Welcome to the Guardian’s weekly Brexit briefing. If you would like to receive it as a weekly email, please sign up here. You can also catch up with our Brexit Means … podcast right here.
Also, producing the Guardian’s independent, in-depth journalism takes time and money. We do it because we believe our perspective matters and it may be your perspective, too. If you value our Brexit coverage, please become a Guardian supporter. Thank you.
Top stories
With this week’s crunch Commons votes on the EU withdrawal bill looming, Theresa May told Tory MPs that 15 Lords amendments, including key changes aimed at giving parliament a meaningful final vote and keeping the UK in the customs union, had to be defeated:
We must think about the message parliament will send to the EU. I am trying to negotiate the best deal for Britain ... But if the Lords amendments are allowed to stand, that negotiating position will be undermined.
The prime minister’s comments came amid warnings from Tory rebels that despite earlier reports they were backing away from voting against May - in part because the resulting humiliation could threaten her leadership and let in Boris Johnson - they were not yet satisfied with some of her changes to the legislation.
But if ministers were confident a revolt on the withdrawal bill would be headed off, May is still struggling to unite her warring cabinet over the white paper on the UK’s post-Brexit future. A peace summit has been called at Chequers, her country retreat – but not until after the EU summit later this month.
This all follows a long private meeting last week with the Brexit secretary, David Davis, who expressed a litany of frustrations but was dissuaded from resigning by a concession to insert a (sort-of) end date in the final text of the government’s proposal on the “backstop” agreement on the Northern Irish border.
Needless to say, the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, as good as rejected the plan –, which would leave the whole of the UK in the customs union after transition until the future arrangement has been agreed, almost as soon as it was announced, clarifying later with slides that it would still lead to a hard border.
In a sign that Brexit is worrying international investors, EY reported that France attracted 31% more foreign direct investment in 2017 than in 2016, against a 6% increase in the UK. Britain’s market share fell for the second successive year, with Germany and France both favoured over the UK for the future.
Best of the rest
Top comment
In the Guardian, Matthew d’Ancona sees huge implications for UK politics in the sheer scale of the contacts revealed between Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore – the “Bad Boys of Brexit” – and Russian officials:
This is a parable of geopolitical imbalance, culture wars and deep political sickness. Under our noses, a well-developed network of far-right and nationalist forces seems to have arisen, apparently digitally mobilised and funded by Russian state actors; the law regulating elections, campaigns and referendums is woefully out of date (passed four years before Facebook was launched); Moscow is laughing at the rest of the world as Trump pleads its case at the G7; the far-right swoons over Vladimir Putin; and Jeremy Corbyn misses no opportunity to give the Russian president the benefit of the doubt over the use of nerve agents on British soil and the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria by his puppet in Damascus. This week, as the Commons votes on the very future of this country, don’t forget how we got here; how badly we underestimated the populist right; and how the leader of the opposition tends to make things easier for Putin, too. Still laughing?
In the Observer, Will Hutton argues that as their cause crumbles, Brexiters are turning to fantasy and bitter recriminations – and it’s time for Labour to step up:
As a policy, Brexit is beginning to look like the poll tax: attractive as a rightwing pet project but disastrous in practice. Then, the Tory party still had enough political nous to rescue itself, even at the cost of losing its prime minister. Now, as Boris Johnson acknowledges and David Davis’s threatened resignation symbolised, it is at war with itself and the realists are trying to rescue a third-best solution against those in Brexit La-La land. Theresa May’s impossible mission is to reconcile Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage’s red lines on sovereignty, freedom of movement and leaving every EU institution and trade policy, with an economy that requires the opposite. It would be hard enough with a united cabinet and years of negotiating time; within the two years allowed by the article 50 process and Brexit millenarian narcissists it cannot be done. Occasionally in politics there is the opportunity to do the right thing and secure massive party advantage. If Jeremy Corbyn were to declare that the Labour party wanted to stay in the EU – crucially, only politically sellable with new and aggressive initiatives to identify, control and manage the numbers of immigrants – he would transform his and his party’s standing.
Top tweet
A well-known professor speaks: