Theresa May’s difficult week

These are tough times for Theresa May on the road to Brexit.
The prime minister is facing a rebellion from lawmakers in her own Conservative Party over her secrecy about strategy, while her lawyers had a difficult first day as the Supreme Court began considering if she or Parliament has the right to start the exit talks.
A Labour Party motion set to be debated in Parliament demands that May promise to publish a plan for Brexit before triggering the Article 50 procedure that sets the two-year countdown clock ticking.
Tory lawmaker Anna Soubry said on Monday the motion is “eminently supportable” and that up to 40 of her colleagues could support it.
Over at the Supreme Court, the 11 justices repeatedly challenged some of government lawyer James Eadie’s arguments. The judges focused on the fact that lawmakers had approved the 1972 treaty that paved the way for Britain to join the
EU, with one judge calling it a “joint effort.”
A loss for the prime minister would put her under even more pressure to disclose further information about her Brexit plans.
May’s office dismissed calls for more details. “We won’t be revealing our cards before we have to,” her spokesman Greg Swift told reporters in London on Monday.
Police in riot vans gathered near the court to control protesters for and against Brexit. Where once there had been warnings of a crowd of 100,000 they instead had to oversee a small, albeit noisy, gathering featuring a couple of retirees, a double-decker bus full of anti-leave campaigners in full judge regalia and Alba, a dog draped in an EU flag.
Luckily for May she has escaped London for meetings in Bahrain, where she declined to rule out paying to maintain some access to Europe’s single market.
“We will be looking to negotiate the best possible terms that we can with the European Union… So I say crucially this is not about how we can take bits of what we’ve already got but what our new relationship with the EU is.”

Foreign Pressure
The pressure on May from abroad could also intensify as European Commission negotiator Michel Barnier speaks to reporters in Brussels for the first time since taking the job in July.
Last week Barnier told European government officials that the EU and UK likely had just 15 months to strike a Brexit deal once May triggers the talks, according to two people familiar with the matter. The reason time is tight is that the European Parliament will need a few months to debate the pact.

Bank Taxes
Financial companies paid £71.4 billion ($91 billion) in tax in the latest fiscal year, according to data released by the City of London Corporation on Tuesday, boosting the case for banks to be offered help throughout Brexit. Finance accounted for 11.5 percent of government revenues in the year through March as the tax take from the sector gained 7.4 percent from the previous year. Mark Boleat, the corporation’s policy chairman, said the statistics underscored the importance of the City of London and how it “arguably stands the most to lose as negotiations loom.”
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond and Brexit Secretary David Davis on Monday told executives from banks including HSBC and Goldman Sachs that they would seek the “best deal” possible for finance in Brexit.
Still, the Daily Telegraph reported they also said the industry would not get special treatment over other sectors. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney did his bit for banks by telling Channel 4 News it was “absolutely desirable” to have a transition between leaving the EU and whatever new trade deal was established with the bloc afterwards.

Brexit Bullets
Brexit could be a chance to boost Britain’s dire productivity, says McKinsey Norway seeks clarity on Brexit before making deal on UK trade UK prepares WTO schedules to lower Brexit disruption to trade Swedish nationalists eye power with EU’s dominoes poised to fall Government says millions of EU citizens living in UK will need ID after Brexit Paris mega-campus starts to seduce London tech startups

On the Markets
Unlike the Brexit referendum, investors took Italy’s rejection of the government’s constitutional changes in stride, in part because polls had, for once, predicted the
result. While the euro touched a 20-month low in the wake of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s resignation announcement, the currency later reversed its slump.

And Finally…
So you think 2016 was challenging? What if 2017 saw the rise of populist leaders across Europe, electoral defeat for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a meltdown in Brexit negotiations and the euro
entering a tailspin?

—Bloomberg

Simon Kennedy is Bloomberg’s Brexit
news editor