Hossen Sohel: Conser-vative Prime Minister Theresa May faces a cabinet showdown yesterday with fears among some ministers that the ties binding Northern Ireland and Scotland to the United Kingdom are now at risk, reports Al Jazeera.
The meeting comes after May’s humiliating trip to Salzburg, Austria, where EU leaders rejected the prime minister’s proposals for a future relationship with the bloc.
Members of May’s cabinet are expected to demand that she comes up with a “Plan B”.
She had crafted her ill-fated “Chequers” blueprint to resolve deep divisions within her party over the UK’s relationship with Europe that have been exacerbated by the issue of the border between Northern Ireland, which is controlled by the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.
Both her government and the EU have committed themselves to avoiding the creation of a physical or “hard” border for customs checks in order to safeguard a peace process forged in the troubled province in 1998 after 30 years of paramilitary violence.
In an effort to prevent customs checks, the Chequers plan proposed keeping the whole of the UK in Europe’s single market for food and goods – but EU leaders roundly rejected this as a threat to the “European project”.
Their forthright position stymied May just a week before she is due to address her party’s conference in Birmingham and was likened by senior colleagues to the infamous 1956 Suez crisis that underlined Britain’s end-of-empire loss of influence.
In a statement on Friday, May said: “Throughout this process, I have treated the EU with nothing but respect. The UK expects the same. A good relationship at the end of this process depends on it.”