May on Collision Course With Pro-Brexit Tories Over Irish Border

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – British Prime Minister Theresa May risked enraging members of her Conservative Party by insisting she wants to keep the most contentious part of her Brexit plan for avoiding a hard border with Ireland.

The premier said she will not push people to accept a divorce deal with the European Union that does not include the so-called backstop guarantee for keeping the Irish border open for goods trade.

May’s comments were aimed at reassuring a local audience in Northern Ireland that exiting the EU will not see a return to checkpoints at the land frontier, but she is in danger of alienating the politicians whose support she needs to get a deal through Parliament in London.

“I’m not proposing to persuade people to accept a deal that doesn’t contain that insurance policy for the future,” May said in Belfast on Tuesday. “What Parliament has said is that there should be changes made to the backstop.”

In fact, Parliament did not call for changes to the backstop, but rather for the entire policy to be abolished. On Jan. 29, the House of Commons voted to scrap the backstop as written into the EU withdrawal agreement, and replace it with “alternative arrangements” for avoiding a hard border.

A group of Tories have proposed using new technology systems to avoid the need for any backstop guarantee in the exit deal, but May sounded cool about that idea, too.

Unpopular Backstop
Pro-Brexit Tories hate the backstop because it ties the U.K. into the EU customs union, potentially forever. The intention behind the plan is to ensure that the border remains free of customs checks even if no new overarching trade deal is ready by the end of the post-Brexit transition period in Dec. 2020.

For many euroskeptic Tories, the backstop defeats the point of Brexit because it will stop Britain being free to determine its own trade regime and strike new deals with other countries around the world.

The Democratic Unionist Party, which props up May’s minority Conservative administration, also opposes the current backstop because it sets up new barriers to trade between Northern Ireland, parts of which the DUP represents, and the British mainland.

May has set herself a deadline of Feb. 13 to negotiate a reformed deal with the EU that has a chance of passing in a vote in the Commons. If she fails, members of Parliament will propose their own Plan B options on Feb. 14, including one that’s expected to prepare the ground to delay Brexit.

The U.K. is due to exit the EU on March 29, with or without a deal.