Theresa May has driven Britain into a dead endGlobe and Mail/UK, Jul 9, 2018, Doug Saunders
For two years, Prime Minister Theresa May has tried to pilot the British state through a labyrinth of negotiations to get her country to quit the European Union without destroying either its economy or her party. On Monday morning, as some of her key cabinet ministers quit in a shocking mass resignation, she drove it into a cul-de-sac.
There now appears no way out for Ms. May: She cannot negotiate any workable Brexit deal, yet must deliver a departure from Europe. She cannot hold her party together around any coherent governing program, yet must remain Prime Minister. She is stuck in an endless circle of political self-destruction as her country tilts closer to the edge of the abyss, its economy frozen in anticipation.
It was the fundamental impossibility of Ms. May’s mission that caused Brexit minister David Davis, junior Brexit minister Steve Baker and foreign secretary Boris Johnson to resign in quick succession after a weekend meeting at the Prime Minister’s summer residence, Chequers.
All three objected to Ms. May’s latest Brexit plan – which attempted to propose a negotiating strategy that would allow Britain to maintain its crucial trade ties to Europe – as too much of a compromise. For these ministers, and the rest of the party’s “hard Brexit†faction, the slim majority in the 2016 referendum was a call from British voters to end all relations with Europe, damn the consequences.
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There were suggestions on Monday that Ms. May’s government could be on the verge of collapse – an event that would trigger the third election in three years.
But Ms. May is unlikely to depart soon, either by an internal Conservative Party leadership challenge or by a parliamentary confidence vote, in part because no popular figures within her own party seem willing or able to step up to the plate, and because the rest of her MPs fear the prospect of a loss to the Labour Party, itself almost terminally divided over Brexit.
As a result, Theresa May finds herself stuck in the exit door without a deal, without a stable cabinet, without a united message and without any viable way forward.
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