Theresa May needs a negotiating position or her Brexit falls apart

Time is running out and if there is no deal, the UK will simply 'crash out' of the EU and chaos will ensue.

British Prime Minister Theresa May hosts a meeting with leaders and representatives of Caribbean countries, at 10 Downing Street in central London, on April 17, 2017, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Picture: AFP

The long struggle over the nature of the deal that will define Britain’s relationship with the European Union, post-Brexit, allegedly reached a turning point last weekend.

“They had nothing else to offer. They had no plan B. She faced them down,” said a senior government official about the hard-line Brexiteers after Prime Minister Theresa May got them to sign up to a so-called “soft Brexit” at a crisis Cabinet meeting.

But the armistice between the Leave and Remain factions in her fractious Conservative Party lasted less than 48 hours.

On Sunday morning, hard-line Brexiteer David Davis, the ludicrously titled Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, reneged on his short-lived support for May’s negotiating goals and resigned in protest.

Then, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson followed suit, claiming that May’s plan meant “the [Brexit] dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt”.

The sheer fecklessness of the “Brexit dream” is epitomised by Johnson, who first compared May’s negotiating plans to “polishing a turd”, then came round to supporting them for about 36 hours, and finally resigned, saying they would reduce the UK to a “vassal state” with the “status of a colony” of the EU.

Yet at no point in the discussion did either of them offer a coherent counterproposal.

And what is all this sturm und drang about? A negotiating position, devised by May with great difficulty two years after the referendum that yielded 52% support for an undefined Brexit, which could never be accepted by the European Union.

All four of the great offices of state – prime minister, chancellor (finance minister), foreign secretary and home secretary (interior minister) – are held by Conservative politicians who voted Remain in the referendum.

Yet they are unable to persuade their party to accept even a soft Brexit that preserves Britain’s existing access to its biggest trading partner, the EU.

The Brexiteers’ power lies in their implicit threat to stage a revolt that overthrows May, fatally splits the Conservative Party and precipitates an early election that brings the Labour Party to power.

They may not really have the numbers to do that but May dares not test that assumption.

So, horrified by the prospect of a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn, who is regularly portrayed by the right-wing media as a Lenin in waiting, the Conservatives are doomed to cling desperately to power, even though they can probably never deliver a successful Brexit.

And time is running out.

The United Kingdom will be leaving the European Union on March 29 next year, whether there is a deal that maintains most of its current trade with the EU or not.

In practice, the deadline for an agreement is next October, since time must be allowed for 27 other EU members to ratify the deal.

If there is no deal, the UK simply “crashes out” and chaos ensues.

The volume of trade in goods and services between the United Kingdom and the rest of the EU is so great, and the preparation for documenting the safety and origins of goods and collecting customs on them so scanty, that the new border would simply freeze up.

That would cause great difficulty for many European enterprises, but for Britain it would be a catastrophe.

As an example, two-fifths of the components for cars built in the UK are sourced from elsewhere in the EU.

Yet most of the time available for negotiating a soft Brexit has already been wasted and Britain still does not have a realistic negotiating position.