A no-deal Brexit approaches

March 29, 2019 has come and gone and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member state of the European Union. But probably not for long.

I interviewed my Brookings Center on the United States and Europe colleague Amanda Sloat on Facebook Live that morning just before Parliament voted Theresa May’s exit deal with the EU down for a third time, as we expected. Amanda’s been watching and explaining the twists and turns of Brexit, including nine blogs for Brookings on the “Brexit Endgame.” I’d also recommend her recent Foreign Affairs piece, her paper “Divided kingdom: How Brexit is remaking the UK’s constitutional order” from last fall, and her Time piece on Northern Ireland from last summer.

My own intuition for the past month or more is that the U.K. and the EU are headed to a break without a deal. May is a Conservative prime minister who set out to deliver a Conservative Brexit, and she negotiated one representing the weaker side against a unified European Union which prioritized Ireland’s bottom line of no hard border on the island of Ireland. But with May reliant on Northern Ireland’s hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party for her parliamentary majority since the 2017 snap elections, no special economic arrangement could be worked out for Northern Ireland. The hard Brexiteers in her party, heedless of the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, eventually made clear that they preferred the substantial risks of a no-deal Brexit to the potential that the U.K. stays in a customs union with the EU - if only in the contingency that they can’t come to a negotiated arrangement otherwise in 2020 under a backstop set up to guard the gains of the peace process. And May didn’t have enough votes between the two parties and from a few Labour MPs willing to buck their party to get her Conservative Brexit deal over the finish line.

Unless a fourth try by May works, we’re down to a no-deal crash out (which some hardliners welcome) on April 12 (or as late as May 22 if the EU is feeling generous enough to give the Brits more time to prepare), or the Parliament wresting away control to deliver a softer Brexit with the help of the EU for another extension which might well require general and European Parliament elections in the U.K. The crash out still seems likeliest to me, because the alternative is complicated and precarious - it requires an affirmative majority for something, which has been lacking thus far, it requires the acquiescence of 27 other EU countries with reasons to be torn about keeping the U.K. in for longer, and it faces hostility from both the lame duck prime minister and the hard Brexiteers. That alternative is still possible - fear of no-Brexit is what led the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and Dominic Raab to vote for May’s deal on Friday when they are on the record preferring no-deal - but time is running out. It’s going to be an interesting week in the British Parliament.