Now Parliament Must Step Up

The government has failed to deliver a plan which parliament will accept. Given May’s spider’s web of red lines, second guessed as the priorities of Leave voters who were lied to during the referendum campaign, the deal she offered was fair and workable. But a fractious parliament, within which discipline has largely broken down, threw it out. This was in part because May’s plan was designed to appease crackpot nationalists in her own party whose fantasies are undeliverable.

This was never going to work. Instead she should have built an alliance across the Commons, where there is a combined majority of Leavers and Remainers willing to compromise and back a deal which falls short of their ideals, but delivers and orderly Brexit from which the country can construct a new future, not the No Deal wrecking ball of the nutters.

Now parliament has to step up to the plate and offer options which will work and which the EU will back. It will do this by putting down amendments to May’s deal. One of these demands, the scrapping of the Irish Backstop and replacing it with ‘New Arrangements’ is ridiculous, because the EU, time and again, has said all possible arrangements were discussed during the negotiations with the UK, which ended in May’s Deal and there will be no changes. This is the amendment the government has chosen to back. If it passes it will get nowhere because it just waffle, not a plan. If it fails it is another defeat for the government.

What is a plan, is an amendment to delay Brexit, if the government cannot come forward with an EU acceptable deal that the Commons will back by the end of February. If that passes it will at least stop a crash. If it fails and nothing else meaningful goings through, beyond futile grandstanding, parliament will have failed the people whose best interests it was elected to defend. That will have consequences. Big ones. Especially for the Tories.