Brexit: May Writes to the EU Requesting an Extension

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Lou2U

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I was going to make this thread earlier today but as ever, things have been moving very quickly.


In a nutshell, Theresa May has written to the EU informing them she wants an extension until June 30th. The EU are going to be debating this beginning tomorrow, but their patience has unsurprisingly run out. Macron is threatening to veto but some are suggesting he is saying so partly on behalf of other members, because no matter what, Britain will blame the French for it. The EU also aren’t happy because the EU Parliament elections begin on May 23rd, and they would prefer us out then, or apply for a longer extension until the end of the year. May has so far said she doesn’t want Britain to participate - if we don’t, then it comes down to a choice between her deal and no deal only.

Just under an hour ago, she made a very short speech to the British public, laying the blame for the delay solely at the feet of members of Parliament. I can’t say what I really would like to about this speech because I’d get banned but I found it incredibly arrogant and patronising, to say the least. May is incapable of accepting any kind of responsibility for this mess that leaves us (at present) with 9 days to get a deal. She is still trying to appeal to the hardline Brexiteers in her party, despite knowing that if she continues, she will not be able to reach a consensus.

Last week it was her intention to bring back her deal for a third vote, also known as ‘MV3’ or Meaningful Vote 3. She was stopped by the Speaker of the House because Parliamentary law dictates that you can’t bring back something which has been roundly defeated without substantial changes. I’m not sure exactly what changes are now being made but Monday has been earmarked as a potential date for another vote.

In short (and to borrow one of May’s own phrases), ‘nothing has changed’. We may have an extension, but May has again alienated just about everyone with her own intransigence. I think it very difficult she will be able to get her deal through Parliament. I did think it looked a little more hopeful for her not too long ago but I really can’t see a way through this with the path she is continuing on.
 
I just want to reflect on her speech for a minute. The video is here.
In March 2017, I triggered the Article 50 process for the UK to exit the EU – and Parliament supported it overwhelmingly. Two years on, MPs have been unable to agree on a way to implement the UK’s withdrawal. As a result, we will now not leave on time with a deal on 29 March. This delay is a matter of great personal regret for me.
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And of this I am absolutely sure: you the public have had enough. You are tired of the infighting. You are tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows. Tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit when you have real concerns about our children’s schools, our National Health Service, and knife crime. You want this stage of the Brexit process to be over and done with. I agree. I am on your side. It is now time for MPs to decide.
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I know I said it above, but the arrogance here is something else. Mrs May does not speak to me when she says this, and she does not speak for me when she repeats the claim of “the British people just want us to get on with it” in Parliament, or anywhere else.

What bothers me the most is the phrase “arcane procedural rows”. Here, she is clearly referring to the Speaker preventing her from going against Parliamentary law. That again is arrogance, and also shows her attitude quite well. She is the PM of the first government to be in contempt of Parliament. She lost votes on her deal by the worst defeat in history and then by the fourth worst defeat in history. Yet she stands up and says, without a hint of irony, that she does not want the British people to vote again. I also have aversions to an idea of a People’s Vote, but the sheer hypocrisy of Mrs May never fails to astound me.
 
She simply doesn’t care about procedure and laws - she only wants to get her own way. It’s been a reoccurring theme with her ever since she was at the Home Office. She’s isolated herself from everyone - I can’t quite get my head around the fact she thought her speech would push MPs to back her deal. Quite an amusing scene on the BBC a little while ago with them not being able to find anyone at all supporting her speech.
 
I’d forgotten how much of a shambles that speech was for her. Very similar to the last couple of weeks - it never fails to strike me that she loses her voice when she needs it the most.
 
Lou2U said:
May is incapable of accepting any kind of responsibility for this mess that leaves us (at present) with 9 days to get a deal.
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Didn’t she have two years already to setup a Brexit deal as a result of the elections and she was unable to do that within two years. Now how is she going to succeed with only 9 days left. She seems somewhat incompetent and I don’t know why she was chosen to be PM. Are there other people in the UK who are better qualified than her, or does the UK generally have a lack of capable people?
 
AlNg said:
Didn’t she have two years already to setup a Brexit deal as a result of the elections and she was unable to do that within two years
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It’s been 1000 days since the referendum, if you can believe it.
AlNg said:
Now how is she going to succeed with only 9 days left
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That’s the million dollar question. I don’t believe an extension until June is going to change anything at all.
AlNg said:
She seems somewhat incompetent
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She is, massively.
AlNg said:
I don’t know why she was chosen to be PM. Are there other people in the UK who are better qualified than her, or does the UK generally have a lack of capable people?
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Believe it or not but she was widely seen as the most credible option at the time, and she was the most supported. I couldn’t even tell you the names of some of the other Conservative MPs who also took part in the leadership contest after the referendum. Boris Johnson was assumed to do so but at the last minute he was stabbed in the back by Michael Gove (currently the Environment Secretary), who was supposed to be supporting him but instead changed his mind to set up his own bid. That didn’t work out for him. The other person seen as an option was Andrea Leadsom, who had to pull out after she made some ill-advised comment about having a “tangible stake” in the country’s future because she had children and May didn’t. So at the time she was seen as pretty good. Now she really isn’t.
 
The polls that I have seen indicate that if it was put to a public vote today either to leave the EU or to stay, that the majority in the UK would vote to stay in the EU.
Further, I understand that there is opposition to the “backstop” in some sense but not in another. The opposition comes from allowing the EU to make rules over the UK, but OTOH, no one in Ireland, north or South wants to return to the hard borders. How is this going to be solved?
After all this debate and discussion how is it going to end up?
UK stays in EU
UK leaves EU without a deal
UK leaves EU with a different deal than the one rejected.
UK continues to get more extensions because they cannot make up their mind about what they want to do.
And of course there are questions about a second general popular vote on Brexit.
 
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It’s incredibly complex. Since her speech last night a petition to revoke Article 50 has got over half a million signatures, but she has of course rejected the idea.

A lot of MPs have also said she has put them at risk by blaming them. An article today says MPs have been booked cabs to take them from Parliament because of risk to their safety. A spokesperson for Mrs May said she “flatly rejected” the argument.

Today the EU Council meet to discuss Brexit but it’s unlikely they’ll come to a formal agreement today. Theresa May’s letter asking for an extension arrived too late for some leaders to be able to discuss the matter with their own parliaments.
 
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Anthony Eden can rest more easily now. There is a Prime Minister that has produced an even greater crisis than the Suez Crisis.
 
Theresa May’s appalling, hateful speech last night - trying to incite public anger against MPs and the UK Parliament for rejecting her universally detested deal, at a time when numerous politicians are receiving death threats - was the last straw for many, myself included.

It was a shocking, decisive moment in this entire three-year long crisis, when May revealed herself to be a self-serving, would-be demagogue willing to endanger the lives of members of her own parliament in a vain, and badly misfired, attempt to ‘save’ her image and crummy together some measly little political points against her ever-growing list of enemies, as the nation teeters on the brink of ruination.

People can only be patronized, silenced, ignored, defamed and humiliated for so long, until the ‘dam’ bursts and ordinary folk start speaking up for themselves.

And that’s exactly what has happened. Yet again, May tried to play her usual game of - "it’s not me, I’m this selfless advocate of the people, it’s all the fault of those evil, spiteful MPs for having the gall to reject my deal twice over. Direct all your anger towards them, take out my personal grudge and vengeance on them for daring to speak out against me".

It was frankly a disgusting spectacle. She has dishonoured her office and lowered herself before the eyes of an entire country and the world’s media to boot.

She promised indicative votes, and then refused to allow MPs to have them. She has bullied and bribed and threatened and cajoled her way for the last three years. If it hadn’t been for her kicking the can down the road - claiming that she was going to change elements of her deal but doing nothing of the sort, simply as a delaying tactic while relying on the threat of “no deal” to coerce MPs into accepting her deal - a new course could have been charted as far back as last December, and we could have discussed Norway, Canada + or any other model of Brexit and prevented ourselves from reaching this nadir.

But May, and the hardline Brexiteers she sought to placate (while stabbing them in the back, behind the scenes, as they later discovered to their dismay, but too late), refused to compromise once in the interests of the people she is supposed to represent. She tolerated no contrary views, no competing visions outside her own narrow negotiating agenda. And look what she - in her ivory tower - has brought us to, 5 seconds from midnight and she’s speaking in an impudent, aggressive tone of voice still trying to absolve herself of any responsibility for the course she has taken, while targeting the rest of parliament.

What a sad, sad day for Britain.
 
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I couldn’t have said it any better myself, @Vouthon. Excellent post.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to hear her come out with such venom last night. It’s what she’s done at every opportunity. Just when I think she can’t sink any lower, she does.
 
When she came into power three years ago, I attended a dinner party with a number of friends in London and in the middle of our meal (after a little bit of wine, I have to say!), I happened to say to my colleagues: “I think May is a machiavellian character”.

At the time, people just couldn’t see it. ‘She’s a shy, dutiful woman, a vicar’s daughter,’ people would say. That was in the honeymoon phase, before Grenfell Tower burnt down and that catastrophic election campaign took place.

But I had been wary of her political star in the ascendancy for years. She was the one who, as Home Secretary, attempted to revoke the “human rights” act and bring us out of the Convention, which even Russia is a party to.

She was the one who, as Home Secretary, arranged for a seriously ill asylum seeker, who was said to be “near death” after a 100-day hunger strike , to be deported. That individual life seemed to mean nothing to her - only getting ‘immigration’ targets down and pandering to the far right.

These were the kinds of decisions that gave me pause. It was only recently, thanks to a documentary film-maker, that we learned of May’s continual undermining of David Cameron in the lead-up to the 2016 referendum: she was the one who forced him to go on that fateful negotiating tour in which he tried to ‘re-negotiate’ our membership of the EU. Foreign diplomats later said that Cameron did practically all of this to “win” the hardline Theresa May over: he said that if he had May on his side, he would win.

Then, in the middle of the crisis after 2016, May ‘ascends’ to power - seizing the moment. And how did she treat her longstanding political rival George Osbourne, who had been tipped to succeed her? She humiliated him, just like she has a track record of humiliating anyone who disagrees with her vision.

When Grenfell Tower burnt down, do you remember the press outcry at how ‘cold’ she acted towards the victims? Whereas Corbyn (despite my distaste for him) was cuddling and consoling victims, she seemed to be visibly unmoved.

And she did the same to Lord Heseltine. And then, in the middle of the 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’ - when Black British citizens who had lived in the UK since the 1950s were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and wrongly deported - May passed all of the blame onto her friend and confidante, Amber Rudd.

Rudd had to resign and take the flack, despite the fact that it was May who had created what the press hailed "the hostile environment" at the Home Office during her tenure, that made this scandal possible.

When you add all of this together, your right: no one should have been surprised at her spitting venom last night or at her refusal to accept responsibility. But they were, because so many defended her for too long, sympathising with the poisoned chalice she’d been handed, looking for method in her self-serving delays and speeches to the public, and the bribing (remember the promise of millions to Labour Brexit-voting constituencies if they went against their party whip and voted for her deal? And the use of knighthoods etc.).
 
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The polls may “favor” Remain now. But that’s what they said in the runup to the referendum. So I wouldn’t consider them trustworthy and I think that’s why the idea of a 2nd referendum has not gained any real traction. Because depending on the people again has some negative aspects to it:

First, it’s risky, Remain could very well lose again.

Second, the devil is in the details: how should the new ballot be worded? Two choices? Which two choices between Remain, Leave with Deal, Leave with No Deal. Put all three on the ballot? The fight over that would be epic.

Third, can they get an extension long enough to properly stage the vote? Maybe if the EU knows they are committed to doing it. Maybe if the EU is okay with UK representatives in the EU Parliament.

Fourth, this is a biggie: submitting to the authority of the people’s vote sets a bad precedent for those leaders who would strongly prefer their own decisions over those of the people, and not just with respect to Brexit, but any other major issue in which the leadership finds itself divided from the people. In which case, no way should the people be allowed to dictate to the leaders.

In any case, it was a whole lot of backstabbing by which May took the PM position. She was a Remainer at heart because she felt that was where the power was and she was attuned to that if nothing else. Hence she negotiated in the sense of Remain, getting a deal that was termed BRINO by many (BRexit In Name Only). It was such a bad deal that the Remainer MPs who voted against it did so because they did not want to be in the position of having to explain a “yes” vote to their voters.

At this point, it has some of the look and feel of a crab bucket…
 
One small correction: the “short extension” with the EU to May or June is conditional on May’s deal passing on her third attempt at a meaningful vote (early next week?), which parliament will not do even if the Speaker allows for it, because most lawmakers - Remainer and Brexiteer - abhor the deal and consider it to be bad for the country (and there is the question of whether the ‘extension’ as an add-on significantly changes the deal, parliamentary precedent prohibits MPs from being compelled to vote on the same issue thrice, because it undermines parliamentary procedure (and insults the collective intelligence of the chamber besides)).

MPs will reject her deal again - her speech last night has turned even sympathetic MPs against her, especially those on the Labour opposition, such as Lisa Nandy, who had been thinking about backing her deal (because she’s in a Brexit constituency and fears a people’s vote) and who she needed to win over. Therefore, we are back to either a “long” extension of perhaps as much as 2 years (if May asks for it, which is in doubt given her reckless arrogance) whereby we would need to elect MEPs to the European Parliament this coming May-June, because EU law mandates that citizens be represented in the institutions and we’d still be citizens of Europe; a catastrophic ‘no deal’ Brexit or we unilaterally revoke Art. 50 and then hold a referendum later, or something (no one knows what to do in the aftermath of a revocation, and there would likely be rioting and violence from some Brexiteers).

And the clock is ticking down to March 29th (just a week away, next Friday!), when we are set to crash out of the EU automatically if no deal or extension or revocation is in place before then.

So the situation is far graver and we almost certainly do not have until May 22nd. We have literally a handful of days now to come up with an alternative solution that both sides can accept (one of those sides having 27 constituent member states with a veto), where a three-year-negotiated deal has failed, due to the fact that May has left both the EU and us with this tiny window of time because of her repeated (and arrogant) tactical delays and deliberate obfuscation.

In other words, May has left the country in an impossible bind. Her reckless and inane gamble was predicated on the fiction that her bullying of MPs would result in parliament caving into her deal for fear of falling into the abyss of Hard Brexit and being accordingly punished by voters, but she’s almost certainly wrong and that’s about to be proven next week.
 
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I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to her before she became PM. I didn’t even pay much attention to politics as a whole until the EU referendum, although I had been getting more aware since Scotland’s Indy Ref.

I saw that documentary. I was furious all over again that Cameron threw so much to caution, and that he’s managed to walk away relatively unscathed. History will not be kind to him.

I’ve just read that Anna Soubry, a former Conservative MP who is now part of the Independent Group, has been told by police that threats made to her are so serious she isn’t safe to go home this weekend. What on earth have we come to in this country?
 
It’s just shameful, shameful and shocking and tragic what has become of our once respected nation.

A Labour MP Wes Streeting, backed by a Conservative colleague, stated plainly last night that May had put MPs’ lives in danger with her “incendiary” address and would bear responsibility if any harm came to them, at a time when the public is most politically riled and radicalised by this issue.

The disturbing fact of the matter is that May is a very intelligent woman who knew exactly what she was doing when she made that firebrand speech, and we know that politicians like Soubry are well-known rivals to her. May sacked and demoted Soubry from the cabinet when she came in, and Soubry has been a spirited and charismatic opponent to her in the House of Commons.

Why would she so recklessly and callously seek to incite baying mobs against her own fellow politicians, simply because she has proven unable to foist her will upon members of parliament after years of continual bullying?

Mr Streeting tweeted: “@theresa_may knows that MPs across the House are subjected to death threats – some very credible. Her speech was incendiary and irresponsible. If any harm comes to any of us, she will have to accept her share of responsibility.”

His Labour colleague Lisa Nandy - who prior to yesterday had been set to back May’s deal - accused Ms May of “pitting parliament against the people”, saying that to do so was “dangerous and reckless”. She added: “Yesterday her government attacked their civil servants. Now she’s attacking the MPs whose votes she needs. It will have cost her support.”

Sam Gyimah, the Conservative former minister, said that engaging in a “blame game” was “a low blow”.

“Democracy loses when a PM who has set herself against the HoC then blames MPs for doing their job. Distracts from Art 50 extension, all part of her strategy to run down the clock and rule out other options. Toxic,” he added.

Fellow Tory Connor Burns asked of the address: “What was actually the point of that?”

In 2016, a Remain-voting member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was assassinated by a gunman from the far-right pro-Brexit terrorist group, Britain First. Last night, May was effectively inciting public anger against MPs while standing outside No.10 Downing Street, as part of political point scoring on her part.

I can’t even comprehend where we are at the moment. Few can.
 
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The problem with bullying the MPs into voting for her deal is that she is asking a significant number of MPs to commit political suicide. Many MPs may be Remainers in sentiment and might be okay with May’s deal, but they don’t want to have to explain a “yes” vote on the deal to their voters, especially if they are representing constituencies that voted Leave.
 
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