While claims suggest Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made major concessions to the European Union in his blind pursuit of a Brexit deal, top European figures have warned a Brexit delay is inevitable.
Tuesday’s political developments in Brussels resemble a double blow for the electoral prospects of the British Conservatives. The party stands to be obliterated at the ballot box if Boris Johnson fails to deliver Brexit as promised by October 31st, an outcome European Union sources quoted by The Times newspaper now says is impossible.
Concurrently, reports from Brussels suggest that Mr Johnson has sacrificed the integrity of the United Kingdom to get a new Brexit deal, again an outcome potential Conservative voters would be likely to punish the party for in an election.
British newspaper The Guardian reported Tuesday evening that a draft agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union had been agreed in a last-dash negotiating session before the midnight cutoff imposed by the EU negotiating team. Yet incredibly, Mr Johnson — who at one time criticised former leader Theresa May for giving away too much to the EU in negotiations — has made a sacrifice even she said “no Prime Minister could accept”, by allowing a customs border to split up the United Kingdom.
Rather than having a customs border around the United Kingdom’s external border, the alleged proposal that has now, it is claimed, been accepted in principle would see a border separating Great Britain from Northern Ireland, both of which are full and equal parts of the United Kingdom. The deal would prioritise keeping an open border between Northern Ireland and a third country, the Republic of Ireland, and the rest of the European Union over keeping an open border with the rest of its own nation.
An unnamed source quoted by the paper said the agreement means “Northern Ireland would de jure be in the UK’s customs territory but de facto in the European Union’s”, allowing both Mr Johnson and Brussels to claim a victory while breaking up the United Kingdom.
Yet even this mad dash to get a deal — potentially at the cost of the United Kingdom’s integrity as a nation-state — will not be enough to deliver Brexit on time, potentially a fatal outcome for Mr Johnson’s electoral chances. As Breitbart London reported, delivering Brexit on time deal or no deal would see the Conservatives win a future general election with a decent majority, while delivering it late — even with a deal — would see them fall short of being able to command a parliamentary majority.
The Times reports that the Prime Minister has been told getting the specifics of a deal done would take “two more months”, pushing the eventual departure day into 2020 and quoted a German government source that said Brexit would have to be delayed until January 1st 2020.
The paper also quoted an unnamed EU source, that said: “Without a deal this week, Britain will need an extension. With a deal this week, Britain will need an extension.”
Brexit has already been officially delayed twice, those dates themselves having only come after a long period of delay. It has now been nearly three and a half years since the British people voted to leave the European Union in 2016, by a margin of more than a million votes in the largest democratic mandate given in British history.
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