With less than five months to go until Brexit Day, March 29, 2019, marathon negotiations between Britain and the European Union have finally produced a draft agreement on their future relationship. Europe has watched transfixed as the world’s fifth-largest economy — including London, a global financial powerhouse — wrenches itself out of the world’s largest political union.

But opposition to the deal’s terms has exploded across the British political spectrum and threatens the survival of Theresa May’s fragile Conservative government. That in turn raises the specter of a takeover by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, still unrepentant about anti-Semitism allegations.

The proposed deal, released on Wednesday in a 500-page document, sets out Britain’s future relationship with the EU in everything from fishing rights to immigration, and it does deliver on some key policies. Theresa May was able to tell a packed Parliament that the agreement meant an end to open immigration, one of the core drivers of the Leave campaign.

“The Declaration will end free movement once and for all,” she said. “Instead we will have our own new skills-based immigration system — based not on the country people come from, but on what they can contribute to the UK.”

But opponents have zeroed in on the parts they say amount to a cave-in to EU negotiators. The first is the transition period. The deal stipulates that the UK will remain in the EU customs union for a transition period until the end of 2020. This is a red flag for Brexiteers, whose leader Jacob Rees-Mogg said the agreement would leave the UK a “slave state,” unable to influence Brussels’s policy but still bound by it.

It’s the status of Northern Ireland that is proving most incendiary. A guiding principle for both the EU and Britain in the Brexit negotiations has been the preservation of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. This avoided a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which was only possible because both were EU members. But with Britain heading out of the EU, the only way to avoid border controls is seemingly for Northern Ireland to remain part of the EU’s customs union permanently, thus effectively separating Northern Ireland from the UK.

The British government spent months trying to square this circle, trying to persuade Michel Barnier, the EU’s top negotiator, that technology could substitute for border checks. The EU rejected this, and in what looks like May’s capitulation, the agreement now calls for a Northern Ireland “backstop.” This means that if an alternative arrangement has not been worked out by the end of the transition, Britain would remain shackled in a customs union with the EU, unable to strike independent free trade deals.

John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a pro-Europe think tank, said that “EU officials described the backstop as a ‘swimming pool Brexit,’ with the UK as a whole in the shallow end of a customs union, and Northern Ireland in the deep end, participating in the single market for goods.” The direction of travel, should the agreement pass the parliamentary hurdle, he said, “is towards a customs union for the whole UK.”

May herself denied that the transition period dictated the shape of the final agreement, saying that “the Withdrawal Agreement is explicit that it is temporary and that the Article 50 legal base cannot provide for a permanent relationship.”

But Brussels reportedly doesn’t agree. In a briefing for EU ambassadors, details of which were widely circulated, deputy negotiator Sabine Weyand said that she expected that the temporary customs union will provide the basis of the long-term relationship.

Reaction to the draft agreement was predictably furious. On Thursday morning, three cabinet ministers quit, including Brexit minister Dominic Raab. In his resignation letter, Raab wrote that the Irish backstop was “a very real threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom.” More high-profile resignations would jeopardize May’s hold on power.

Another very real threat is a party leadership challenge. This could be triggered by 48 letters of no confidence from individual Tory MPs. Given that the hard Brexiteer faction within the Conservative Party is known to contain between 40 and 80 members, that is a strong possibility.

Even if she survives these challenges, the prime minister still has to persuade a hostile Parliament to approve the treaty. She needs 330 votes to push the treaty through the 650-seat House of Commons, but must cancel out the hard-Brexiteer wing of her own party, May would need approximately 50 Labour votes. And shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer made clear that Labour has no intention of rescuing “a trade agreement that makes it harder to trade.”

A rapid-turnaround YouGov poll confirmed that Britons see the deal as a worst-of-all-worlds Brexit, with more than 40% of both Remainers and Leavers opposed. At a time when YouGov shows Labour still only four points behind the Conservatives, the parlous state of May’s government should concern British Jews worried about the threat from Jeremy Corbyn.

Theresa May has proven to be a great survivor, clinging to power despite furious Conservative infighting over Brexit. If she can somehow get the agreement through Parliament, she can be certain that the EU will approve it.

After all, it’s almost everything they could have dreamed of.

75,000

That’s the number of Russian expats in London said to be informants for Kremlin security services. According to a new report by Dr. Andrew Foxall of the Henry Jackson Society, opponents of Putin in London live in fear in the wake of the Sergei Skripal assassination in Salisbury in March. The report estimates that the GRU, just one of Russia’s three main intelligence services, has up to 480,000 people on the payroll. If true, Europe and North America must be equally riddled with spies. (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 718)