Theresa
May’s latest Brexit statement means nothing has changed except, of course, it
takes us closer to the scheduled exit day with no sign whatsoever of when or
how the Brexit chaos is going to be resolved. As a consequence we face a
growing business crisis
as well as further diminution of Britain’s
international reputation. It’s becoming so familiar now that it’s
important to keep reminding ourselves how utterly extraordinary it is to have a
government so reckless of its basic economic and foreign policy
responsibilities to the point of seeming indifference.
May repeated
all the well-worn phrases she has been trotting out since December but with the
addition of a new injunction to ‘hold
our nerve’. This might be good advice for a nation facing some terrible
external threat but it is an absurdity when applied to an entirely self-inflicted
fiasco.
The
idea seems to be the standard line that EU negotiations ‘always go to
the wire’ but this mistakes the Brexit negotiations for standard EU summit
talks where there is last-minute horse-trading to get the multiple sides on
board. Here, there are two sides and, for all that May speaks as if the
negotiations are ongoing, so far as one side is concerned they are over. Moreover,
the stakes are far greater for the UK than in any previous negotiations and the
costs of brinksmanship to the UK are (already) racking up. Far from giving
leverage, this just increases the self-harm of Brexit.
That doesn’t
mean that there won’t at some late point be a piece of paper produced about the
backstop that says the same as has already been agreed but in different
language. Very likely there will be, as the well-connected journalist Nick
Gutteridge suggests, but it won’t change the fundamental situation.
May’s
contradictory messages
Of course,
May’s tactic – if it exists at all – is that by then MPs will be so spooked by
the prospect of no-deal that they will vote for her deal. If so, that entails a
rather curious contradiction with the ‘hold our nerve’ rhetoric since it
requires MPs to ‘lose their nerve’. Will they? For at least a hard core of the
ERG the answer is surely no. They either actively want no-deal or are so
splenetically bent out of shape that there is no deal they would agree to –
which comes to the same thing.
But May can
have some hope that a few of the ERG will buckle, and rather more hope,
perhaps, that the Tory ‘remain rebels’ – who have hardly been Cromwellian, so
far - will do so. Ultimately, the hardcore Brexiter rebels have always been far
more ruthless, and totally unswayed by any idea of party loyalty. Then, if she
picks up some Labour rebel votes, she might just get it through. I still think,
as
I suggested last December, that this is not completely impossible – though
it certainly wouldn’t constitute anything like the settled and stable outcome
the EU hope for and which would be needed to actually deliver the next stage of
Brexit.
This tactic
is predicated on the assumption that MPs will conclude that no-deal is too
awful to be contemplated. But here, again, there are some curious
contradictions. One is that there have been several reports, for example in Paul
Waugh’s excellent article in HuffPost, that May might be coming to
the view that no-deal is not such an unthinkable disaster. It’s possible that
this is so, if only because her dogmatic and monocular focus on leaving the EU
on her ordained date may trump all else in her bizarre interpretation of where
her ‘sacred duty’ lies.
Equally,
it’s conceivable that, as George
Parker in the Financial Times (£) discusses, it is a form of ‘madman
theory’, designed to strong arm the EU. But just as British politicians don’t
seem to have understood that the messages they send out for domestic
consumption are also seen in the EU, so too do messages sent for EU consumption
have a domestic consequence. Thus if May is signalling to the EU that Britain
can live with no-deal then she is also signalling to MPs that continuing to
vote against her deal will not bring catastrophe.
Delicate
judgment is lacking
The
situation strikes me as strangely similar to a scene in the classic novel and
film noir The
Maltese Falcon*, where Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has a showdown with
‘the Fat Man’ (Sydney Greenstreet) who wants him to disclose the location of
the eponymous bird. The dialogue runs:
“Spade: If you kill me how are you
going to get the bird? And if I know you can’t afford to kill me, how are you
going to scare me into giving it to you?
Fat Man: Well, sir, there are other
means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.
Spade: Yes, that’s … that’s true. But
there’re none of them any good unless the threat of death is behind them. You
see what I mean? If you start something, I’ll make it a matter of your having
to kill me or call it off.
Fat Man: That’s an attitude, sir,
that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. Because, as you know
sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests
lie and let their emotions carry them away.”
May’s
current Brexit manoeuvrings involve similar calculations, but between multiple
actors. Unfortunately delicate judgment appears wholly lacking, hence the
widely commented on prospect of no-deal
happening by accident rather than design or, still less, by an
unemotional calculation of ‘best interests’.
Multiple
outcomes are possible
There’s a
wider issue here, too, beyond tactics or lack of them. The more no-deal gets
talked about as a possible outcome – even, as an increasingly
likely outcome – the more it
becomes normalised as something which is, indeed, within the scope of the
possible. Paradoxically, this is also true when what is being said, for example
by businesses, that it would be a crazy and hugely damaging outcome. For even
that brings it into the frame of the thinkable, the discussable and, hence, the
doable. Meanwhile, of course, the hardcore
Brexiters claim, quite mendaciously, that no-deal was what Brexit meant all
along, and that 17.4 million voters knew this and voted for it.
At the same
time, there are entirely contradictory reports, based on an
overheard conversation in a Brussels bar, suggesting that far from
no-deal being the consequence of May’s deal failing the consequence would be a
lengthy delay (this, of course, would in any case be contingent on EU approval).
This, too, is a plausible scenario but, again, perhaps it’s just about offering
different messages to different groups of MPs: no-deal to threaten the
‘pragmatists’, delay to threaten the hardcore ultras. If so, it’s back to the
issue that each group hears the message intended for the others, as well as for
themselves, and calibrate (or ignore) them accordingly.
The plain
fact is that no one knows what direction May is heading in, or the country as a
whole (hence, ludicrously, we are reduced to guesswork based upon bar room
gossip). As I suggested in
my previous post, she may well not know herself, and even if she does it
does not follow that this is what will happen.
From that point of view, it is
remainers who really need to ‘hold their nerve’. I received some criticism of that
previous post for, some felt, discounting the possibility of Brexit
being reversed (Andrew
Adonis, for example, called the post “ridiculously pessimistic” in
that respect). But what I
said was phrased with intentional care to say there is “currently no viable
route” to remain. That could change and – an obvious point I’ve made many times
on this blog – the main thing that is likely to make it change is a political
crisis which is insoluble in any other way than, in particular a referendum
(the outcome of which, of course, is unknown).
We may be approaching that point
(perhaps via the
latest idea for a cross-party amendment from Peter Kyle and others) and
the more May procrastinates the deeper the crisis becomes. At all events, we
are already in a situation where all outcomes are almost as likely – or unlikely
- as each other.
Update 15
February 2019
A brief
update in the light of the government’s
defeat in last night’s vote. Whilst dismissed as symbolic, symbols
matter hugely so the question is: what does it symbolise?
This was
primarily an ERG rebellion, and shows that even as May continues to do their
bidding (in seeking ‘alternative arrangements’ to the backstop) they will kick
her in the teeth whenever she gives them the opportunity. She still seems to
operate on the basis that they are appeaseable, despite all evidence to the
contrary, and for as long as she does so they will continue to do it.
On this
occasion, the rebellion was based on the flimsiest of pretexts (the arcane
point that in being asked to vote to support the position agreed in vote of 29 January
this might be taken to endorse the non-binding Spelman
amendment ruling out (sic) no-deal). They no longer even pretend to believe
that MPs need to give May ‘ammunition’ she supposedly need to undertake the
supposed re-negotiations that they supposedly support.
Perhaps
because they are now facing a
fairly robust backlash from some of their fellow Tory MPs (a further
example of the spreading
language of treachery and betrayal, by the way), the ERG have been
keen to point out today that it was not just they who rebelled but also Tory
MPs on the remain or soft Brexit side. The implication is of a common concern
across the party, rather than the ERG being a ‘party within a party’.
This ignores
the fact that the reason why some on the other wing rebelled was partly because
they didn’t support the Brady amendment that
was also tagged to it and partly because, in trying to appease the ERG, the
government sought to portray the Spelman amendment as completely irrelevant
(which, confusingly, it is in
substantive terms but not in the way suggested by the government).
So, what all
this symbolises is that the Parliamentary Conservative Party has now to all
intents and purposes ceased to function as a party (and, for that matter, the
Labour Party is getting close to that state). This in turn points up sharply
what has been true since last summer’s Chequers Proposal: that for the purposes
of Brexit the
UK no longer has a functioning government. It is extraordinary to have to
state such a thing, but it is a plain fact. Which in turn underlines the point
with which the main part of this blog post concludes: the political crisis is
now deepening on a daily basis, opening up the space for many possible
outcomes.