LONDON: Three pro-EU lawmakers from Britain’s governing Conservatives quit over the government’s “disastrous handling of Brexit” on Wednesday, in a blow to Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempts to unite her party around plans to leave the European Union.
The lawmakers, long critical of May’s Brexit strategy to leave the EU which they believe is being driven by Conservative Eurosceptics, said in a statement they would join a new group in parliament set up by seven former opposition Labour politicians.
May said she was saddened by the resignations, but signalled she would press on with her attempts to win a deal before Britain is due to leave the bloc on March 29.
But the resignations put May in an even weaker position in parliament, where her Brexit deal was crushed by lawmakers last month when Eurosceptics and EU supporters voted against an agreement that both sides say offers the worst of all worlds.
They could also undermine May’s negotiating position in Brussels, where she was going later for talks with Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to try to secure an opening for further technical work on revising the agreement. With only 37 days until Britain leaves the EU, its biggest foreign and trade policy shift in more than 40 years, divisions over Brexit are redrawing the political landscape. The resignations threaten a decades-old two-party system.
“The final straw for us has been this government’s disastrous handling of Brexit,” the three lawmakers, Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston, said in a statement.
“We no longer feel we can remain in the party of a government whose policies and priorities are so firmly in the grip of the ERG and DUP,” they said, referring to a group of Conservative pro-Brexit lawmakers and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party which props up the government in parliament.
May acknowledged that Britain’s membership of the EU “has been a source of disagreement both in our party and in our country for a long time” adding that leaving the bloc “was never going to be easy”.
The three said they would now sit with a new grouping in parliament that broke away from the Labour Party earlier this week over increasing frustration with their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit strategy and a row over anti-Semitism.
Another former Labour lawmaker joined their ranks late on Tuesday, and several politicians from both the main opposition party and Conservatives said they expected more to follow from both sides of parliament. — Reuters
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