A man walks past an UK government Brexit information campaign poster at a bus stop in central London, Britain, October 15, 2019. REUTERS/Toby Melville
There’s a Brexit countdown in
progress, but whether it’s counted in hours in order to end at midnight on October
16 or in days to end at midnight on Halloween is anybody’s guess.
The European Commission wants the
terms of an agreement for the UK to leave the European Union to be finalized
before the next European Council opens in Brussels on October 17, since the
traditional duty of the heads of government meeting there is to approve or
reject whatever needs to be decided, rather than to continue debate on specific
terms.
But British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson has set the clocks at his official residence at Number 10 Downing
Street to mark the days and hours until midnight on October 31, his constantly
repeated deadline for Britain’s exit from the European Union.
If Johnson’s negotiators can somehow
secure an agreement by midnight on October 17 or, to be realistic, manage to
secure sufficient progress to ensure that talks continue even while Europe’s
leaders are meeting, then there’s a chance that the champagne will start to
flow at Downing Street on Halloween.
But if no deal is struck in the next
forty-eight hours or so, then the UK’s House of Commons is likely to witness
scenes of frenzied activity on October 19 as it gathers for an extremely rare
Saturday sitting to consider the outcome of the Brussels summit. The same
applies if the deal is too controversial to secure a parliamentary majority,
since the ruling Conservative Party is currently twenty-three votes short of an
overall majority in the 650-Seat House of Commons, not least because of the
expulsion of twenty-one MPs from the party on September 5 after they rebelled
against the Government in order to back legislation preventing a no-deal
Brexit.
When the Commons meets on October 19
it will gather to consider various potential courses of action. The most
immediate issue will be whether Parliament needs to take further action in
support of the legislation—passed against the wishes of the Government—that
mandates the prime minister to request an extension to the October 31 deadline
if he has failed to secure a deal by October 18. The Government has said it
will comply with this legislation, but its continued insistence that Britain
will leave the EU on October 31, and talk of the prime minister sending a
second letter that would effectively countermand the first, has raised concerns
that any ostensible compliance will be accompanied by moves to negate the
request.
If it looks as if the Government is
trying to ensure there is no extension, and that Britain looks to be crashing
out of the European Union without a deal on October 31, that increases the
prospect that the Commons will both hold—and pass—a vote of no confidence in
the Government. This would once have been expected to prompt the immediate
resignation of the prime minister, but the Fixed Term Parliament Act passed in 2011
makes the situation more complicated since it allows for a fourteen-day period
in which the prime minister can soldier on in office if he can convince the
Queen that nobody else can command a majority, thus placing the onus on the
opposition parties to unite sufficiently to support an alternative nominee for
the premiership.
At present, the fractured nature of
the opposition makes it far from clear that they will be able to unite behind
the most prominent potential nominee, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, even if it
is just on a caretaker basis pending an election.
But what if Johnson does manage to
secure an agreement with Brussels? For once, Downing Street has been extremely
tight-lipped on the negotiations, which is probably the best indication that
the government is seriously trying to reach an agreement.
If there is an agreement, it will
then have to secure parliamentary approval. Obviously, much will depend on the
precise terms of the agreement. But two points can be made. Firstly, the
Government currently relies on the support of nine MPs from Northern Ireland’s
Democratic Unionist Party for routine legislation. The question of how any
deal to leave the European Union can be squared with commitments to ensure
there is no customs border on the island of Ireland remains highly
controversial.
On the one hand, the 1998 Good
Friday agreement that ended thirty years of “The Troubles” relies considerably
on the fact that there is no hard border between the British province of
Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland; on the other, the
British government is preparing to leave the European Union’s Customs Union and
Single Market, while the Republic of Ireland as a full EU member state, will
remain inside them. There is no guarantee that the DUP will support what seems
to be the current government proposal, that it is prepared to conduct
EU-related inspections and collect EU-related duties on goods passing between
Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, in effect creating a customs barrier
between one part of the United Kingdom and another.
Secondly, can the Government win
over a sufficient number of MPs from other parties, notably Labour MPs
representing areas that voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, to secure
an overall majority? This remains doubtful, but not impossible.
A major development in recent days
is the increasing prospect that the opposition will unite sufficiently to add
an amendment to any Brexit bill that insists the UK’s actual departure should
first be subject to a confirmatory referendum. The Government is fiercely
opposed to such a referendum, but it may turn out to be the only way in which
it can secure a majority for any Brexit legislation it brings to Parliament.
There are other possibilities. The
turmoil may well continue, with little or nothing resolved except that the Government,
kicking and screaming, duly requests an extension and then seeks to call a
general election in an attempt to gain sufficient extra seats in a new House of
Commons to pass its Brexit legislation.
In a sense, that seemed to be the
purpose of the speech delivered by Queen Elizabeth II to Parliament on October
14, written for her by the Government, in which she announced a series of bills
that have no chance of becoming law unless Boris Johnson can first secure an
election victory.
So soon there may be two more
potential countdowns. One to a referendum, which would take about six months to
organize, and one to a general election, which could be held in late November
or early December.
As to what might constitute the
final countdown, perhaps one should simply remember that The Final Countdown
was a smash hit in 1986 and included the lyrics:
“We’re leaving together,
but still it’s farewell. And maybe we’ll come back.”
And who recorded the song? A Swedish
group—called “Europe.”
John M. Roberts is a UK-based senior
fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and Global Energy Center.
There’s a Brexit countdown in progress, but whether it’s counted in hours in order to end at midnight on October 16 or in days to end at midnight on Halloween is anybody’s guess.
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