LONDON — Pro-Brexit British lawmakers were deciding Tuesday whether last-minute changes to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal were enough to overcome their…
LONDON — Pro-Brexit British lawmakers were deciding Tuesday whether last-minute changes to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal were enough to overcome their opposition to her plan to lead the U. K. out of the European Union.
The House of Commons is due to vote later on the divorce deal, a day after talks with the EU produced assurances that a contentious section of the agreement couldn’t be used to tie Britain to the bloc indefinitely — and less than three weeks before Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29.
Lawmakers defeated May’s deal by a whopping 230 votes in January, and it’s far from clear whether the changes would be enough to persuade enough to change their minds. May says the changes are legally binding, but Brexiteer politicians still need convincing.
Attorney General Geoffrey Cox dealt a blow to May’s hopes with a legal opinion saying the changes “reduce the risk” Britain could be stuck inside EU regulations indefinitely — but did not eliminate it. The two-page opinion said the U. K. could still not extract itself from the deal unilaterally, a key demand of pro-Brexit British politicians.
Cox said that if U. K.-EU negotiations became stalled through “intractable differences,” Britain would have “no internationally lawful means of exiting the Protocol’s arrangements, save by agreement.”
The pound, which had risen on hopes the deal would be passed, slumped by more than 1 percent against the dollar after Cox’s assessment, to trade at $1.3014.
Even before Cox gave his opinion, leading pro-Brexit Conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg expressed skepticism.
