Brexit pushes UK to brink as government fights to survive

Bloomberg

The UK stands at its most dangerous crossroads in decades after Parliament emphatically rejected Theresa May’s Brexit deal and left her facing an uncomfortable vote to oust her government.
The humiliating defeat on Tuesday evening, the biggest for any government in modern history, leaves May’s divorce agreement with the European Union all but dead and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn trying to force a general election.
While May believes she will survive Wednesday’s no-confidence vote, it’s unclear how long she — or her Brexit strategy — will last.
With the UK due to leave the EU in 10 weeks, there is growing alarm among British and European politicians that May will fail to end the impasse in time to avoid the potential economic catastrophe of leaving the EU without a deal. Any alternatives, including calling a second referendum, would likely require the EU to extend the March 29 departure deadline.
The prime minister said she will start cross-party talks this week to try to reach a consensus, but in such a febrile atmosphere they may already be doomed. Corbyn dismissed her offer as too little, too late.
The dramatic, if not unexpected, events in the House of Commons marked another watershed for a country that used to be a pillar of democratic stability and is now at the mercy of the divisions sown by the 2016 referendum to leave Europe’s common market after 46 years of membership.

Landslide Loss
May lost the vote on approving her Brexit deal by 432 to 202. Giving her reaction afterward, she was barely able to contain her frustration.
“It is clear that the House does not support this deal,” May told the Commons. “But tonight’s vote tells us nothing about what it does support — nothing about how — or even if — it intends to honor the decision the British people took in a referendum Parliament decided to hold.”
Opposition to the deal has focussed on the backstop designed to keep the Irish border open, which anti-EU members of May’s Tory Party fear would permanently trap the UK in the bloc’s customs union. Members of Parliament have also objected to the size of the cash settlement for the EU and the level of access to European markets after the split.
If May loses Wednesday’s no-confidence vote, Britain will be on course for its third general election in four years. Many Conservatives on her side who voted against the Brexit deal said they’d support her leadership. If everyone on her side does turn out, her margin of safety is just 13 votes.

EU doubles down on Irish-border backstop
Bloomberg

The European Union is struggling to make sense of the massive defeat the British Parliament dealt to the Brexit deal agreed with Prime Minister Theresa May, but the bloc is refusing to remove
the Irish-border element that UK lawmakers most oppose.
“The backstop that we have agreed with the UK must remain a backstop and it must remain credible,” the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
The arrangement is designed to keep the Irish border open in all circumstances, which led many British politicians to vote against the deal because they fear it would permanently trap the UK in the bloc’s orbit.