May losing Brexit control despite gamble on backstop

Bloomberg

Theresa May faces losing control of Brexit to Parliament on Tuesday in a series of crucial votes that will shape Britain’s split from the European Union.
Despite a last minute gamble aimed at buying off rebels in her Conservative Party, the prime minister was expected to face a knife-edge battle to block a proposal that would hand Parliament the power to delay the process and prevent a no-deal divorce.
The leadership of the opposition Labour Party was preparing to order its MPs to vote for the amendment, put forward by Labour’s Yvette Cooper and Tory Nick Boles as May scrambled for a compromise all sides could support.
In a dramatic meeting Monday evening, the prime minister effectively abandoned the agreement she’s spent the past 18 months negotiating with the EU and threw the weight of her government behind a separate proposal to re-write the deal.
May urged hundreds of Conservative politicians crammed into a room inside Parliament to support another amendment that would strip out the so-called backstop plan for the Irish border, wrecking a compromise she’s agreed to with the EU in the hope of securing one with her own party.
May’s move was intended to win over hardline Brexit backers who joined with opposition MPs on January 15 to reject her EU divorce package. It was the biggest government defeat in the House of Commons for more than a century and prompted two weeks of soul-searching and debate over how to resolve the impasse inside the government.
Previously implacable factions in the Conservative Party have even held private talks to seek a consensus around asking the EU for a modified backstop and an extra year’s transition. Whatsapp discussions between politicians, including leading euroskeptic Jacob Rees-Mogg and Pro-EU Nicky Morgan, were made public Monday night and confirmed by the two sides.
If the House of Commons does not ratify a Brexit agreement, the UK will tumble out of the bloc with no new trading terms in place on March 29. That risks a recession, a hit to the pound and a crash in house prices, according to official analysis from the authorities in Britain.

Irish Backstop
May, who was expected to close Tuesday’s debate, now hopes her Tory party will say clearly what it wants to change in the deal she’s struck with the EU. Her aim is to send a message to Brussels that the Irish border backstop must be ditched or radically redrafted, and persuade the EU to change position so a new deal can pass through Parliament.
According to an EU official, though, the amendment proposed by Graham Brady has little chance of persuading the bloc to make compromises. The proposal appears to only leave scope for the backstop to be overtaken by a better solution — of which there is no evidence of one at this point. It will be “extraordinarily difficult” for the UK to win concessions or remove the backstop unless it moves its own red lines, the official said.
May, who was supposed to meet with her cabinet on Tuesday morning, also faces major hurdles when her latest gambit is put to a test in a vote expected in the Commons later in the day.
So far, May’s euroskeptic colleagues in the European Research Group have said they’re unlikely to be persuaded to support her call, though they will not finalize their position until just before Tuesday’s votes.