The cracks are showing

If ever any Brit needed reminding of the absolute indifference with which the rest of Europe views the tedium of Brexit, a glance at most European newspapers this morning would have provided it. The failure by the British government to reach a deal on the Irish border issue dominated the UK news but received scant coverage elsewhere. The travails of Donald Trump were the biggest item on most non-English language newspaper websites, demonstrating what happens when lunatics run big asylums rather than the small scale takeover we are witnessing at home. Indeed, there are plenty of significant issues going on elsewhere: The fact that Germany has not yet formed a government, almost three months after the election, is a reminder that other countries have their own political issues to deal with.

We should thus not be under any illusions that Brexit is anything other than a peculiarly British problem and as such requires a domestic solution. But finding a solution depends on being able to identify the problem. Whilst the Brexit ultras try to blame the perfidious EU for making life difficult, ultimately the issue boils down to ineffective domestic government which makes resolution far harder. But whilst I have been critical of Theresa May's handling of many aspects of Brexit, I do have some sympathy for the fact that she inherited a mess bequeathed by her predecessor. Brexit involves trying to reconcile a series of mutually incompatible positions whilst convincing the electorate that both something and nothing has changed, and at the same time trying to prevent the fissures at the heart of government from growing larger. The near impossibility of this task serves to remind us that advocates of Brexit either deliberately lied about the ease with which it could be achieved, or perhaps even worse, could not see the difficulties involved.

Much as I may have railed against last year's decision, I have never called for a second referendum. Partly because I don't think it will resolve anything, but perhaps because I have secretly believed that the difficulties in delivering a Brexit that works for the UK are so insurmountably large that it could yet come back onto the agenda of its own accord. I have little doubt that the current government is unable to deliver the "red, white and blue Brexit" promised by Theresa May. For one thing, a task of this magnitude requires a government with a common purpose but this one contains too many members with differing positions. Worse still, the government is unable to command a working parliamentary majority and as it learned to its cost yesterday, that is an impossible position from which to win a deal on Ireland.

But Brexit obscures a bigger truth. The referendum last year was a vote against the status quo. As a consequence we should not be surprised to find that the old political methods are failing to find a solution. The conventional politicians who populate the Conservative and Labour parties, and who we can broadly class as the political centre, represent the status quo against which the electorate voted. It is no wonder that they cannot imagine a solution because they cannot conceive of a world in which the old rules no longer apply. In many respects I am in the same boat although my position is based on the evidence that suggests whatever comes next will not match the deal with the EU that we have now.

Clearly, it is me who is out of tune with the Zeitgeist. But I may be wrong: After all, there is no reason why the post WWII settlement must continue to hold after more than 70 years. But precisely because half the electorate shares a similar opinion, Brexit can never work on the terms set out by its proponents. It will deliver a highly Pareto inefficient outcome because it cannot make anyone better off without making others worse off. This is not wholly a monetary issue. If we end up in a world where Britain distances itself from the values which have characterised its past, and those which large parts of Europe still hold, then this is for many (myself included) a regression to a sub-optimal position.

So how can Brexit be made to work under such circumstances? First off, it probably requires a political leader with near-unanimous support who can convince the electorate that Britain has a future outside the EU but that it still shares the EU's underlying goal of ensuring peace and prosperity across the continent. There certainly isn't anyone in the current generation of politicians with that sort of broad appeal. The closest any politician in my lifetime came to having the X-factor was Tony Blair, and look how that turned out. Thatcher never had it. Nor did Winston Churchill who, lest it be forgotten, was so revered by a grateful public that they rewarded him with an election defeat in 1945. In that light it is hard to imagine that Jeremy Corbyn is a viable political alternative, even though he offers a radically different economic policy.

In the absence of the requisite leadership, is there any other way that Brexit can be made to work? I suspect the answer boils down to cold, hard economics. If the UK economy can generate prosperity in which the electorate can all share, they may be prepared to accept life outside the EU - albeit grudgingly. But as most of the economics profession (and all reputable economists) have pointed out, leaving the EU on the terms specified by the government simply cannot generate that prosperity because it entails giving up many of the economic advantages we currently enjoy, such as membership of the single market.

Having established that we don't have the political leadership and that the economic conditions for a successful resolution are unlikely to exist, I am not the only one struggling to understand how Brexit will work. It certainly will not be the success which the Brexit-at-any-price brigade believes. But then I have been saying this for nearly five years and nothing that has happened so far has been enough to persuade me I am wrong.