Boris Johnson demands UK PM May rip up her Brexit proposals

LONDON: Boris Johnson the campaigner of Brexit called on United Kingdom's Prime Minister Theresa May to rip up her proposal for Britain’s exit from the European Union.

The statement will increase the pressure on May as she prepares to face her divided party at its annual conference next week.

May has yet to clinch a Brexit divorce deal with the EU and rebels in her party have threatened to vote down any deal she makes. Just six months before Britain is due to leave the European Union on March 29, 2019, little is clear.

A poll of polls published on Friday added more uncertainty to the situation as it showed voters would now vote 52 to 48 percent in favour of remaining in the EU were there to be another Brexit referendum. May has repeatedly ruled out another referendum.

Johnson said May's Brexit plans would leave the United Kingdom half in and half out of the club it joined in 1973 and ineffective “enforced vassalage”.

“This is the moment to change the course of the negotiations and do justice to the ambitions and potential of Brexit,” Johnson writes in his article, who resigned in July as foreign secretary over May’s Brexit proposals.

He said the EU’s “backstop” proposals for Northern Ireland, under which the British-ruled province would remain within the EU customs union even if the rest of Britain left, amounted to the economic annexation of part of the United Kingdom.

The plan outlined by Johnson gained support from other rebels such as Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg who are pushing for a deeper break with the EU.

“This is an opportunity for the UK to become more dynamic and more successful, and we should not be shy of saying that – and we should recognise that it is exactly this potential our EU partners seek to constrain,” Johnson wrote.

May, who voted to stay in the EU, is trying to clinch a divorce deal with the EU while grappling with an open rebellion in her Conservative Party, which convenes in the English city of Birmingham on Sunday for its annual party conference.

May has repeatedly said her Brexit proposals are the only viable ones. The 30-year schism inside her party over Europe helped sink the premierships of her Conservative predecessors Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron.