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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

What May’s win means for future of Brexit deal

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Bill Smith - 
When Britain’s ruling Conservative party announced on Wednesday that the required minimum of 48 lawmakers had submitted letters requesting a no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Theresa May, there were doubts among some observers about whether she would win.
As more of the party’s 317 members of parliament’s main elected house, the Commons, aired their views on the secret ballot — many of them stating which way they planned to vote — the question shifted to the margin of May’s victory and the damage the vote could inflict on her leadership.
John Curtice, a political scientist at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC shortly before the vote that a two-thirds majority would be a “reasonable outcome” for May.
But that would also mean some 100 lawmakers had voted against her, and those same critics would be almost certain to oppose May’s Brexit deal in parliament, making her almost certain to lose the vote.
The result is slightly worse than that and makes little difference to May’s efforts to push the deal through parliament, analysts said.
“Nothing has changed,” tweeted Simon Usherwood, a Brexit-focused political analyst at the University of Surrey.
May’s opponents suggested their failure to oust her had not dented their determination to change the Brexit deal.
“It’s a terrible result for the prime minister,” influential right-winger Jacob Rees-Mogg, who leads the Conservatives’ European Research Group of some 80 eurosceptic lawmaker, told the BBC.
Rees-Mogg renewed his call for May to resign as prime minister and said “the backstop needs to be withdrawn.” Anger among Conservative eurosceptics has simmered for months over May’s acceptance of a controversial fallback clause in the withdrawal agreement she has negotiated with the EU, committing Britain to a potentially indefinite “backstop” arrangement aimed at preventing a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland,which will leave the EU with Britain.
The backstop could impose separate rules on Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom, but May insists it would only be a temporary, last-resort arrangement.
The anger intensified rapidly on Monday after May postponed a crucial vote in parliament on the Brexit deal, which had been planned for Tuesday after three days of debate last week, because she believed it would be rejected “by a significant margin.” The postponement could delay the vote until January, just weeks before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, leading to renewed accusations that May has tried to sideline parliament in the Brexit process.
May has run a minority government, propped up by 10 lawmakers from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), since she lost her parliamentary majority in a disastrous snap election last year, which she called to ask voters to back her Brexit plans.
May has appealed to lawmakers from all parties to back her deal “in the national interest,” especially those from the biggest opposition party, Labour.
But only a handful of Labour lawmakers and one Liberal Democrat have suggested that they could support May, potentially leaving her
dozens of votes short of the 320 or so she needs.
“The message from tonight is very clear: The Backstop must go,” tweeted Nigel Dodds, the DUP’s leader in parliament.
Simon Hix, a political scientist at the London School of Economics,said May had only won enough votes to “cling on.” The 117 votes against her mean “the Commons arithmetic on Brexit is now even tougher for her,” Hix tweeted.
“Rees-Mogg makes the point that a clear majority of backbenchers, not counting the MPs [with] some patronage office, now oppose her,” he added.
Another pro-Brexit Conservative lawmaker who voted against May, Andrew Bridgen, told the BBC that the vote “has not solved any of the problems the government faces.” “It’s deadlock, it’s stalemate,” Bridgen said. — dpa



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