December 22, 2018

Just over a year ago, in her new year message, Theresa May promised to use 2018 to maintain what she said had been the steady progress towards Brexit achieved during the previous 12 months. Delivering on the referendum result in a sensible way was, she claimed, what both Leavers and Remainers clearly wanted her to do. “Whichever way you voted in the referendum, most people just want us to get on and deliver a good Brexit, and that is exactly what we will be doing,” she said from the cabinet room inside 10 Downing Street.

Since then May has lost one foreign secretary, two Brexit secretaries, and six other government ministers over Brexit. The past year has not been one of steady progress but of constant and unremitting crisis. As 2018 draws to its close, Theresa May’s tortuously negotiated and hugely unpopular Brexit deal with the EU cannot even be put to a vote in parliament because the government knows MPs will throw it out. Parliament is gridlocked. No majority exists for May’s Brexit deal, or indeed any other kind of Brexit that anyone can think of, including no deal.

The Tory party is at war with itself, as is Labour, over how and, increasingly, whether we should now leave the EU at all. Businesses are in despair because, with less than 100 days to go before we depart from the world’s largest trading bloc and single market, no one can tell them what the new rules under which they will soon have to operate will be. Today the British Chambers of Commerce says the “no deal” outcome it increasingly fears would mean “chaos for firms on any number of fronts including customs, tariffs, disorder in their supply chains, and recognition of qualifications”. Its director general, Adam Marshall, says current “lack of clarity” is already forcing firms to make “tough business judgements … such as opening warehouses and distribution hubs on the continent, applying to European regulators and setting up legal identities – this means that jobs and investment intended for the UK are being diverted out.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/22/2018-brexit-year-theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn