BRUSSELS — European Union leaders offered a united chorus of ‘‘No’’ on Wednesday to Britain’s belated bid to negotiate changes to the Brexit divorce deal, with one official calling on British lawmakers to stop bickering and work out a cross-party approach.
In London, Prime Minister Theresa May acknowledged that her government hasn’t decided exactly how it will try to change the deal to address British lawmakers’ concerns about the Irish border.
All this while Britain is headed for the EU exit in less than two months, on March 29.
‘‘We are, quite simply, running out of road,’’ Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said.
Buoyed by winning a vote in Parliament, May has vowed to secure ‘‘legally binding changes’’ to the withdrawal agreement. British lawmakers voted Tuesday to send May back to Brussels seeking to replace an Irish border provision in the deal with ‘‘alternative arrangements,’’ ignoring EU warnings that the agreement can’t be altered.
But EU leaders saw the House of Commons session in a very different light.
Jean-Claude Juncker, chief of EU’s executive arm the European Commission, said Tuesday’s vote ‘‘has increased the risk of a disorderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom’’ from the European Union. ‘‘The withdrawal agreement will not be renegotiated,’’ he said.
Other EU governments backed that stance, leaving little room for May to realistically secure any changes to the Brexit deal.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said that ‘‘we’ve been down that track before and I don’t believe that such alternative arrangements exist.’’ German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said ‘‘opening up the withdrawal agreement is not on the agenda.’’
Britain and the EU struck a divorce deal in November after a year and a half of tense negotiations. But the agreement has run aground in Britain’s Parliament, which overwhelmingly rejected it on Jan. 15.
Much of the opposition centers on a border measure known as the ‘‘backstop,’’ a safeguard mechanism would keep the Britain in a customs union with the European Union to remove the need for checks along the border between the UK’s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland after Brexit.
The border area was a flashpoint during decades of conflict in Northern Ireland that cost 3,700 lives. The free flow of people and goods across the near-invisible border underpins both the local economy and Northern Ireland’s peace process.
Many pro-Brexit British lawmakers fear the backstop will trap Britain in regulatory lockstep with the European Union, and say they won’t vote for May’s deal unless it is removed.
May was speaking to Ireland’s Varadkar and European Council president Donald Tusk on Wednesday, and met opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in an attempt to find elusive cross-party unity on Brexit.
May conceded that her government hadn’t settled on a way to replace the backstop, telling lawmakers that ‘‘there are a number of proposals for how that could be done.’’ May said measures under consideration included a unilateral exit mechanism from the backstop for Britain, a time limit to the backstop and ‘‘mutual recognition and trusted trader schemes.’’
The European Union says the backstop is an insurance policy and as such can’t have a time limit or a get-out clause.
