Hard-Brexiteers and DUP told to think twice before rejecting deal

A British cabinet minister has urged an alliance of Conservative hard-Brexiters and the DUP, who have warned they will join forces to vote down Theresa May’s withdrawal plans, to “think about the alternatives”.

As the prime minister struggled to keep her Brexit plans on track, the education secretary, Damian Hinds, said there would be "trade-offs" in any deal and the final agreement would not give all sides everything they wanted.

“It is not necessarily going to be something everybody is going to think is absolutely perfectly what they want,” he told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show. “But that’s the nature of these things. There are some trade-offs.”

Ms May’s hopes of getting the cabinet to sign off her Brexit deal proposals at a crunch meeting this week appeared to be hanging in the balance amid warnings that even if ministers are “bounced” into giving it their backing at cabinet, MPs could still block it.

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She also faces a growing rebellion from the remainer wing of her party with rumours that four more pro-Europe ministers are on the brink of resigning after the departure of transport minister Jo Johnson, who quit on Friday calling for a second referendum.

The prime minister's woes were intensified by reports that the European Union had rejected her proposal for an "independent mechanism" that could allow the UK to quit a temporary customs arrangement if Brexit talks collapsed.

Mr Hinds ruled out a key Brexiter demand for a unilateral exit mechanism from the Irish backstop, saying it was “very, very unlikely” that the proposal would get agreement from the EU and telling colleagues that any alternative plan had to be “realistic”.

He said: “They need to think about what the alternatives are as well. It is no good just not liking individual aspects. If you’re going to take that view, you have got to have in mind a realistic, viable, deliverable alternative. I think people are going to be getting behind this deal and saying ‘yeah, let’s get on with it’.”

It comes after Steve Baker, the deputy of the European Research Group (ERG) of hard-Brexit Tory MPs, and Sammy Wilson, the DUP’s Brexit spokesman, said they would oppose any agreement they thought threatened the union and could lead to a trade border down the Irish Sea.

“We share the prime minister’s ambition for an EU free trade agreement, but not at any price, and certainly not at the price of our union,” they wrote. “If the government makes the historic mistake of prioritising placating the EU over establishing an independent and whole UK, then, regrettably, we must vote against the deal.”

May also faces pressure from Tory europhiles. The former cabinet minister Justine Greening called on her Tory MPs to block her plan. “The parliamentary deadlock has been clear for some time. It’s crucial now for parliament to vote down this plan, because it is the biggest giveaway of sovereignty in modern times,” she said.

The arch-Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg called on the prime minister to change tack, throwing his weight behind a plan to leave with no deal next March but pay GBP18bn and follow EU rules so the UK could negotiate as a “third country” with Brussels.

“It is time for convinced Brexiters like me to compromise. So, at this late hour in the negotiations, we would like to make a new, generous offer to break the deadlock, to achieve a ‘no deal plus’. It would cost us money but it would finally dispel the ‘crash out’ Project Fear nightmare scenarios.”

A British government source said: “The end part of negotiations were always going to be tough. There are a number of issues that need to be worked through on the Northern Ireland backstop and these are the most difficult.

“They include ensuring that, if it is ever needed, it is not permanent and there is a mechanism to ensure the UK could not be held in the arrangement indefinitely.”– Guardian News and Media