WITH a ComRes poll revealing yesterday that public support for a no-deal Brexit is rapidly rising, up 6% since January and now standing at 44%, former Tory Brexit Secretary David Davis laid into Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement which is to be voted on in the House of Commons again tomorrow evening.
When MPs voted on the deal in January the government lost by a record 230 votes.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday morning, Davis said of May’s deal: ‘It’s a dreadful deal on many, many counts.’
He added: ‘The affect of the government losing this week… frankly, is to make two things more probable.
‘One is no deal, as it were by accident, because we defer by two weeks but we get nothing and so we have to leave anyway under the law, or we get no Brexit.
‘And that’s what the House will have to choose between. It’ll have to choose between something which might have a risk of some short-term but manageable economic turbulance, or something which for certain will be a democratic disaster, namely, not delivering on the referendum.’
He went on: ‘What happens is that the British people who voted for this and a large number of Remainers who didn’t vote for it but still think it should be carried through because they believe in democracy, will see a government walking away, a parliament walking away from a question that they themselves put to the people.
‘Now that will absolutely undermine belief in democracy in this country and certainly belief in the established political parties.’
Also appearing on the Marr show, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt begged fellow Tories to vote for May’s deal, warning that some MPs wanted to ‘kill’ the deal in order to delay Brexit, with the aim of getting another referendum on the issue.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell told Marr: ‘It looks as though she’s bringing back the same deal so it looks as though we will have the same result and it will be thrown out.’
He said Labour’s priority this week is to stop May ‘driving through some sort of Brexit deal that will damage our economy and undermine jobs’ and if that means a delay to Brexit ‘so be it’.
