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MPs have overwhelmingly approved the Brexit trade deal to pave the way for the UK-EU deal to go into effect at 11pm tomorrow.
The House of Commons backed the deal, reached between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the EU on Christmas Eve, by 521 votes to 73, a majority of 448.
The deal, which spans 1,246 pages and covers a commercial value of £ 660bn, will now go to the House of Lords for consideration by their peers.
The government expects the deal to go through all required parliamentary stages in a single day on Wednesday.
And therefore it will be fully ratified before the end of the Brexit transition period at 11pm on New Year’s Eve.
Boris Johnson returns to 10 Downing Street after voting on the Brexit trade deal in the House of Commons
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was to formally sign the deal in Downing Street on Wednesday afternoon, previously told MPs that the deal would allow the UK to take control of its “national destiny”.
“The central purpose of this bill is to achieve something that the British people always knew in their hearts could be done, but that we were continually told to be impossible,” he said.
“We were told that we could not have our cake and eat it … that is, that we could trade and cooperate with our European neighbors in the narrowest terms of friendship and goodwill, while retaining sovereign control of our laws and our national destiny.” .
Johnson praised the deal for allowing “a new relationship between Britain and the EU as equal sovereigns.”
Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer had ordered his party to vote in favor of the deal, arguing that the alternative would be for the UK to leave the Brexit transition period without an EU trade deal.
In a message to MPs planning to vote against the agreement, including some within his own party, he said: “When the breach is an agreement, it is not a sign of how pro-European it is to reject the implementation of this treaty.
“It is not in the national interest to evade a question or hide in the knowledge that others will save you from the consequences of your own vote.”
Sir Keir said the agreement “would establish a floor from which we can build a strong relationship in the future with the EU.”
However, the Labor leader criticized the “thin deal” as having “many flaws” and said there was a “huge gap” in the agreement’s provisions for the services sector.
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Prime Minister on Brexit: we have nothing to fear
One Labor MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, voted against the deal, while 36 other Labor MPs did not vote.
This suggested that they had abstained and thus also rebelled against the party’s leader, Sir Keir, by failing to back the EU trade deal.
Among them was Helen Hayes, who resigned her shadow cabinet post after choosing not to support the official Labor Party position.
Two former Conservative cabinet ministers, Brexiters Owen Paterson and John Redwood, also refrained from rebelling against the prime minister.
During the more than four hours of debate on the deal, former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Sir Keir for failing to support her efforts in negotiations with the EU last year, when he was shadow Brexit secretary.
She told the now Labor leader: “He said he wanted a better deal; he had the opportunity in early 2019 when there was an opportunity for a better deal on the table and he voted against it.”
Ms. May welcomed Mr. Johnson’s agreement, but suggested that Brussels would be favored under the terms of the agreement.
“We have a trade agreement that benefits the EU, but not a services agreement that would have benefited the UK,” he added.
Conservative eurosceptic Sir Bill Cash compared the prime minister to ancient Greek statesman Pericles and Alexander the Great, adding that Johnson had “saved our democracy.”
His conservative colleague Mark Francois, who chairs the Conservative Brexiteers European Research Group, claimed that he and his other “Spartans” who support the License could now “lower our spears” in the “battle for Brexit.”
The SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats confirmed their opposition to the deal.
And the DUP also reiterated its anger at post-Brexit agreements for the Irish border, known as the Northern Ireland Protocol, which Johnson signed with the EU last year.
“We are people who believe that the UK should go, it should go as a whole, and that is not happening,” said DUP MP Sammy Wilson.
On Wednesday morning, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, formally signed the trade agreement in Brussels.
The document was then flown to London on an RAF plane for Johnson to add his own signature in Downing Street.
