TimKerr said:
Arn said:
And in the latest Brexit update, the House of Commons gave the sitting UK government its biggest defeat in history with a 432 votes to 202 loss voting against approving the plan 2 years of negotiations with the EU has developed.
That included 118 members of the Conservative Party voting against their own government.
Now we have a vote of no confidence in the government tonight (they should see that off with their slim majority). That leaves 2 days for the government to come back with "Plan B" to replace the defeated plan that took 2 years to agree and clearly wasn't acceptable to pretty much anyone who wanted to remain or leave the EU
So I am not an international policy analyst but I do follow this stuff superficially in the news. But what happens now? Brexit is planned for end of March but there are no policies or procedures in place? So Britain will leave the EU and then what? Chaos? Anarchy? Why did the govt vote against this plan in the first place?
It's pretty complicated... But, I'll try a basic short version.
The referendum was framed far too simply. Remain in the EU or Leave the EU. 52% of those who voted said to Leave.
The problem is within that 52% some of them took leave to mean a complete and utter clean break. Some took it to mean the political institutions but maintaining some ties such as the customs union allowing for the existing internal trade rules to stay in place.
One issue that came up was that there is a land border within the island of Ireland that is currently entirely open. Tens of thousands of people cross it every day. Freight lorries come into Dublin port in Ireland, drives over the border into Northern Ireland and hops on a ferry to Scotland.
If the UK took the clean break option then that border would have to be tightened for customs and quality checks, along with passport checks to prevent people getting into the UK (from say the eastern EU countries) illegally simply by following that route via Dublin ports.
Such a border on the island of Ireland would more than likely reignite the conflict that ran from the 1960s til the late 1990s for reasons I can further expand upon if you desire.
So the deal included a "backstop" which effectively agreed that the UK would "leave" the EU, but its rules would mirror those of the EU for customs etc. That didn't suit those who wanted the "clean break" from the EU so they voted against it.
Another part of this was having Northern Ireland remain aligned to EU rules and have those border checks done within ports around the Irish Sea. This effectively would have created a de facto united Ireland and could be seen as the beginning of the break up of the UK. Also it wasn't acceptable to Scotland as why should NI get special status and Scotland couldn't, thus leading to a push for another Scottish Independence referendum. So a pile of people were against the deal for that reason.
TLDR; the deal was the only deal possible to negotiate based on the red lines set down, mostly by Theresa May and her Tory government but also to an extent by the EU. However the deal couldn't possibly make all the different factions with different ideas of what Brexit actually is happy as for some it didn't go far enough, for others it went too far. Then there were a few in the middle who recognised it as the only deal that could be put through that didn't lead to the utter chaos of a "no deal" exit.
