The Guardian Politics Weekly: Is a no-deal Brexit back on the cards?

Heather Stewart is joined by Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and Rachel Wolf to discuss the latest Tory leadership pledges, the new intake of European MEPs and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

As Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt do their utmost to drive the country off a no-deal cliff edge, business leaders, fellow politicians and the rest of the world look on aghast.

While the Thelma and Louise of British politics wrestle over the steering wheel, we ask: are we really going to leave the EU without a deal?

Joining Heather Stewart are the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland and Owen Jones, and Rachel Wolf from the consultancy Public First.

Also this week: it was a lively start to the opening of the European parliament, with protests, back-turning and rude T-shirts. We talk to one of the new crop of MEPs, Caroline Voaden of the Liberal Democrats, and to the Guardian’s Brussels bureau chief, Daniel Boffey.

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The Guardian Politics Weekly: A bad week for Boris Johnson

It appears that Boris Johnson has been taking tips from the Theresa May electioneering handbook, as this week he lurched from one PR disaster to another.

Last Friday police were called to the flat Johnson shares with his partner, Carrie Symonds, and since then Johnson has been on the back foot: dodging reporters, avoiding TV debates, and saying strange things about building toy buses.

Could the wheels be coming off Boris’s cardboard bus?

Rafael Behr is joined to discuss by the Observer’s Michael Savage, Katy Balls from the Spectator and Tom Kibasi from the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Also this week: the next prime minister will be decided by 160,000 Conservative party members. We ask Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who they are and what is known about them.

Labour’s shadow cabinet met on Tuesday to resolve their second referendum conundrum once and for all. But didn’t. What’s stopping them?

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TLDR News: Tactical Voting in the Leadership Election

Throughout the Conservative leadership contest theirs been speculation that candidates have encouraged their supporters to vote tactically. With the final two candidates selected we look back over the process and examine if there really been tactical voting going on.

The Huffington Post: Trump To Be Denied Honour Of Addressing UK Parliament During State Visit In June

Although Barack Obama made a landmark address in Westminster Hall in 2011, Trump will not be allowed the same privilege after the visit’s organisers decided to avoid a diplomatic row over his “racism and sexism”. [...]

MPs will be sent away from Westminster from May 23 until June 4, which means the building will be effectively closed during a key part of the President’s trip to London. [...]

Whitehall insiders revealed that the UK government had not made a formal request to the Commons speaker and Lords speaker, which is the usual protocol, to allow Trump to speak. [...]

Some government supporters of Trump’s visit, including foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, had been pushing hard for a change of heart to allow him to make the address to parliament. [...]

Corbyn, who has refused an invitation to a state banquet with Trump and the Queen at Buckingham Palace, has warned that Britain should not be “rolling out the red carpet” for Trump.

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The Atlantic: Watching Britain’s Influence Shrink in Real Time

Some within Britain’s diplomatic corps, however, have warned that the U.K.’s global role is already not what it used to be, and stands to deteriorate even further after it leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. “We’re not the same country we were in 1945,” Harriet O’Brien, a British diplomat based in New York, says in the BBC series. “In some ways, we don’t have as much influence in the world. So we do, I think, punch above our weight.” [...]

And when it comes to present and future world crises, British leaders have publicly grappled with not being able to command the same foreign-policy authority it once had. “We have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Hunt told the House of Commons last week when asked about Britain’s draft resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Yemen.

The last time Britain seemed so unsure of its place in the world, it had lost its empire after World War II. Then the American statesman Dean Acheson warned London against overestimating its power alone. “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship,” Acheson said in 1962. “This role is about played out.”

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The Guardian: Britain’s arrogant attempts to hoodwink the EU have sacrificed all trust

There is a reason why Britain is being dragged kicking and screaming from the backstop to the withdrawal agreement. Since the start of this process, our government has confirmed every European fear and British stereotype. The UK has sought to divide and rule, bypassing the European commission and playing member states off against one another; ceaselessly demanded unique privileges unavailable to either members or non-members; and continued to insist upon fantasy technology at the Irish border to prevent the return of all-too-real sectarian violence.

Our long reputation has always preceded us but, immediately after the referendum, the EU held out genuine hope that the government might behave reasonably. Certainly, Britain’s official narrative centred around building goodwill and demonstrating good faith. But, in reality, Theresa May quickly compounded tactical errors with pointless offence. The 2016 “citizens of nowhere” conference speech horrified EU diplomats, who also objected to the threatening tone of the Lancaster House speech and Article 50 letter. In May 2017, the prime minister even accused “bureaucrats of Brussels” ​of meddling in the UK election. Boris Johnson’s rhetoric about punishment beatings and whistling for money, and Jeremy Hunt’s likening of the bloc to a Soviet prison did little to help.

The EU expected domestic Tory theatre, but ministers’ hostile language has also bled into personal relationships. Johnson, David Davis and Dominic Raab have all been deemed abrasive figures, and EU officials report numerous breaches of courtesy and protocol. Character and personality matter, and British arrogance has not won friends or influence.

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The Spectator: All by herself: Theresa May and the politics of isolation Inbox x

Her current policy — to threaten to walk away from talks if the EU doesn’t accept her Chequers plan — is not taken seriously in Brussels. EU leaders can see that the UK is hopelessly unprepared for no deal, and reason that she’d be stopped by her cabinet, parliament or both if she tried it. May’s colleagues worry that she is in denial, and so they are making their own plans. One of those intimately involved in the government’s contingency planning tells me, ‘No deal cannot be our only Plan B.’ [...]

Even the handful who still defend Chequers in private, as well as in public, admit that things are now more difficult. One cabinet minister concedes that the EU’s approach at Salzburg was a ‘very successful negotiating tactic’. Another cabinet member says the Chequers plan has done its job: to show the government had made an effort, in good faith, to negotiate as close an economic relationship with the EU as possible. ‘You’ve got to be able to say to the Remainers that we tried.’

There are some in the cabinet who still loathe Brexit and regard Chequers as the UK’s opening offer. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is expected to push to stay in the customs union and makes no attempt to disguise his concerns about Brexit. In cabinet meetings this week, he complained that a restaurant in his Surrey constituency can’t hire enough staff to wait all the tables — proof, he said, that the UK needed low-skilled immigration. But as one exasperated cabinet minister put it to me afterwards, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Chancellor that maybe the restaurant should just pay its staff more. And that the balance of power between workers and low-wage businesses might be precisely why so many voted for Brexit in the first place.

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The Guardian: UK faces darker hours before Brexit agreement is reached

Brussels is well acquainted with being cast as the baddy by grandstanding prime ministers and ministers. Ruling out one Brussels-led policy in bellicose terms lets governments accept quietly something else that may only be slightly less toxic to the voters and domestic political alliances that give them power. [...]

If there are any doubts in Brussels that May has now accepted a Canada-style free trade deal as the likely landing zone, albeit with some bells and whistles to make it look like a compromise, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, was able to assuage them on the BBC’s Today show on Saturday. Asked twice to rule out such a deal, with the regulatory barriers on imports this involves, he did not do so.

But there’s a bigger, and intractable, row to come. May says she has ruled out a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK for constitutional reasons. She may also have done this because the UK’s manufacturing sector is reliant on an absence of customs checks between Britain, Ireland and the continent. Yet the UK’s continued membership in a customs union has also been ruled out. The Brexiters see many of the Leave benefits as coming from the ability of global Britain to set its own tariff schedule on imports. Something has to give. Brussels is preparing for things to get much darker.

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The Atlantic: Can Britain Deal With ‘No Deal’?

The comments, which coincided with the resumption of Brexit talks in Brussels this week, marked one of the most pronounced admissions yet from a senior British government official about the prospect of a no-deal Brexit—a scenario British Prime Minister Theresa May famously said would be “better than a bad deal for Britain” in a 2017 speech. Though many within the government have insisted that an agreement with the EU is still within reach, virtually no one has admitted that failure could be seriously costly for both sides. Indeed, Hunt’s predecessor Boris Johnson said such a scenario would be “perfectly okay.” [...]

Hunt wasn’t wrong about no deal. Indeed, the potential consequences of failing to reach an agreement have been widely documented. In addition to both the legal and financial challenges the U.K. would face, there are also questions surrounding the impact it could have on the country’s ports, its borders, and the legal standing of its more than 3 million EU residents—just to name a few. [...]

But if the government is convinced that no deal is in fact not better than a bad deal after all, it has yet to say that clearly, as Hunt’s backtracking demonstrates. Wright said that while the no-deal papers do signal the government’s desire to be prepared for any outcome, “it’s not an outward rejection of ‘no deal is better than a bad deal,’ because I think they are still convinced that perhaps the EU’s proposal for what a final deal would look like is not acceptable for various reasons,” she said. “But I think they absolutely realize that not planning for a no deal [Brexit] would be catastrophic.”

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The Observer view on why Theresa May must stop the Brexit clock

The English, it is often said, lacking in language skills, have an unfortunate habit of shouting at foreigners when travelling abroad, assuming that by raising their voices and waving their arms, their needs will eventually be understood. This approach rarely works well. It tends to annoy those on the receiving end, while failing to assist mutual comprehension. Yet this, in sum, is what the hard Tory Brexiters have been reduced to as pressure grows to avoid a national “no-deal” catastrophe when the UK quits the EU next March. [...]

May’s cabinet colleagues, fanning out across the continent like Patton’s Third Army to advance her Chequers compromise, do not appear to have fared any better. Especially embarrassing are the efforts of Jeremy Hunt, the new foreign secretary. He gravely warned puzzled Europeans last week that Britain was heading for “no-deal by accident” by pushing itself off a cliff. The UK would not “blink first”, he added. Perhaps Hunt thinks he is Clint Eastwood. It matters not. On Brexit, this government has its eyes tight shut. It is blind to the consequences – and the waiting chasm. Blinking does not come into it. [...]

“The UK knows well the benefits of the single market. It has contributed to shaping our rules over the last 45 years. And yet some UK proposals would undermine our single market, which is one of the EU’s biggest achievements. The UK wants to keep free movement of goods between us, but not of people and services. And it proposes to apply EU customs rules without being part of the EU’s legal order. The UK wants to take back sovereignty and control of its own laws, which we respect, but it cannot ask the EU to lose control of its borders and laws,” Barnier wrote.

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The Guardian: Oh for the days when it was all Brussels’ fault!

The foreign secretary betrayed this sense of nostalgia when criticising Brussels’ conduct over Brexit. “Without a real change in approach from the EU negotiators we do now face a real risk of a no deal by accident and that would be incredibly challenging economically,” he warned, adding that the British people would blame the EU for this and it “would change [their] attitudes to Europe for a generation”. So there he is, a Tory cabinet minister, saying that British problems are the EU’s fault. Just once more, for old times’ sake? [...]

We’re witnessing the end of a way of life. For decades, our political leaders, both Tories and Labour, have been able to blame things that went wrong, things they failed to do, anything that seemed unfairly constraining, or frighteningly liberating, on the Brussels bureaucrats. Anything that smacked of globalisation and corporate power, but also anything that seemed overly statist and controlling, anything that was bad for business and anything that left the individual citizen too exposed. Put simply: anything. [...]

This is why, despite the stratospheric importance of the question of whether or not Britain is in the EU – not just in terms of economics and geopolitics but of the hearts, minds and self-image of millions of Britons – the two main parties haven’t fought a general election on the issue for over 30 years. They’ve argued endlessly about privatisation and NHS funding and tuition fees and foxhunting and MPs’ expenses, but they’ve both avoided the main problem, this colossal, festering unresolved question and left it as a personal matter for individual members. That’s like having decades of religious debate in the 16th century between two groups both of which refuse to say whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.

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