Burning down the house

In newsrooms, this time of year is known as the silly season for the fact that there is little of note to report and as a consequence the media is often dominated by trivial news items. As the Brexit debacle continues to unfold, the news is far from trivial but the adjective silly continues to apply.

This week has seen the Labour Party put forward plans to form a temporary government if the current government loses a vote of no confidence, which Labour has promised for September. To that end, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sent a letter to the leaders of all the other opposition parties and senior backbench MPs calling on them to support his attempt to bring down the Johnson government and delay Brexit. This raises two questions: (i) is it right that MPs should try to prevent the government from delivering a no-deal Brexit and (ii) what is the best way to ensure that?

With regard to (i) it is highly likely that the government will face a no-confidence motion in September. If it wins, we carry on down the current path to destruction. If it loses, the Fixed-terms Parliament Act of 2011 allows a grace period of 14 days to allow the current administration to form a government which is acceptable to parliament. If after this time no such government can be formed, a general election must be called. If Tory MPs were to vote against their own government, it is constitutionally possible to put a firebreak in the process. Quite how this will play with the electorate is another matter. Brexit supporters will be up in arms, accusing MPs of thwarting the will of the people, and such a course of action will do nothing to heal the divisions that have widened over the course of recent years.

Clearly this process will have to be handled very carefully. Unless instructed to do so by the electorate, a new government would not have a mandate to stop Brexit altogether so those hoping that a new administration will turn back the clock to 22 June 2016 will be disappointed. At best, a new government would only have a temporary mandate to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. Anything else would open it to the same accusation that has been made of Boris Johnson’s government that it has no authority to pursue its stated course of action.

With regard to (ii), historical convention dictates that the prime minister resigns in the event they lose a no-confidence vote. But the sample size is small: the government has been defeated on such a vote only once in the last 95 years (1979). Indeed, the law is vague as to whether the prime minister will be forced to resign. Moreover, the government has control over the timing of the election date. Thus, if it were to lose a no-confidence vote in early September it would not have to think about calling an election until mid-month. If it were to set the date for early November (a seven week campaign as in 2017), parliament would be dissolved and would not be able to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. Consequently, the no-confidence motion could backfire on those trying to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

Even if a new government were to be formed, it appears that Jeremy Corbyn would not be the best option to lead it. Jo Swinson, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, rejected his plan by suggesting, “Jeremy Corbyn is not the person who is going to be able to build an even temporary majority in the House of Commons for this task – I would expect there are people in his own party and indeed the necessary Conservative backbenchers who would be unwilling to support him.”

She is certainly right about that. In the summer of 2016, his own MPs tried to remove him and although Labour did better than expected in the 2017 election, this was as much about rejection of the Tories as about support for Labour and there is a sense that Corbyn’s time has passed. It is not as though Corbyn is a noted Europhile: The 2017 Labour manifesto indeed pledged to implement Brexit, which seemed to have bypassed many younger Labour voters who looked to Labour to reverse the June 2016 decision, and in the three years since the referendum, Corbyn has failed to take a stance on Brexit that Remainers can get behind. From a political standpoint, moderate anti-Brexit Tories have nothing to gain by supporting Corbyn for they will be vilified by party members, even those in constituencies which voted Remain.

Whilst it is positive that at least efforts have been made to come to a cross-party agreement on how to stop a no-deal Brexit, Corbyn is the wrong man for the job. There have been some suggestions that the likes of Ken Clarke could command sufficient support to lead a government of national unity. I have my doubts. But what the events of the last few weeks have shown is that the Remainers do not have a plan to stop a no-deal Brexit and appear to be unwilling to stand up and take the drastic action which would be required to necessitate this. As one Twitter user pointed out, a lot of what has been discussed “seems to be unconditional predictions about what will happen, rather than setting out what the possible permutations of events are.”

I continue to believe that Boris Johnson wants to avoid a no-deal Brexit and is looking for something to thwart his plans so that he can shift the blame elsewhere for not delivering on 31 October. I don’t want a no-deal Brexit either. But sometimes it seems as though the only way Brexiteers can be made to own the consequences of their actions is that they feel the pain of failure and endure the wrath of the electorate. It’s a bit like burning down the house to deal with a vermin infestation: You can get rid of the rats but have nowhere to live. And as I have consistently maintained since I was first questioned on the subject in late-2012, “the EU is far from perfect, but life on the outside may be even harder.”