Theresa May says 95% of Brexit deal is done

Theresa May has said she is prepared to “explore every possible option” to break the deadlock in Brexit talks, BBC reports.

She told MPs 95% of the terms of exit were agreed but the Irish border was still a “considerable sticking point”.

While willing to consider extending the UK’s transition period beyond 2020, she said this was “not desirable” and would have to end “well before” May 2022.

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn said the Tories were “terminally incompetent and hamstrung by their own divisions”.

The UK, which is due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019, has previously agreed to a so-called implementation period ending on 31 December 2020.

The PM has not ruled out the idea of extending this by up to a year to give the two sides more time to agree their future economic partnership and ensure controversial contingency plans to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, the so-called backstop, do not ever come into force.

Both Brexiteers and Remainers worry this would delay further the moment of the UK’s proper departure from the EU, and potentially cost billions in terms of extra payments.

Mrs May told MPs that protecting the UK’s integrity was so important that she had a duty to explore “every possible solution” to keeping the Irish border open and ensuring no new barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

She said the UK should be able to make a “sovereign choice” in December 2020 between extending the transition period for a short period or invoking the backstop – which would see the whole of the UK stay in a temporary, time-limited customs arrangement with the EU.

She suggested the transition option might be preferable as it would “mean only one set of changes for businesses at the point we move to the future relationship”.

“But in any such scenario we would have to be out of this implementation period well before the end of this parliament,” she added.

Urging Tory MPs to hold their nerve during the toughest part of the negotiations, she rejected calls for another referendum and said reports that civil servants were planning for such an eventuality were untrue.

She said she would not be listening to those who wanted to “stop Brexit” through a new referendum – which she said should be called a “politicians’ vote” rather than a “people’s vote”.

She explained that people had had their vote, in the 2016 referendum, and a repeat would be a case of politicians telling them to have another go.

But one of her party’s MPs, Sarah Wollaston, said the only “politicians’ vote” would be if they found a way to ignore the views of the people who took part in the People’s Vote march past Downing Street to call for a new referendum.

A weekend of feverish speculation suggested May had 72 hours to save her job ahead of a meeting of the 1922 committee of backbench MPs on Wednesday.

In her statement, May cited the agreement reached in the last few weeks on the future status of Gibraltar and the UK’s RAF bases in Cyprus as sign of the progress that is being made.

“Taking all of this together, 95% of the Withdrawal Agreement and its protocols are now settled.”

Ministers also fielded urgent questions about the cost to the UK of extending the transition period and the terms of the “meaningful vote” MPs have been promised on Brexit.

Copyright PUNCH.