British Prime Minister Theresa May has announced members of parliament will vote on her widely criticised Brexit deal in the week beginning January 14 next year.
In a statement to parliament on Monday, May also rejected growing demands for a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, warning it would “further divide” the country and “break faith” with the British people.
The 62-year-old dismissed calls from leading public figures, including former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, for a rerun of the 2016 vote suggesting it would do “irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics”.
“It would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver,” May said. “Another vote which would likely leave us no further forward than the last.”
Nearly 52 percent of Britons more than 17 million people voted to leave the EU during a divisive referendum held in June 2016. Turnout for the poll was more than 72 percent.
The UK is now set to leave the 28-member bloc on March 29 next year, two years after it triggered Article 50 – the exit clause in the EU’s constitution – and kick-started negotiations with European leaders over a divorce deal.
But May’s proposed deal, brokered after months of back-and-forth between London and Brussels, has proved widely unpopular among parliamentarians Aljazeera reported.
Last week, she pulled a so-called “meaningful vote” on the plan, acknowledging it would have been roundly rejected by the UK’s lower chamber House of Commons.
The move triggered disgruntled Eurosceptic Conservative MPs to move for a vote of confidence on her leadership, which she narrowly survived in a secret ballot on December 12.
In an effort to assuage critics from within her own party and across the political spectrum, May attended an EU Council summit in Brussels the following day, where she pleaded with her counterparts in the bloc to make concessions on the UK-EU withdrawal agreement’s contentious “Irish backstop” clause.
EU officials refused to blink, however, and maintained that no amendments to the deal would be forthcoming.
But on Monday, May told parliament she had won private assurances from her European counterparts at the Brussels summit that there was “no plot” to keep the UK in the backstop and that they wanted to avoid having to activate the safety net provision – which would guarantee no hard border is erected on the island of Ireland in the event that post-Brexit trade negotiations between the UK and the bloc prove unsuccessful.
“I know this is not everyone’s perfect deal. It is a compromise. But if we let the perfect be the enemy of the good then we risk leaving the EU with no deal,” May said.
“Avoiding no deal is only possible if we can reach an agreement or if we abandon Brexit entirely,” she added.
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