EU and League of Arab States were holding a summit, she met the union’s leaders to try to win support for her efforts to make her deal more attractive to parliament, where frustrated lawmakers are gearing up to try to wrest control of Brexit from the government.
Photo: AFP
Her decision to push back a vote on her deal to next month, just days before Britain is due to leave, has prompted lawmakers to step up attempts to stop a no-deal Brexit, a scenario that many businesses have said could damage the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Several of their plans would involve extending the Article 50 procedure that limits the Brexit negotiating period to two years, delaying Britain’s departure beyond March 29 — something that May has said would only delay an inevitable decision.
When asked about a possible extension, a UK government official said that ministers were “considering what to do if parliament makes that decision” not to pass the deal.
“If we cannot get this deal across the line, we are facing the prospect of having to extend,” UK Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Defence People and Veterans Tobias Ellwood told BBC Radio.
The EU has said that it would consider an extension to the Brexit process, but only if the UK can offer evidence that such a delay would break the deadlock in parliament, which resoundingly voted down a deal last month in the biggest government defeat in modern British history.
At the EU-Arab League summit, May met German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte — a clear bid to get their support for her attempt to get substantive changes to a deal agreed in November last year.
However, she faces increasing frustration in Brussels, which has so far rebuffed her attempts to reopen the agreement.
When asked if he was running out of things to give on Brexit, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Sunday said: “I have a certain Brexit fatigue.”
May needs to find a way to assuage concerns in the UK over the Northern Irish “backstop,” an insurance policy to prevent the return of a hard border, and possible focus for renewed violence, between the UK country of Northern Ireland and EU-member Ireland.
However, with her efforts taking more time than expected, officials on both sides are increasingly suggesting a delay. So far, May has stuck to her line that she intends to lead the UK out of the EU on March 29.
On Sunday, when she announced that the vote in parliament on her Brexit agreement would only come by March 12, she maintained that a deal was still “within our grasp.”
Yet there are many who disagree.
Lawmakers in her Conservative Party and those in the Labour Party are stepping up efforts to try to ensure that May cannot take the UK out of the EU without a deal, at a vote that is due on Wednesday on the government’s next steps.
Yvette Cooper, a Labour lawmaker, has called on parliament to back her bid to seek to force the government to hand power to parliament if no deal has been approved by March 13 and to offer lawmakers the option of requesting an extension.
“The prime minister’s remarks today make it even more vital that the House of Commons votes for our bill to try to restore some common sense to this process,” Cooper said.
However, there is another, perhaps more attractive, proposal, from two Conservatives, which would delay Brexit to May 23, the start of the European Parliament elections, if lawmakers have not approved a deal by March 12.
A government official said that the proposal could be considered “helpful.”
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS