Therese Raphael, Columnist

Even Jeremy Corbyn Can’t Kill the No-Deal Beast

We’re still a long way from a Brexit agreement, and you have to ask whether the Tory party would survive a compromise deal from Theresa May.

April 4, 2019 at 5:00 AM UTC

By Therese Raphael

Therese Raphael is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering health care and British politics. Previously, she was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Britain's Conservative Party appears to be in mortal danger.
Photographer: WPA Pool/Getty Images Europe

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The British parliament has said over and over again that it doesn’t want the U.K. to leave the European Union without an exit deal. On Wednesday night it made that binding in a vote that was won on a razor-thin 313-312 margin.

Even that (assuming it’s okayed by the House of Lords) doesn’t end all the risks of a no-deal Brexit. For one thing, the vote requires the government to seek an extension from Brussels, and that will have to be approved unanimously by 27 EU member states. The bloc’s leaders still need to be convinced that they’re delaying for a worthy reason, not just allowing the U.K. more time to wallow in its own political mire.