BOSTON, England — Here in the fens of Lincolnshire, the shock troops in the 2016 campaign for Britain to leave the European Union won their greatest victory with 75.6 percent voting to withdraw from the continental trading bloc.
And now? They’re seriously miffed.
“I say, let’s get on with it, please!” said Yvonne Stevens, a retired proprietor of a tea shop and member of the local council. “Let’s get out. Knock us on our backsides. Go on! We’ll be on the floor looking up. We’ll sort it out. Just get us out of Europe.”
Stevens and her fellow Brexiteers are pushing for the once-unimaginable – to leave the European Union with no deal at all.
Parliament is scheduled for a historic vote Tuesday evening on Prime Minister Theresa May’s unloved, half-in, half-out compromise exit plan.
Members of her own Conservative government acknowledge that May’s deal – negotiated over the past two years in Brussels – might fail to win support.
And many in the political press are predicting a devastating, career-defining defeat.
If May’s deal survives, then Brexit lurches ahead and Britain leaves the European Union – kind of, sort of – on March 29 as planned.
If May’s deal dies? Chaos.
The newspapers and airwaves Sunday were filled with reports of coups and plots, with some members of Parliament allegedly scheming to wrest control of Brexit away from a battered May and her revolving-door cabinet.
Meanwhile, opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is threatening (again) to call for a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons “soon.”
Corbyn probably has enough support to stage the vote – but not enough votes to actually topple May.
And then? More delay.
Some, including former Tory Prime Minister John Major, argue that the “only sensible course” to prevent the doomsday “no-deal” scenario is for Britain to delay Brexit by revoking Article 50, the EU provision that sets the timetable for departure in March.
The idea is that with some breathing room – and a definitive rejection of her deal in the Parliament – a properly chastened but newly reinvigorated May could go back to Brussels and demand more favorable terms.
The problem? European leaders have repeatedly said there is no better deal.
Others, led by those who oppose Brexit, say there should be a second referendum, a do-over, to decide again whether to really, really leave or remain. The electoral commission has advised that staging this second “People’s Vote” would take at minimum 21 weeks.
There is, of course, another option – one that was viewed as reckless, almost unthinkable just a few months ago, but has been gathering growing support among hard-line Brexiteers, and that is for Britain to leave the European Union with no deal.
Without May’s two, maybe three years of negotiated transition, Britain would immediately be treated by the EU as a “third country,” subject to potentially onerous immigration controls, trade tariffs and border inspections.
Out: today’s frictionless trade, where an order placed in the morning crosses the English Channel in the afternoon.
In: gridlock at the ports. Also possible: airplanes grounded, holidays canceled, store shelves emptied. And worse, according to a string of think-tank analyses, economic forecasts and government reports.
“Make no mistake, no-deal cannot be ‘managed.’ And it’s certainly not desirable,” Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, the U.K.’s largest business lobby group, warned in a speech Friday.
In the placid farming and market town of Boston, which holds the prize as the most Brexit-loving city in Britain, the campaigners to leave say they are ready to roll the dice with no deal.
“I think all the doom and gloom is exaggerated,” said Stevens, the pensioner. “It’s scaremongering is what it is.”
A recent poll, by Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University, found that “no deal” was popular among Conservative Party voters, many of whom think that the government’s warnings are intended to stoke unfounded fear.
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