Sticking to principles

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Theresa May: You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

Jeremy Corbyn: Not until you rule out no deal.

TM: I can’t and won’t rule out no deal.  The only way to rule out no deal is to support my deal.  You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

JC: Not until you rule out no deal.

TM: I can’t and won’t rule out no deal.  The only way to rule out no deal is to support my deal.  You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

JC: Not until you rule out no deal.

TM: I can’t and won’t rule out no deal.  The only way to rule out no deal is to support my deal.  You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

JC: Not until you rule out no deal.

TM: I can’t and won’t rule out no deal.  The only way to rule out no deal is to support my deal.  You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

House of Commons:  We don’t like no deal.

TM: That’s non-binding and changes nothing.  I can’t and won’t rule out no deal.  The only way to rule out no deal is to support my deal.  You should come and talk to me about Brexit.

JC: Oh, alright then.

When winning and losing look the same

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The Prime Minster won a victory, of sorts, yesterday in the House of Commons, although there were probably few people as surprised as her.  It’s a curious sort of victory though which is achieved by voting against her own proposal, and demanding that her own supporters do likewise in order to support instead a position that she herself said was “impossible” just a few weeks ago, and which, apparently, the EU’s leaders had told her just hours before she encouraged MPs to vote for it was not going to be on the table.  Still, believing six impossible things before Brexit is the new norm in the Tory Party.  When she previously said that there was “no alternative” to her deal, it now seems that what she meant to say was that there was “no alternative other than the undefined one that is now the new one to which there is no alternative”.

She’s trapped in a parallel universe entirely of her own manufacture where every escape route back to normality is blocked by the inherent contradictions of her own party, reinforced by the results of her consistent inconsistency and refusal to accept fact.  She has given herself up as a hostage to a gang of zealots for the sole reason that her biggest red line is that she is determined to do the one thing that most of those zealots don’t actually give a damn about anyway, namely to control immigration from the EU, in the apparent belief that all those who voted for Brexit to stop immigration were really saying that they wanted more Indians instead of Poles. Some people feel almost sorry for her – that’s entirely misplaced.  The people I feel sorry for are the negotiators of the EU who are vainly trying to comprehend the apparent determination of the leaders of a soon-to-be ex-member to press the self-destruction button. 

Yet still the zealots persist with the fantasy that the EU will “blink and offer us better terms”, roll over, and give the UK what it wants despite the fact that that would mean abandoning the interests of a member state in favour of a non-member and risking the integrity of the single market which the UK itself did so much to help them create. 

There is a yawning gap in ideology and world view between the UK and the EU, and the hall-mark of any successful negotiation – recognising what the other side wants – has been completely absent from the UK’s approach from the outset.  The world view driving the extreme Brexiteers is based on competition and the notion that size and power determine outcomes and that the weak and small should be bulldozed aside in pursuit of that.  It’s compounded, of course, by a self-estimate of the size and power of the UK in the modern world which owes more to the 18^th Century than the 21^st; but they really can’t understand why the EU isn’t playing by the same rules.  From this perspective, Ireland is peripheral, just a bit of collateral damage as the big boys carve up the spoils.  The founding principle of the EU, on the other hand, was economic integration, driven by a determination that Europe – and most especially, France and Germany – could never tear the continent apart in another war if their industries were sufficiently interdependent.  The Single Market may well have been a UK-inspired idea, but it fits perfectly with that perspective.  And the idea that European states stand or fall together is an underlying driver of the determination to protect Ireland from the folly of its nearest neighbour.

There is no meeting of minds between these perspectives, although I suspect that the EU understand the UK perspective very well – probably better than the current UK government does.  The unicorn analogy to Brexit has been overdone – including by me – but the Independent came out with another interesting analogy yesterday, asking us to “imagine for a moment that the House of Commons passed a bill to repeal the laws of gravity, and ordered the prime minister to go away and implement it”.  In some ways it’s no sillier than what the House of Commons actually did yesterday, but the idea that they can do such a thing highlights the effect of a belief that sovereignty is absolute and indivisible and vested by God in one place.  This is the fiction at the heart of the UK’s unwritten constitution; Brexit has brought home to some of us the scale of the problems posed by a constitution founded on a fiction. Unfortunately, the opposition party in Westminster is as wedded to the fiction as the governing party, severely limiting the opportunity for reform whilst we remain hitched to Westminster.

Not-nationalism

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Yesterday, I referred to the version of Catch 22 in which the Prime Minister has managed to trap herself: she needs to persuade the EU27 that she’s mad enough to pursue a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, whilst not being quite so mad that it’s pointless trying to negotiate with her.  Just a very small box of frogs, then.  As Yossarian neatly put it, "That's some catch, that Catch-22". 

Meanwhile, in what looks like a determined attempt to convince the EU27 that she is incapable of negotiating in good faith, she is now demanding that Tory MPs vote for an amendment which would scrap part of the agreement that she herself has made with the EU, in the apparent belief that, if she only loses it by a very small majority, the EU will change its mind and reopen the Withdrawal Agreement for further negotiation.  Not only is she effectively asking the House of Commons to approve a different deal to the one she has agreed, but she is demanding that if the House of Commons only narrowly refuses to, then the EU will be obliged to accede to her request.  Oh, and for good measure, the request is for the now infamous backstop to be replaced by an alternative which is completely undefined because neither she nor the proposers of the amendment have the faintest idea what they’re actually asking for.

Once again, it’s a display of Anglo-British not-nationalism-at-all at its very worst, with the underlying assumption that the rest of Europe must come up with a magic solution which meets the UK’s demands, and putting the responsibility to define how it’s done on someone else.  Everything these not-nationalists-at-all say seems driven by that not-nationalist-at-all exceptionalism which assumes that the rest of the world is there to do as they say.  Thus, the problem caused by the border which the Anglo-British drew across Ireland, and the Good Friday agreement which they signed guaranteeing that that border became almost invisible – these are all someone else’s problems, not theirs.

If Ireland doesn’t like the situation, well, then the Irish should know their place – or even, in line with the crass question posed by John Humphrys, they should follow the UK out of the EU and re-join the UK.  Because joining the most successful union in the history (or not!) of humanity is the best route forward for an independent state.  Obviously.  This belief in the superiority of all things British, and the idea that smaller and weaker nations should bow down before the UK’s power, might be a throwback to another age but it is a major part of the driving force behind Brexit.  And only its adherents can seriously argue that it isn’t nationalistic.

Those independentistas who believe that being cast adrift in a UK dominated by this mindset offers any sort of opportunity for Wales are almost as delusional as the Prime Minister.

The madness of Queen Theresa

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Insofar as there is a discernible strategy behind the Prime Minister’s continuing refusal to rule out a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, it seems to be aimed at (a) convincing opponents of Brexit that her deal is better than the alternative, and (b) convincing the EU27 that she’s really, really serious about this, in the hope that they will cave in and throw the Irish (north and south) under a bus to give her what her own party’s extremists want.

The first problem with this, to date, has been that few people believe that she is really mad enough to do it.  Apart from a few swivel-eyed ideologues in her own party no-one seriously believes that no deal will be anything other than a disaster in the short to medium term, which means that both opponents of Brexit and the EU27 have had considerable difficulty in taking her seriously.  It hasn’t helped that there is clearly no parliamentary majority for taking such a step – and probably no majority in her cabinet.   Hiring a ferry company with no ships didn’t exactly help her credibility either.

I have a feeling, though, that perceptions might be changing.  A government prepared to waste billions of pounds on preparations for something which they claim they’re trying to avoid is not a government in control of its senses.  And when we learn that the military are stockpiling supplies on military bases at home and abroad and that the government is actively considering imposing martial law, it might be time to consider the possibility that she really is that mad, and it isn’t just a pretence.

That brings us, though, to the second problem with her ‘strategy’.  Supposing, just for a moment, that she succeeds in convincing everyone that she is mad enough to do it, why exactly would that make the EU27 decide to get rid of the backstop?  When dealing with someone prepared to renege on the UK’s treaty obligations, unilaterally break any agreement made, and lead her country into complete and utter chaos, surely the most rational response is not ‘let’s just give her what she wants’, but ‘there’s no point whatsoever in negotiating with someone like that’?

Protecting 'democracy'

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I’ve noted before that one outcome of the Brexit process has been the way in which those claiming that the EU is ‘undemocratic’ have successfully, if entirely unintentionally, exposed the extent to which the UK’s democracy is far from being as complete as they would have us believe.  Yesterday saw another example.  An elected MP (in this case the member for the eighteenth century) has urged the Prime Minister (who we do not elect) to tell the monarch (who we do not elect) to suspend the House of Commons (which we do elect) in order to stop those who we do elect from over-ruling those who we do not.   And this, apparently, is to ‘protect democracy’.  And he did it – as he does everything – with a straight face.

Subject to interpretation

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One of the consequences of the UK’s membership of the EU over the past 40 years has been the extent to which English has become the lingua franca of all the EU institutions.  Although it’s a second language for most of the players, its international status (which actually, of course, owes more to the US than the UK) means that it is a popular and widespread second language across Europe, and indeed the rest of the world.  If the UK does eventually leave the EU, it will only be an official language in two smallish member states (Ireland and Malta), but notwithstanding that I suspect that English will continue to be widely used in the EU institutions.

There is a problem though for those who speak any language as a second language – they can all too easily interpret the words too literally.  Take this story, for example, reporting that EU diplomats were left in disbelief when, in phone calls to EU capitals after her crushing defeat in the Commons, and her widely-publicised promise to seek out alternatives, all the PM did was repeat her previous demands.  How can second language speakers of English be expected to know that sometimes words mean - and are intended to mean - the exact opposite of what they appear to mean?

Equal members of the union?

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One former Secretary of State for Wales has been sharing his pessimism about the future of his party this week.  Whilst I might share his view that his party could be about to tear itself apart, I see that more as a cause for rejoicing than pessimism.  Still, each to his own.

In the detail of his comments he made the observation that “When you go outside London as I was at the weekend you hear more and more people in the street saying we just need to leave without a deal.  I think we're in quite dangerous territory as a country where certainly a chunk of my party, a wing of my party is fomenting that kind of opinion. It's deeply, deeply irresponsible.” On that, I certainly do agree with him (although I wonder what has become of him that ‘going outside London’ seems to be exceptional).  And not just because of the potential economic consequences; the underlying attitude which allows people to hold such a view is deeply concerning.

It argues, in effect, that we can and should simply disregard the concerns of the Irish, on both sides of the border which the UK imposed on the island.  Indeed, May’s persistence in going back to Brussels to demand change to the backstop arrangements is part and parcel of the same attitude.  Egged on by Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al, she is effectively demanding that the EU sacrifice the interests of one member state in order to give a better deal to a non-member.  It shouldn’t surprise us; we already know that at least one senior Tory has openly been saying that “The Irish really should know their place”; and we know only too well that the UK government would willingly sacrifice the interests of Wales or Scotland (and the outlying regions of England too, come to that) in order to serve what they see as the ‘greater good’ but which we might choose to call ‘the south-east’.

I can understand how and why Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all have become conditioned into such an attitude (although it’s rather more worrying that so many ordinary people are following them so readily).  They inhabit a world in which it is entirely natural that the biggest and richest get what they want and the interests of the smaller and poorer are brushed aside.  That is the way they would instinctively treat the outlying parts of their own ‘precious union’, and they really can’t understand why the EU is not simply putting Ireland in its place and doing the deal that the bigger countries want.  They don’t understand, in short, why the European Union doesn’t work in the same way as the British Union does. 

From the point of view of an independentista, however, the situation highlights, very starkly, the difference between the two unions.  A union based on historic incorporation and expansion is not the same as a union based on voluntary association by independent member states.  The latter, of necessity, will strive to protect and promote the interests of all its members when dealing with ‘third parties’ which is what the UK decided to become.  It could not be otherwise; if the interests of one of the smaller member states were to be sacrificed, the other small members states could no longer have faith in the whole and the enterprise would be endangered.  Just because the word ‘union’ is used in both contexts doesn’t make them the same thing at all.

An election wouldn't get May off the hook

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There has been a degree of speculation about Theresa May calling a snap election, with reports that some ministers have warned their local activists to be ready.  The Prime Minister has ruled it out and has already promised her party that she will not lead them into the next General Election, but given her record, neither of those are reasons to assume that she won’t do it.

Depending on the extent to which seats actually change hands, an election could certainly change the parliamentary arithmetic, but whether it unblocks the Brexit process is another question entirely.  It would force Labour to clarify its position in its manifesto, and a lot of questions have, rightly, been asked about what Labour’s manifesto would say about Brexit – whenever the next election comes.  Rather unfairly, considerably less attention has been given to the Conservative manifesto.  At one level, this is understandable: the PM writes the manifesto, and we can probably assume that it will refer to the implementation of her deal. 

But to what extent would any such manifesto actually bind the MPs elected on it?  Even if she were to win a working majority in such an election (itself very much open to doubt) is she really stupid enough to assume that Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve would all suddenly feel themselves bound to support her deal?  An election might well make Labour’s position clearer, but it will do little or nothing to resolve the internal conflicts within the Tory party.  Those conflicts have driven the Brexit mess from the outset; they will continue to do so even if, by some strange chance, the PM were to win a majority of seats in a snap election.  

As far as Brexit and the Conservative Party are concerned, an election would resolve nothing.  It would, though, kick the can a bit further down the road and therefore meet the only discernible political objective which the Prime Minister has.

The right to vote for a fantasy?

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There was a report yesterday that the Electoral Commission is drawing up contingency plans for a second referendum on Brexit.  It’s a sensible thing for them to be doing, albeit that it’s potentially another example of the amount of time and money being wasted on Brexit which could be used more productively elsewhere.  At the moment, I’m not entirely convinced that there will be a second referendum – the Prime Minister hasn’t ruled it out enough times yet.  However, once she has ruled it out a sufficient number of times for us to be certain that it’s going to happen, attention will turn to the question to be asked.  

This is far from being as straightforward as many are assuming; whatever the chosen question, there will be those who will cry foul.  According to Craig Murray, Downing Street is working on a plan to use the alternative vote system, asking electors to rank three options in order of preference (ignoring any potential options other than no deal, no Brexit, or May’s deal).  Once the least popular (probably no deal) is eliminated, the votes of those supporting it would be allocated to the remaining two options.  Whilst holding such a referendum might look like a change of plan by May, it turns out that it’s just another way of getting her own way, the assumption behind it being that there would still be a leave majority which would end up coalescing around her proposal.  And if she’s got it wrong, and there is no longer a leave majority and Remain win the day, it lets her off the hook for cancelling Brexit since she can argue that she gave people the chance to support two alternative types of Brexit.

But the possibility that opinions have changed isn’t the only potential flaw in this putative plan.  It depends on ‘no deal’ remaining on the table despite the obvious parliamentary opposition to it.  That goes some way towards explaining her refusal to even countenance taking the option off the table to enable productive discussion with opposition politicians.  Yesterday, she went so far as to declare that it is ‘impossible’ to remove the option; a statement which did nothing to convince people on her own side, such as former Minister Nick Boles who is bringing forward a Bill to do precisely that.  Theresa May telling lies in pursuit of her own aims?  Surely not.

There is another point to bear in mind as well.  The results of referendums aren’t always easily predictable.  As Cameron found out, calling a referendum between the obvious ‘correct’ answer and an answer which he thought so unlikely that he couldn’t even be bothered to define it accurately doesn’t stop people from voting for the undefined.  And including an option (no deal) on the ballot paper the outcome of which would be a short-term economic disaster doesn’t stop people voting for it either.  It might look like an improbable outcome, but it’s not an impossible one.  There is currently no majority in parliament for a no deal Brexit, but any MP supporting the calling of a referendum which includes that as an option is implicitly committing to vote for that outcome if it’s what the electorate decide.  And a government which even proposes such a referendum would be acting wholly irresponsibly now that the implications are as well-known as they now are.  May’s refusal to rule out such an option may start out as a cunning ploy to get support for what she does want, but recent history tells us that we cannot depend on it not coming to pass.

That does, of course, raise another important question about the nature of democracy.  If the majority of people, in full knowledge of the potential consequences properly and authoritatively spelt out, want a no deal Brexit, why shouldn’t they be allowed to have one?  Of course, proponents of such a course of action will continue to lie and mislead, but don’t people have a right to believe the lies if they prefer?  At the extreme, if people want to vote for every household to be given a free unicorn, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so?  That last might look like a silly question, but how different is it really to the fantasy for which some people were persuaded to vote in the last referendum?  I find this question of restricting the rights of electors to vote for whatever they want a difficult one in principle; in practice, the only answer that I can give is that no government should ever give the electorate a chance to vote for something which that government is not prepared subsequently to enact.  Cameron did it and left the mess for someone else to clear up.  I wish that I could believe that May will not repeat the same mistake - or, worse still, that she isn't prepared to enact a no deal Brexit.

Breaking the log-jam

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Insofar as the last few days and weeks have clarified anything, it is that there are two major obstacles to making progress in any direction on Brexit.

The Irish ‘backstop’ isn’t one of them.  The backstop itself isn’t something which some people who should know their place, aided and abetted by Brussels bureaucrats, are unfairly and unjustly imposing to fetter the freedom of a great global power; it’s the inevitable outcome of previous international agreements and a series of contradictory demands laid down by the UK government.  It’s a hole which is entirely of the UK’s digging.

The intransigence of Brussels isn’t one of them.  The withdrawal agreement which has emerged is, again, the inevitable outcome of a combination of previously agreed commitments and the red lines laid down by the UK Government.  And the Political Statement on what happens next is as vague as it is because there is no known way of squaring what the UK is demanding with what the EU can ever give without destroying itself in the process, but they had to put something down on paper anyway.

The fact that the House of Commons contains a majority of ‘Remainers’ isn’t the problem either.  Some of them might do so reluctantly, but if they were presented with a deal which meant that the UK left the political institutions of the EU whilst remaining in the single market and customs union, I remain convinced that a majority would probably support it.  The Brexit extremists would argue that it isn’t really Brexit at all, and it might well destroy the Conservative Party (it's an ill wind...), but the only decision taken by the referendum was to ‘Leave the EU’, and in legal and constitutional terms, such a deal would honour that result.  It wouldn’t honour all the wild, contradictory and fantastic claims made by pro-Brexit campaigners, but those claims weren’t on the ballot paper.  Such a deal might really have been “one of the easiest in human history” (© Liam Fox), and had it been presented to parliament within a few months of triggering Article 50, I suspect that it would have sailed through with the support of Remain MPs still shocked by the result.

No, none of these are the real obstacles to sensible progress.  Both the obstacles are actually people – two individuals who are, as it happens, both in the position which they occupy more by accident than design, and who are both incapable of applying flexibility and common sense to adapt to changing circumstances and revise their stances.

The first, obviously, is the Prime Minister herself.  Here is a person who is forever claiming to be ‘listening’ but without hearing a word that is said to her.  If Plan A loses by a huge margin, then Plan B is to explain to the opponents once again why they are wrong to oppose it.  And discussing alternatives must be limited to discussing alternative ways by which Plan A can be pursued.  Even many in her own party realise that this won’t work, and members of her cabinet, including the Chancellor, are actively briefing a completely different approach to that which she is pursuing.  The ‘red lines’ on which she refuses to budge are her interpretation – and her interpretation alone – of the result of the referendum.  They are not an inevitable part of any agreement except in the circumstances where she is directing the negotiations.

The second is the leader of the opposition.  Here’s another individual who is forever claiming to be listening; in his case it’s the claim that it is the members of his party who make policy, not him, and that he is pursuing that policy.  He does, though, seem to be in a tiny minority of members who believe that what he is currently saying reflects the opinion of the membership.  He, too, is suffering from open disagreement by those around him who are saying something very different to him.

Brexit has led to a log-jam in UK politics and in parliament in particular.  It seems to me that the only way to break out of that log-jam is to remove the two individuals most responsible for it.  I honestly don’t know exactly what the outcome of that would be, but I suspect that it would be a rapid and dramatic change in the dynamic.  If – or when – either happens it’s likely to be quite sudden.  And, based on their history of ruthlessness towards leaders in pursuing and retaining power, I expect the Tories to get there first.  If Labour are not to be totally wrong-footed, they will need to follow rapidly.