Theresa May
has said she is prepared to "explore every possible option" to break
the deadlock in Brexit talks.
She told MPs
95% of the terms of exit were agreed but the Irish border was still a
"considerable sticking point".
While willing
to consider extending the UK's transition period beyond 2020, she said this was
"undesirable" and would have to end "well before" May 2022.
Labour's
Jeremy Corbyn said the Tories were "terminally incompetent and hamstrung
by their own divisions".
The UK is to
leave the EU on 29 March 2019 but hopes of reaching agreement on the terms of
its exit by the end of the year have been held up by a lack of a solution to
the Irish border issue.
At last
week's EU summit, European leaders refused to sign off plans for a special
Brexit meeting in November to seal the withdrawal agreement, saying insufficient
progress had been made.
But updating
MPs, Mrs May insisted the process was moving in the right direction, with the
future status of Gibraltar and the UK's RAF bases in Cyprus having been settled
in recent days.
"Taking
all of this together, 95% of the Withdrawal Agreement and its protocols are now
settled."
Jeremy
Corbyn called PM's statement a “mixture of failure, denial and delusion,"
She urged
the EU to do more to ensure commitments entered into by both sides to avoid a
hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland were honoured
by whatever means necessary.
One idea is
to extend the transition period, currently due to end on 31 December 2020, to
give the two sides more time to agree their future economic partnership and
ensure controversial contingency plans, the so-called Irish backstop, do not
ever come into force.
Both Tory
Brexiteers and Remainers worry this would delay further the moment of the UK's
proper departure from the EU, and potentially cost billions in terms of extra
payments.
But Mrs May
told MPs that protecting the UK's integrity was so important that she had a
duty to explore "every possible solution" to keeping the Irish border
open and ensuring no new barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the
UK.
She said the
UK should be able to make a "sovereign choice" in December 2020
between extending the transition period for a short period or invoking the
backstop - which would see the whole of the UK stay in a temporary,
time-limited customs arrangement with the EU.
She
suggested the transition option might be preferable as it would "mean only
one set of changes for businesses at the point we move to the future
relationship".
"But in
any such scenario we would have to be out of this implementation period well
before the end of this parliament," she added.
'Politicians'
vote'
Urging Tory
MPs to hold their nerve during the toughest part of the negotiations, she
rejected calls for another referendum and said reports that civil servants were
planning for such an eventuality were untrue.
She said she
would not be listening to those who wanted to "stop Brexit" through a
new referendum - which she said should be called a "politicians'
vote" rather than a "people's vote".
She
explained that people had had their vote, in the 2016 referendum, and a repeat
would be a case of politicians telling them to have another go.
But one of
her party's MPs, Sarah Wollaston, said the only "politicians' vote"
would be if they found a way to ignore the views of the people who took part in
the People's Vote march past Downing Street to call for a new referendum.
A weekend of
feverish speculation suggested Mrs May had 72 hours to save her job ahead of a
meeting of the 1922 committee of backbench MPs on Wednesday.
During more
than three hours of Brexit questions in the Commons, Tory MPs condemned the
anonymous briefing against the PM over the weekend, which suggested she faced
being "knifed" by her party, but expressed frustrations about
government concessions.
John
Whittingdale said Leave voters were being asked to wait more than four years
after the 2016 Brexit vote to regain full control of their laws and money.
And former
cabinet minister John Redwood said staying in the EU's customs union up to the
end of 2021 could cost the UK between £15bn and £20bn at a time when resources
were "desperately needed" for domestic priorities such as the NHS,
schools and Universal Credit.
He told MPs
it would be "an act of great rashness" to a financial settlement
which amounted to a "surrender document which we cannot afford".
In a
separate statement, Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab said the "meaningful
vote" on the final Brexit deal could not be allowed to prevent or delay the
UK's departure from the EU.
The choice
MPs faced, he said, was between the "best deal" negotiated by the
government and a no-deal alternative, adding he was "very sure that will
focus minds".
But Labour
said it would not support this while former Tory education secretary Nicky
Morgan questioned what legal advice ministers had received to support its
position.
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