Friday was supposed to be “Brexit Day,” when the United Kingdom once again became a sovereign nation independent of the European Union. Instead, it was the day that the UK’s parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s awful Brexit deal for the third time.
Astonishingly, it’s not entirely Theresa May’s fault. Just mostly.
May has lost power in great chunks since grabbing the PM job when David Cameron resigned. She called a snap election in 2017 and lost her party’s majority in Parliament in the result.
Her critics in the UK and the EU have levied severe criticism for her action invoking Article 50 of the EU’s principal treaty, triggering the two-year period to negotiate an exit deal before she had any plan for negotiating such a deal. Those criticisms are all correct, but do nothing to resolve the crisis that Brexit has come to be.
May’s deal includes the “Irish backstop,” a provision designed to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. If invoked by the EU after a transition period that lasts until the end of 2020, the backstop would effectively keep the entire UK in the EU indefinitely.
The backstop is just one of the biggest stumbling blocks in May’s deal. (The Irish are being at least slightly more helpful than they were during Easter week 1916.)
The backstop, and other features of May’s deal, led Parliament to reject it by 230 votes in January and by 149 votes earlier in March. In the 29 March vote, May lost by only 58 votes. Before that vote, May promised that if her plan were approved, she’d resign. Despite her enormous unpopularity and clear failure as PM, even that wasn’t enough to get her bad deal passed.
