If you think you’re having a bad week, count your blessings you’re not British PM Theresa May.
May, it must be said, doesn’t have too many good weeks - but this week has been special even by the beleaguered Dancing Queen’s standards.
Theresa May Photo: AFP / FILE
She has been trying to keep her Brexit ‘Chequers’ plan afloat and fend off brickbats from erstwhile Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, and face down the justaposition of her recent “end of austerity” party conference speech with a trial showing beneficiaries will be much worse off under the Tories’ Universal Credit scheme.
Gerri Peev joined Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan to talk about May’s "week from hell" and the crucial seven days ahead.
“It’s a seven-day countdown until the next big meeting in Brussels. At the moment, EU negotiators are meeting with British officials and politicians to knuckle down on the detail of the withdrawal agreement of Britain leaving the EU.”
The ‘Northern Ireland impasse’ - whether to have a hard or soft border between Ireland and Northern Ireland - is also far from resolved, Peev says.
“Theresa May’s Conservative government is propped up by the DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] a Northern Irish party.
“They are vehemently against any kind of differentiating treatment between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK because they see themselves as very much part of the UK. They do not want some sort of border or some sort of different customs arrangement with goods travelling between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK."
The problem is, this is exactly what the EU is proposing, Peev says.
“So that is going to be a bit of a sticking point.”
May’s nemesis - former foreign secretary and the right honourable member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson - has been throwing Twitter bombs.
British Conservative Party politician Boris Johnson gives a speech during a fringe event on the sidelines of the third day of the Conservative Party Conference. Photo: AFP
“On Thursday Boris Johnson tweeted that as far as he understands it, the current proposals from the EU would amount to the UK becoming an EU colony and it was basically a rallying cry to his supporters to oppose this deal.”
Johnson was warning that he would not abide by “any kind of deal which keeps the UK in the customs union or in the single market because, he says, this is not what the people of Britain voted for when they voted to leave the EU,” Peev says.
Amid all this ongoing Brexit chaos, the clock is ticking.
“So basically she’s got seven days of these negotiations to go and then there’s another meeting next Wednesday, and if they do decide to agree to these proposals then there is probably one more meeting in November.
"After that it has get through the Commons, and this has been the sticking point.”
Reports suggest there are 40 rebel Tory MPs on May’s own side who would vote down the deal in its current form.
“If that happens, it is potentially a bit of a disaster for her and she might have to go back to the drawing board - or there might have to be a general election.
“At the moment the general thinking is that really November is the latest month in which a final deal could be totally agreed. That is in order to give it enough time to get through Parliament.”
The UK is meant to be leaving the EU in March next year and there is much technical and legislative work to be done before then, Peev says.
“The one silver lining for Theresa May is: while these rebels might vote down a particular element of the deal, it’s not clear whether they’ll vote down the final agreement at the final hurdle, because if they do that then that means the government will fall.”
Whether these hardliners are willing to take the flak for bringing down their own government is an unknown, she says.
That's a small consolation for May, with more bad news this week: a trial of her party’s Universal Credit scheme (rolling about six benefit schemes into one) has shown many beneficiaries would be worse off.
“It all sounds wonderful and streamlined and snazzy, but in reality it means a £3 billion cut in benefits.
“Something like 40 percent of single-parent families are actually going to receive a cut of £200 a month.
“Two thirds of claimants with children are also likely to receive a similar cut, and those figures were divulged by the work and pensions secretary in an estimate made to the cabinet.”
Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has weighed in and called the scheme “cruel and vindictive”.
Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May waves as she gives her keynote address on the fourth and final day of the Conservative Party Conference. Photo: AFP
Even May’s own comments at the Conservative party conference - that the age of austerity is over - look somewhat hollow in the light of this, Peev says.
“The whole new system is meant to be rolled out next summer, some four months after Brexit is enacted - if it is, indeed, enacted - and so we could be facing a summer of potential chaos.”
