Sky News (HERE) say Theresa May is in a perilous bind on Brexit. This is quite an understatement. But she has only one person to blame for her predicament and that is herself. Nobody forced her to take so many options off the table so early and paint so many red lines. Nobody forced her to trigger Article 50 when she did. Nobody forced her to call an election or go into an alliance with the DUP when her majority disappeared. All those decisions are coming back to haunt her.
Suggest an EFTA/EEA route to Norway, as Nick Boles has proposed, and the ERG would pull the plug. Leave without a deal and business, particularly the car industry, would start to ship out. You want a FTA? The EU say you need a backstop for the Irish border first, otherwise it's no deal anyway. The only legally enforceable backstop available is the one proposed by the EU but the DUP won't buy it at any price and will remove their support if she accepts it.
Nobody has a solution to the Irish border problem at all but one idea now being bandied about is a UK wide "customs arrangement". This would take years to work through and so the proposal is to extend the transition by a year to give more time to prepare the "customs arrangement". Almost nobody in Westminster, on either side, agrees with the delay. So, that's a non starter.
The Guardian (HERE) points to two other issues. Firstly, that the PM is handicapped by having to hold parallel negotiations, one at home and the other in Brussels. But this is the result of triggering Article 50 before a consensus had been reached in cabinet. Once again, her fault. The other is her refusal to engage with moderate MPs which is going to lead to a constitutional crisis in parliament sooner or later. This too can be laid directly at her door.
Had she levelled with the British people in July 2016 about the immense difficulty in severing 43 years of integration and tried to find a compromise among a decent majority of MP's she would not be in so much difficulty now. Taking sole charge of deciding what's best for the nation is incredibly arrogant and she will soon pay the price for her hubris.
The time is ticking down, she's ruled out any extension to the Article 50 two year period, parliament is fractious and she and Dominic Raab have made it more so by reneging on a promise to offer a meaningful vote. So, yes she is in a perilous position - but so are we. It's a high wire act now. So much is at stake for all of us.
What we are witnessing could have been (and was) anticipated. The two year A50 period is proceeding as it was always intended. The EU, a legal construct, is behaving exactly as you would expect. They are the dominant bloc, playing it by the book with a completely unified position, pursuing their own interests, in particular with regard to Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement. On the other hand, we are fractured and divided every which way and facing the EU as supplicant. Brexiteers might think that no deal is okay but Theresa May, despite parroting the phrase regularly, knows that it's not. And so does the EU.
We will conceded everything sooner or later. Meanwhile the only thing at issue is the amount of damage we have to sustain before we realise it.
