International Trade Secretary Liam Fox says exiting the EU without a deal is the U.K. government’s “default policy” if there is no agreement in parliament on the prime minister’s Withdrawal Agreement.
Fox, a leading voice in the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, told BBC Radio’s Today program that a no-deal Brexit would be “difficult, but survivable.” But he said that if MPs vote down Theresa May’s Brexit deal, “that would be the default policy.”
That appears to go beyond a statement of legal fact: that because of the two-year Article 50 timetable, the default position in legal terms is that the U.K. would fall out of the EU without a deal if MPs do not back the deal on the table. Fox’s suggestion that no deal would become government policy will infuriate MPs who are urging the government to rule out a no-deal exit which they regard as highly damaging to the economy.
But Fox said he was more sanguine about a no-deal Brexit. “I don’t regard no-deal as national suicide. This is not Dunkirk, we’re leaving the European Union. The best way to do it is to agree the deal the prime minister has negotiated. I think no-deal would damage our economy, but it’s survivable. I think no-Brexit, politically, is a disaster from which we might not recover.”
That echoes a warning that May will deliver Monday morning in a speech in Stoke-on-Trent. She will attempt to persuade Brexiteers in her party to back her deal citing the two defeats the government suffered last week as evidence that a Remain-leaning parliament will prevent Brexit from happening.
“As we have seen over the last few weeks, there are some in Westminster who would wish to delay or even stop Brexit and who will use every device available to them to do so,” she will say.
Fox said that any move to overturn the 2016 referendum result and stay in the EU would “cause such a chasm between parliament and the people,” and risk “the sort of populism we’ve seen in Continental Europe.”
“There are those who want Brexit not to happen. I think that would be profoundly undemocratic … it would shake to its foundations the relationship between parliament and the voters of the country,” he said.