Plan B looks like Plan A revisited

Anyone hoping for anything new from Theresa May’s statement to parliament today would have been sadly disappointed. The law required the prime minister only to give a neutral motion – one which does not require parliament to take a decision one way or the other – and that is what we got. However, the PM effectively admitted that her efforts to reach out across parliamentary lines have failed. Other political leaders are simply not prepared to draw the same kind of red lines as May who remains in a clear minority as one who believes the Withdrawal Agreement is the only game in town.

Worse still, the prime minister continued to rule out an extension of Article 50 and a no-deal Brexit, thereby failing to put in place a safety net that other MPs might be prepared to buy into. She also ruled out the prospect of a second referendum, arguing that there is unlikely to be sufficient support for it in the House of Commons. She may be right. As I noted in my last post, constitutional experts at UCL argue that it will take a minimum of 22 weeks to get a referendum done from start to finish – and that is without dealing with the aftermath. It is more likely to run over a much longer time period and the government recently released material to MPs suggesting it could take a year. This would require a much longer Article 50 extension than the government is currently prepared to accept.

There is a strong possibility that at next week’s vote, May will simply try and present the same deal as last week but with some tweaks that give the impression the Irish backstop deal will be time-limited. This may allow it to pass through parliament but will count for nothing unless the EU agrees, particularly since the Irish government has resisted UK efforts to do a bilateral deal on the border problem. Putting the same deal to a vote next week is akin to Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again in expectation of different results. But we need to look at this debate in the same terms as the main protagonists – trying to apply economic rationality is not the right way to go about it.

Both the Conservative and Labour leaders are clearly using this issue to play for party political ends. May’s problem is that if she crosses red lines on issues such as remaining in the customs union or extending Article 50, she will lose the support of yet more MPs whilst further alienating the Conservative party membership which clearly favours Brexit. She is clearly doing everything she can to avoid going down in history as the leader who split the Conservative Party. Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is playing a similar game. Although his party members oppose Brexit, Corbyn has refused to engage in negotiations which enable the government to deliver Brexit on its terms which in turn will reduce the chances that Labour can win a general election. His tactic is to force the Conservatives to “own” Brexit in the expectation that it will blow up in their face. As a political manoeuvre, the actions of both sides make sense. But since there is a real risk of a no-deal Brexit if one or both sides miscalculate, this strikes most observers as unnecessarily risky.

Another worrying trend is the sense that the electorate is becoming so disenchanted by the process that it would rather the government took a decision one way or the other rather than engage in continued debate. I was particularly struck by the debate on the BBC's Question Time programme last week when the biggest cheer of the night was reserved for an audience member who called for politicians to enact the result of the referendum result and leave the EU. To the extent that politicians tap into the public mood, they may feel emboldened by this sort of sentiment to push for a hard Brexit in the knowledge that their electoral prospects are unlikely to be harmed by acceding to the “will of the people.” Nonetheless, Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King's College London, who was also on the Question Time panel, made it clear that a no-deal Brexit implies trade-offs that too many politicians have not been sufficiently honest about.

Indeed, it is almost six years to the day since David Cameron’s speech at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London, which he gave on 23 January 2013, in which he stated “It is time to settle this European question in British politics.” Obviously, we have done nothing of the sort and in retrospect, it is clear that we have arrived at our current position because of a series of unintended consequences flowing from that speech. It was obvious at the time that Cameron never thought he would be in a position to take a decision on a referendum, as it was expected that his Conservative Party would only be able to govern in tandem with the LibDems. This assumption turned out to be wrong and Cameron compounded the error by adhering to his election manifesto pledge to hold the referendum.

It has also become obvious in retrospect that the idea of allowing an outbreak of direct democracy in a system based on representative democracy was a mistake. Direct democracy requires a far greater degree of engagement than representative democracy, which effectively outsources decision-making to the government. Since it is not a system which people in Britain are used to, it became an emotional battleground rather than a subject of rational debate. Theresa May’s government further compounded the problem by taking a non-legally binding vote and transcribing it into law.

This trail of unintended consequences makes it clear that the hoped-for outbreak of rationality, which many expect will save us from the cliff-edge Brexit, may fail to materialise. Sound advice would thus be to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.