Brexit deal sets up crunch December vote

By Andrew Hammond

Sunday's emergency EU summit of 28 presidents and prime ministers unanimously passed the U.K.'s withdrawal Brexit deal.

Yet, the decisive and historic step comes amid further political tumult in London where there appears to be no majority in the Westminster Parliament for the deal that would end almost four-and-a-half decades of membership of the Brussels club.

In this context, Theresa May's entire premiership is now hanging again in the balance as she enters a critical period with a crunch vote anticipated on the deal on Dec. 10 or 11.

While it is still too early to count her out, she is now facing into a hugely uncertain period leading up to the U.K.'s scheduled withdraw from the EU in late March.

Not only could she soon face a leadership challenge from hard-line Brexiteers within the ruling Conservative Party disappointed by her deal, she must also try to navigate the deal through ratification in the House of Commons without a majority in the chamber.

This looks to be exceptionally politically difficult, not least because public opinion appears to be opposed to the deal. A YouGov study, for instance, released last week, found that 42 percent of U.K. citizens oppose the draft deal, 19 percent are in favor, with 39 percent not sure.

With a monumentally busy and precarious period ahead, politically, for the United Kingdom, many are starting to appreciate one of the great ironies of the 2016 referendum to leave the EU.

That is, the monumental effort and time London has needed to devote to the Brussels-based club, as it seeks to negotiate the terms of its departure, is more than perhaps all previous post-war U.K. administrations did before the Brexit vote.

Thus the 2016 referendum that saw around 52 percent of the population apparently voting for cutting ties with the EU has seen May and her team devoting huge attention to Europe with a key strategic priority being developing a new relationship with the 27 other member states.

Indeed, such has been the scale of the task already that it has proved the most complex and important peacetime negotiations that the United Kingdom has ever faced.

Even now, with the deal agreed by the EU-27 on Sunday, there remain multiple key questions about the U.K.'s likely pathway toward the EU exit door. For instance, Ireland continues to cause major challenges.

Under the agreement, a backstop contingency plan will come into force in the event that London and Brussels cannot agree on a new future-focused trade deal during the transition period scheduled to start in April.

The backstop would not have an expiry date or allow for unilateral exit and, if the new EU-U.K. trade deal is not ready by the end of the transition period, the backstop would kick in with Northern Ireland in "full alignment with those rules of (the EU's) internal market and the customs union" which critics say amounts to a barrier down the Irish Sea.

To be fair to May, the scale of the challenge she has faced the last two years isn't all of her own making. She inherited as prime minister no formal EU exit planning because her predecessor David Cameron refused to contemplate losing the 2016 referendum.

However, her own government's grasp of the realities of Brexit has been shaky from the start. As May has gradually discovered, the complexity of the negotiations mean that she has not been able to deliver an alternative model to current EU full membership that can secure consent from Brussels and the EU member states, which provides the same balance of influence and advantages that the United Kingdom gets from its current full member status.

For all the EU's flaws, and it has many that need to be better tackled, the United Kingdom has enjoyed a uniquely positive position in what is the world's largest political and economic union. For instance, it has all the benefits of the Single Market, but is not part of the Eurozone, and it has retained a big budgetary rebate.

Moreover, the stark reality is that Sunday's Brexit deal, like all other existing agreements with the EU (from Norway to Switzerland and Canada and Turkey), has key disadvantages, including the fact that it fails to provide full access to services which accounts for around 80 percent of the U.K. economy.

And outside of the economic realm, May knows ― as a former U.K. home secretary ― that forthcoming discussion offer no guarantees that the United Kingdom could fully replicate existing cooperation in areas like policing and security which she has previously cited as important.

Taken overall, with Sunday's exit deal now agreed by the EU-27, the realization is growing within the United Kingdom of its flaws. Since 2016, more of the government's resources and attention have needed to be directed toward the EU than its postwar predecessors.

Yet, despite all of this effort, May has not been able to strike an exit agreement that is better for the U.K. national interest than one which continued membership of a reformed EU potentially offers.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.