Not out

I assumed two years ago that I would be waking up on 30 March 2019 with the UK as an ex-member of the EU. After all, parliament voted by 498 to 114 in favour of triggering Article 50 in a vote on 1 February 2017, in the full knowledge that this was what the legislation entailed. But no. A litany of errors and political miscalculations over the last two years means that Brexit has, at the very least, been postponed for two weeks. 

Why is Brexit so difficult to deliver? 

The intellectual dishonesty at the heart of Brexit becomes more apparent by the day. It was always clear that triggering Article 50 meant accepting whatever compromise was agreed at the end of the negotiation period, otherwise the UK would have to leave the EU and rely on relationships governed by general international public law (e.g. trade would be subject to WTO rules). Of course, that would not be a problem because, according to Liam Fox, we would now be in a position to have rolled over the 40 trade deals with third counties that are currently covered by EU trade arrangements. He has managed just 8, the largest of which is with Switzerland. He also said that doing a trade deal with the EU would be "one of the easiest in human history." Nobody seems to have told his parliamentary colleagues.

Two years on and we are now in a position where the UK parliament has rejected the deal negotiated with the EU three times and is scrambling to find an alternative before it crashes out of the EU without any form of backstop on 12 April. The political system is simply not capable of dealing with the complexities of the Brexit problem. Over recent weeks, the executive (government) and legislative (parliament) arms of government have blamed each other for the current impasse but in reality they are both to blame. Starting with the government, there has been an appalling lack of leadership from Downing Street. Article 50 was triggered without giving any thought as to what the UK wanted from the negotiations and what it could realistically achieve. Theresa May then made a serious error of judgement in calling an election AFTER triggering Article 50 which not only wasted valuable negotiating time but resulted in the Conservatives losing their parliamentary majority. May’s inability to instil discipline on her own party has allowed backbench MPs to act with impunity, thus undermining the government at every turn.

However MPs as a whole have failed to cover themselves in glory either, and are held in low regard by most of the country. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s band of Brexit ultras has failed to heed the warnings that a no-deal Brexit threatens major economic disruption and are so obsessed with delivering an ideologically pure Brexit that the concerns of the electorate have been totally ignored. Rees-Mogg, lest we forget, has long derided the withdrawal agreement and claimed that the UK will become a “vassal state” if it signed up to it. This week, he indicated he would then back the deal if the DUP would do so. They didn’t but he supported it anyway. Meanwhile the Labour Party continues to suggest that an election is the only way forward because it will somehow be able to deliver a Brexit that has eluded the Conservatives, and has focused its energies on this issue rather than the task at hand. Then there are self-obsessed mavericks such as Boris Johnson who care not one jot for anything other than their own self-interest.

But perhaps the biggest problem over the past two years is that whilst the Brexit referendum was conducted on cross-party lines, with MPs free to campaign as their conscience dictated, the post-referendum process has been conducted along party lines. Both the Conservatives and Labour have tried to play the Brexit process purely for their own advantage and it has been clear all along that the Tories were attempting to “own” Brexit. They surely must regret that decision now. It is becoming clear that any attempt to find a Brexit resolution requires a cross-party consensus. Indeed, I did suggest in May 2017 that the negotiating team should be representative of parliament as whole rather than a single party. But what is now a crisis of government (or governance, if you prefer) clearly requires a different approach. I thus have some sympathy with those calling for the formation of a cross-party government. After all, the first national government of 1931 was formed in the wake of the economic fallout from the crash of 1929, and lasted for two months – perhaps just enough time to find a Brexit compromise. 

The way(s) forward 

I noted two years ago (here) that it was difficult to see how the UK would, in the prime minister’s words, “emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before.” Indeed, I pointed out that the UK was likely to be weaker, less united and more inward looking and I take no pleasure in being right about that. Nor, increasingly, can we be sure that Brexit even represents the will of the people anymore. Indeed, it only ever represented the will of just over half of those who turned out to vote. Although I have never been a supporter of a second referendum, the fact that politicians cannot decide what to do next suggests there is a case for putting the argument back to the people. After all, MPs have had three votes on the critical piece of legislation and have rejected it each time. The intellectual case against a second referendum gets weaker by the day.

However, I have long had a sneaking suspicion that the withdrawal agreement could go through at the fourth attempt. After all, the trend is running in the PM’s favour. Here is how it could be done: Assuming that on Monday parliament asks the government to consider a customs union with the EU, and that it agrees to this suggestion, the EU could simply revise the political declaration (the non-binding element of the legislation which is designed to chart the broad course of the future relationship with the EU). The declaration would then be aligned with official Labour policy and the government could put both the withdrawal agreement and revised political declaration before parliament for a fourth time in the expectation that Labour will support it. This would allow the government to deliver Brexit without a long delay as Theresa May evidently wishes.

If that fails, the UK might then have to face up to a general election. The government is clearly exhausted by its unsuccessful efforts to deliver Brexit and as the prime minister said yesterday in the wake of her third defeat on the withdrawal agreement, “I fear we are reaching the limits of this process in this house.” But perhaps the quote which best sums up where we are in the whole sorry mess came from an unnamed cabinet minister who, when asked by a BBC reporter why Theresa May was putting up the withdrawal agreement for a third vote despite the fact she was almost certain to lose, replied “F*** knows. I’m past caring. It’s like the living dead in here.” That at least is something we can all agree on.