This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Brexit: May hit by two cabinet resignations as Raab and McVey quit over plan - Politics live
Brexit: May hit by two cabinet resignations as Raab and McVey quit over plan - Politics live
(35 minutes later)
Responding to Blackford, May says the reason Scotland is treated differently from Northern Ireland is because Northern Ireland will be the only part of the UK that will have a land border with the EU after Brexit.
Frank Field, the former Labour MP who now sits as an independent, asks if the UK will be completely independent under this plan. May tries to give those assurances.
And Scotland is not mentioned because it is part of the United Kingdom, she says.
Amber Rudd, the Conservative former home secretary, asks May what response she has had from business to the plan.
From the Labour MP Mary Creagh
(That was a helplful question, so we can probably chalk Rudd up as the third MP to speak out in support.)
Chief whip staring at phone with face like thunder. 5 ministers gone in 3 hours.
May quotes positive business reaction.
This is from CityAM’s Owen Bennett (who is writing a biography of Michael Gove.)
This is from Newsnight’s Nicholas Watt.
No word from @michaelgove’s team about where he is. Radio silence. Is he plotting?
With two Tory MPs supporting Theresa May’s deal she has one breakthrough: enough tellers for her #Brexit vote
Ian Blackford, the SNP’s leader at Westminser, says to lose two Brexit secretaries in six months is chaotic. He says that May looks desperate and defeat.
Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister and ERG vice chair, says this backstop is “completely intolerable”. MPs will not vote for it. So will May trigger all no deal planning now?
Scotland is not even mentioned in the document, he says. Yet there are 100 references to Northern Ireland, and references to Gibraltar and the Isle of Man too. If Northern Ireland can stay in the single market, why not Scotland too? He says May is ignoring the democratic desires of Scotland.
May says MPs will get to vote on the deal, but the government is continuing no deal planning too.
Ken Clarke, the Conservative pro-European, asks May if she agrees that the main benefits from EU membership have come from having a completely open border. So will she agree not to give that up until we know what we are changing too?
Nicky Morgan, the Tory pro-European who was sacked by May as education secretary, says backing the deal would be in the national interest. May welcomes her comments.
May says the UK has heard from business the importance of frictionless borders. That is why the future plan is based on that.
Labour’s Ben Bradshaw asks if it is true that Theresa May, when she was home secretary, told the security services not to investigate Arron Banks.
May is responding to Corbyn.
May says she cannot comment on security matters.
She says the government is planning for no deal.
Mark Francois, a Tory Brexiter and a member of the European Research Group, says there are 84 Tories who will vote against the deal, and the numbers are rising. The agreement was “dead on arrival”, he says. He urges May to accept the political reality.
She says there are 500 pages of legal text. It is not ill-defined.
The prime minister says when a deal gets brought back it will be for MPs to consider it, and their duty to deliver on the vote of the British people.
She says the political declaration does refer to the plan to create a free trade area between the UK and the EU.
Labour’s Angela Eagle says May’s fatal mistake has been to kowtow to Brexit extremists who made promises that were undeliverable.
And Corbyn said there were no references to extradition in the document, she says. But she does not know what he read. There are references to extradition. And Corbyn was also wrong to say Europol was not mentioned. The document says the UK does want to continue with that, she says.
May says she has kowtowed to no one.
Corbyn says there is no clarity about a future immigration strategy.
At last. An MP has defended May and her deal. Sir Peter Bottomley, a Conservative, said the agreement was the best available.
After the Windrush scandal, EU nationals living in the UK need certainty.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory Brexiter, says May said the UK would leave the customs union, protect the integrity of the UK and take the UK out of the jurisdiction of the European court of justice. But the deal does not do these things. As what May says and what she does “no longer match”, should he write to Graham Brady (chair of the backbench 1922 Committee)?
He says parliament should not accept a false choice between no deal and this deal.
May says in the future relationship the UK will no longer be in the customs union or single market, the integrity of the UK will have been maintained, and the jurisdiction of the ECJ will be ended. She will deliver on her commitments, she says.
The government should withdraw this “half-baked deal” that does not have the backing of the cabinet, parliament or the country as a whole.
Labour’s Chris Leslie says not a single MP has yet spoken up in favour of May’s plan. May says remaining in the EU is an option. How can that be achieved?
Corbyn asks May to confirm that the UK would not be able to leave the backstop unilaterally.
May says she said there was a risk of no Brexit. But the government is determined to deliver on leaving the EU.
He says rules committing the UK to maintaining EU state aid regulations are baked in. But there are no equivalent guarantees on worker rights, he says.
Justine Greening, the Tory former education secretary, says if it was acceptable to have a referendum before, why not again?
He says after two years of negotiations all the government has agreed is a vague, seven-page document on the future. There is no determination in it to negotiate frictionless trade, or trade as frictionless as possible, he says.
May says there was an overwhelming vote in parliament to have a referendum. People voted in that in huge numbers. She says she has seen the EU before ask people to vote again when they vote against the EU, a “go back and think again” vote. That would be wrong, she says.
Jeremy Corbyn is speaking now. He says May’s plan represents a huge and damaging failure and does not meet Labour’s six tests.
Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the home affairs committee, says the political declaration does not mention the European arrest warrant or the SIS II information exchange system.
Corbyn says May’s Brexit deal does not meet Labour’s six tests.
May says the government wants an arrangement covering arrests. And she says SIS II will be taken forward in further negotiations.
The government is “in chaos”, he says.
Sir Bill Cash, the Tory Brexiter, says the deal amounts to broken promises and abject capitulation to the EU. The EU will continue to control UK laws after this, he says.
He says, if Dominic Raab cannot support the deal, MPs cannot back it either.
May says the EU will not control UK laws in future.
No deal is not an option, he says.
She says she recognises the concerns Cash raises. But she wants to implement the referendum result in a way that protects jobs, she says.
He says the government must publish its legal advice on the deal, and the OBR should revise its economic forecasts.
Hilary Benn, the Labour chair of the Brexit committee, says the UK will remain in the customs union under this plan. Will May admit to the British people that that is in the national interest?
He claims there is no mention of an “implementation” period in the deal.
May says what is in the national interest is having a good trading partnership with the EU.
The deal says the transition could be extended to “20XX”. Does that mean it could run to 2099?
Anna Soubry, the Conservative pro-European, says May cannot honour the promises made by Brexiters because those cannot be met. She asks May to not rule out a second referendum.
May says, when she became PM, there was no plan for Brexit.
May says she cannot give that assurance. The UK will leave the EU on 29 March next year, she says.
May implicitly criticises the Cameron government for not having a plan for Brexit.
Nigel Dodds, the DUP leader, says he could take May through the promises she made in public, and private, to his party. But it would be a waste of time because “she clearly doesn’t listen”. He says the five people who have resigned today have all said May’s deal would compromise the integrity of the UK. We can either vote to protect the UK. Or vote for a vassal state that will break it up, he says.
Some people said it could not be done. She did not accept that, she says.
May says her commitments to Northern Ireland remain.
She says it has been a frustrating process. It has forced the UK to confront difficult issues.
She says neither side want to see the backstop exercised.
Once a final deal is agreed, she will come to parliament and ask MPs to back it in the national interest.
She says she does not accept that she has not considered Northern Ireland in this process. (Dodds signals to her he is not saying that.)
May says the choice is clear. We can choose to leave with no deal, or have no Brexit at all ....
That generates loud cheering from some MPs.
Or we can choose this deal, says May.
She says she is delivering for the British people and doing what is in the national interest.
May is now on the outline future partnership.
Free movement will end once and for all, she says.
She says no other advanced economy has such good access to the EU for goods.
And there are commitments on services that go well beyond WTO requirements.
The UK will leave the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy, she says.
There is a close and flexible partnership on defence and security.
May says some people urged her to rip up the backstop.
But that would have been irresponsible, and it would have meant reneging on promises made to the people of Northern Ireland.
May is taking MPs through the details.
She says the withdrawal detail shows how the UK will leave the EU in 134 days’ time.
She says she thinks the Irish border issue will best be solved through the future relationship.
But the withdrawal agreement includes a backstop. This has not been “a comfortable process”, she says. Neither the UK nor the EU are totally happy with it.
But, she says, any deal would have to have a backstop. It would not be possible to have an alternative, like Canada plus plus plus, without it.
She says the EU has made concessions.
First, the plan for the Northern Ireland-only backstop has been dropped.
Second, the transition could be extended as an alternative to the backstop.
Third, the plan commits both parties to use “best endeavours” to ensure this is not used. And if the backstop is used, it will be temporary. There will be a mechanism for ending it.
Finally, Northern Ireland businesses will have full access to the UK single market.
Theresa May is making her Commons statement on the Brexit deal now.
We may be here for a while. John Bercow, the Speaker, always lets statements of this kind run, and interest in this one is enormous. I wouldn’t be surprised if it runs for up to three hours.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan has resigned as a parliamentary private secretary.
It is with sadness that I have submitted my letter of resignation as PPS to the Education Ministers to the Prime Minister. It has been a joy and a privilege to have served in defence and education. pic.twitter.com/AWlMXNxtT0
My colleague Jesssica Elgot is tipping Michael Gove, the environment secretary, as a possible replacement for Dominic Raab as Brexit secretary.
There surely can't be a credible candidate for Brexit secretary other than Michael Gove. That might be the only way to keep this show on the road. Depends on his choices today, I suppose.
The case for Gove is that he is most heavyweight Brexiter left standing in cabinet following the resignations of David Davis, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab. He is also a minister with a reputation for executive effectiveness. And if anyone could sell a Brexit plan to the ERG, it would be him.
He was also, reportedly, the only Brexiter who backed the plan at yesterday’s cabinet.
The case against Gove is that Theresa May doesn’t trust him an inch, on the understandable grounds that in the past he has already betrayed two senior Tories to whom he was very close (David Cameron and then Boris Johnson.)
If Gove were to get the job, it is conceivable that he could demand changes to the government’s Brexit strategy. Gove has in the past argued that Brexiters should focus on getting the UK out of the EU, with a view to hardening up Brexit later. And his close ally Nick Boles has been pushing the “Norway for Now” option – staying in the European Economic Area, with a view to perhaps moving to a Canada-style trade deal later.
Suella Braverman, a junior Brexit minister, has resigned.
It is with deep regret and after reflection that I have had to tender my resignation today as a Brexit Minister. Thank you for the opportunity. I look forward to working to support Brexit from the Backbenches. This has not been an easy decision. pic.twitter.com/C0kply8aLE
Braverman was chair of the European Research Group before she joined the government. When David Davis and Steve Baker resigned from the Brexit department over the Chequers plans, for a while there were reports that she was going too. But on that occasion she was persuaded to stay.
