Nervous times as crisis grows

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.

Arguably, this latest vote has shifted the dial a little towards a delay or even an eventual abandonment of Brexit. There is a growing sense that the ERG are overplaying their hand in refusing to support the Brexit that is in prospect in favour of the Brexit of their dreams. That’s an old story amongst ideological fanatics, and one mark of fanaticism is being so entrenched within a bubble of the like-minded as to be blind to what is happening around them.

*(Finally, many thanks to the people who have pointed out that The Maltese Falcon makes a rather appropriate metaphor for Brexit in general in that something believed to be a prize of huge value turns out to be a worthless piece of junk).
 

Britain in a tailspin

Beneath a lot of sound and fury, the main story of this week is that Britain continues to go round in circles over Brexit.

The ludicrous ‘Malthouse’ group to identify ‘alternative arrangements’ to the Irish backstop met. Ludicrous because we already know that these arrangements don’t exist; that because of this we already know that the EU won’t agree to them; that if the EU did agree then we already know that many of the ERG would find another reason to object to the Withdrawal Agreement; and that, in any case, if they did exist then it is already in the Withdrawal Agreement that they would be used instead of the backstop. Unsurprisingly it was later reported that the group had “descended into acrimony”.

Meanwhile, Theresa May was in Northern Ireland, apparently already having accepted that the backstop will remain but hoping to time-limit it. But we already know that if it continues to exist in any form then the ERG and probably the DUP won’t accept it, whilst if it is time-limited then we already know that the EU won’t accept it. Unsurprisingly, her subsequent trip to Brussels yielded nothing new, not least because she proposed nothing new.

Detached from reality

All of these developments are detached from any kind of reality. What is real is the continuing damage being done to businesses (and individuals) as they contemplate the growing possibility of no deal, as discussed in my previous post. This week’s highest profile example came with Nissan’s announcement that they will not, after all, build the new X-Trail model in Sunderland. Nissan and Sunderland, of course, hold emblematic places in the Brexit saga.

The immediate reaction from some Brexiters was to say, at least, that the Nissan decision was only partly to do with Brexit and, at most, that it was nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. The latter is plainly nonsense. The former is true, but misses the point. Such decisions will almost always be multi-factorial but Brexit weighs them against the UK and does nothing to weigh them in favour of the UK.

Hence, especially for industries like auto which involve huge long-term investments, the impact of Brexit is going to be a slow-burn of disinvestment, leading to long-run decline. The same looks set to happen with financial services and many other industries, almost regardless of what happens with Brexit now.

But Brexiters have created a hermetically sealed logic. Every warning is dismissed as Project Fear, with the jeer ‘you can’t prove Brexit will make that happen’; every time a warning comes true, it is dismissed as Project Fear Mark 2, with the jeer ‘you can’t prove it was Brexit that made that happen’.

The invariable reference point has become Y2K from which (even leaving aside the huge sums spent by firms and governments to deal with it) the perverse conclusion is that since one warning of something bad happening did not materialise this ‘proves’ that nothing bad can ever happen.  There’s now a sizeable part of the population, egged on by Brexiters in politics and the press, who have simply given up on rationality, evidence and argument.

What the hell does Brexit mean?

Instead, at its core, Brexit is project predicated upon anger, self-pity and victimhood. It was thus inevitable that Donald Tusk’s ‘special place in hell’ comments provoked much manufactured outrage (strangely forgetting the far more vicious comments Brexiters have made about the EU). Thus Brexiters such as Peter Bone dishonestly claimed that leave voters had been insulted. But Tusk’s target was very explicitly those who had led the campaign for Brexit with no plan for how to deliver it, and although the theological language was rather peculiar the underlying point was correct. The Brexit leaders, in some cases with knowing recklessness, in other cases with casual irresponsibility, have inflicted incalculable damage on Britain.

That Tusk made the remark, clearly knowing that, as Leo Varadkar pointed out to him, the British press would have a field day is highly revealing. It is a demonstration of what I wrote in my previous post, that the EU leadership are simply no longer interested in trying to mollify Brexiters or tread carefully around British political sensibilities. On the other hand, Tusk was also clearly sending a message of solidarity to his Irish counterpart on the podium, and it is one which also has relevance for the UK: member states will be looked after, so far as possible; non-members will not be.

But Tusk’s remarks were revealing of something else, far more uncomfortable for remainers for all that they may agree with his diagnosis of Brexiter vandalism. His comment was clearly unhelpful to their cause – for example, if there were to be another referendum it would be quoted endlessly – but as his other remarks made clear, he now regards this cause as a lost one.

The dynamic of the relationship between the EU and the remain campaign has been shifting for a while, and changed decisively once the Withdrawal Agreement was completed. From then on, for the EU polity, Brexit was a done deal. Remainers may be pro-EU, but the EU is no longer pro-remain. I don’t mean, of course, that there are not plenty of individuals, including politicians, in the EU who still hope that Brexit might be reversed. But the institutional logic has now shifted, and Tusk’s remarks are a reflection of this.

Britain can neither leave nor remain

The dispiriting situation is that the UK has now reached a point where, in a sense, it can neither leave the EU nor stay in it. That is to say, there is currently no viable route to get to ‘remain’ but even if there were what kind of EU member would the UK then be? On the other hand, there is no way of delivering Brexit which any but a tiny minority of Brexiters regard as satisfactory. Ironically, a project cloaked in the sacred cloth of the ‘will of the people’ is going to end up being the will of almost no one.

That we have reached this point is, in part, because of the incompetence of May’s government. I have never disguised the fact that I think that Brexit in any form was going to be a disaster for this country, but even so, it needn’t have been the shambolic nation-shredding fiasco that has been enacted.

Yet however enacted, the fundamental flaw in Brexit, as I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, is precisely what Tusk so forthrightly said this week: it invited people to vote for something for which there was no realistic plan and promised things of which there was no realistic prospect. The fall out amongst the Malthouse group is itself indicative: even a small group of Tory MPs cannot agree on how to approach Brexit, let alone the country as a whole.

Tactics or paralysis?

Hence the circles continue, with it being rumoured that May could once again delay the vote on her deal, which is supposed to be held next week. If so, what is she waiting for? Presumably she hopes to extract some kind of document from the EU which she will claim has delivered what the House of Commons asked for in passing the Brady Amendment, and she may well get such  document.

In the meantime, there may well be talk of forming a cross-party consensus based on Labour’s emerging position. I could imagine May going through the motions of that in order to put pressure on the Brexiters, telling them that this somewhat softer Brexit will be the outcome if they don’t fall in line. But it is very hard indeed to envisage her actually following through on something that would involve her in multiple U-turns and, very likely, split the Tory Party permanently.

Some see all this as being a tactic to ‘run down the clock’, leaving MPs with no choice when the very last minute comes other than to accept the deal to avoid no-deal. Personally, I am not sure that May now has any tactic other than to just get through one day at a time and hope things work out. That has long been her modus operandi but now she appears completely out of her depth, and almost paralysed by the enormity of the mess she is in and has partly created.

However, if it is her tactic then I suspect that, yet again, she underestimates the extent to which at least a handful of the Brexit Ultras are simply beyond any kind of sanity when it comes to EU. And a handful is all it will take to ensure, at that last minute, that the deal falls. By then, it will be too late to do what a responsible Prime Minister would be doing now, which is to lay the ground to seek an extension to the Article 50 period which – even if she does get some kind of deal through – it now looks inevitable will be needed. She might be left with so little time that the only choices would be no-deal or rescindment.

For the circles we are going round are not a neat holding pattern, waiting patiently for a safe landing according to known procedures. Rather, Britain is in a vicious tailspin, almost out of fuel, and plummeting to the ground. The pilot is frozen in panic, the second pilot is present but not involved, the cabin crew are bickering and the noisiest of the passengers have convinced themselves that the theory of gravity is elitist fear mongering.

Brexiters are finally being forced to face reality

For at least three years – and in some cases much longer – Brexiters have peddled fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about what Brexit would mean and how it could be done. Ever since the 2016 referendum more and more of these have been exposed or debunked, as many of the posts and links on this blog testify.

But however often this happens these falsehoods live on, zombie-like, endlessly repeated by Brexit leaders and regurgitated by their legions of followers. The critics are ignored or dismissed as ‘remoaners’ or worse, even though much of the criticism comes from expert or well-informed quarters. That cuts no ice with those Brexiters for whom belief trumps evidence, and who accept expertise only when it comes from those who are almost invariably the minority fringe of their profession be that law, economics, business or trade policy.

False claims meet reality

The underlying significance of the current Brexit impasse - with the UK government seeking to re-open negotiations and the EU saying that the negotiations are over - is that all that denial, bluster, falsity and misinformation has unequivocally hit the brick wall of reality. That has happened from time to time throughout the negotiations, but now the crunch has come. The particular issue (it might have been others) is, of course, that of the Northern Irish border.

Before the referendum, John Major and Tony Blair jointly gave explicit warnings that Brexit would make the border the external frontier of the EU, meaning the re-introduction of controls, and that this would pose problems for the Good Friday Agreement. Naturally, this was dismissed as Project Fear. Instead, Brexiters including Boris Johnson and Theresa Villiers, then Northern Ireland Secretary, insisted Brexit would leave the border “absolutely unchanged”.

Major and Blair were right, and Johnson and Villiers were wrong. To re-cap a now familiar story, there is currently no border infrastructure because the institutions of the single market and the customs union make it unnecessary. The UK has decided to exit those institutions so as to be able to set its own tariffs and regulations. That makes physical infrastructure necessary, which for political reasons including the Good Friday Agreement is not acceptable to either the UK or the EU. The Northern Ireland backstop therefore bends the shape of the institutions a little in order to accommodate Brexit (indeed, it is under-remarked upon the degree to which the EU have flexed those institutions to do so) in the absence of any other way of avoiding such infrastructure.

Once it became impossible to deny that Brexit created an issue for the Irish border, the Brexiters embarked on new falsehood. It was that there are technological, administrative or just undefined ‘alternatives’ to those institutions. As with so many of their other false claims it rests on the claims of a few mavericks, or cherry-picked quotations from experts, or semi-understood and misrepresented facts. The reality is that, at least as yet and possibly never, there is no example anywhere in the world of these technologies delivering the very particular requirements of the Irish border of no physical infrastructure whatsoever.

The crucial difference now is that no matter how much Brexiters shout they cannot make the EU accept as true a claim that is untrue. This is not a matter of being ‘inflexible’ or refusing to give ‘concessions’, as so much of the media reporting in the UK would suggest. It is simply not in the gift of the EU to agree to something when what they are being asked to agree to is the pretence that something which does not exist does exist. The very most it can do – and has already done in the present Withdrawal Agreement – is accept that if at some point in the future these technological or other alternatives come to exist then the backstop would be rendered obsolete.

The EU is doing what the UK has failed to do

In this sense the EU is doing what the UK collectively – its politics and media, more particularly – has signally failed to do: insist that however much Brexiters dislike them facts are facts and will not yield to any amount of rhetoric or be changed by any amount of ‘true faith’. Instead, Brexiters have been pandered to by a media that either trumpets their lies or fails to challenge them, sometimes by treating them as ‘equivalent’ to any other beliefs.

With the referendum result, all of the falsehoods took on a new and dominant place in political life, as the much declaimed ‘will of the people’. But that, too, is not enough. The people may will the moon to be made of blue cheese, and we can call their will sacred, and those who disagree traitors. But, still, the moon is not made of blue cheese.

Within the Tory Party, the Brexiters have been endlessly accommodated by successive leaders including – except, partially, in the period between the Chequers Proposal and this week’s parliamentary votes – Theresa May. Indeed, at May’s behest, parliament has now voted to endorse their falsehood about the border, tasking her to supposedly re-open negotiations.

Yet, apart from the fact that there are no substantive concessions that the EU could make on this issue it may well have occurred to people in Brussels what Tory leaders seem never to have grasped: that whatever the Brexiters are given it will never be enough and they will always want more. Thus even if there were concessions to be made it would only lead to more being demanded. In that sense, again, the EU is now doing what the UK has failed to do: calling a stop to trying to sate the insatiable.

Brexiters are Britain’s problem, not the EU’s

In any case, appeasing Brexit Ultras is not the guiding theme of EU politics. It was, perhaps, one thing to try to do so whilst the UK remained a member, quite another to do so now it is leaving. I heard a peculiar interview by the normally excellent Matt Frei with Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld on Channel 4 News recently in which he asked a question along the lines of how could the EU help Theresa May to bring the Brexiters in her party on board? The response – in tones which mixed slight irritation with incredulity – was to the effect that this wasn’t the EU’s problem or concern. It is for the UK to deal with its own political divisions. The British government has agreed the terms of Brexit and now it is up to that government to deliver it.

In that, too, the EU is in a certain sense doing the UK a service. Brexiters seem oblivious to it, but the UK’s reputation for trustworthy negotiation is being trashed by their antics – not just with the EU but with the wider world looking on. Indeed, one of the roots of the current EU determination to have a legally watertight backstop agreement is the cavalier way that the then Brexit Secretary David Davis, at the conclusion of phase one of the talks, immediately declared that what had been agreed (including the first version of the backstop) was not binding.

I’m not sure that, even now, Brexiters realise how much damage was done to the UK’s reputation just by that one remark. Taken together with persistent mutterings from Boris Johnson and others about not really accepting the financial settlement either, and from some that even the Good Friday Agreement could be reneged upon, a picture of a country that is not a reliable negotiating partner has been presented to the world.

The story of Brexit could be seen as a series of breached firewalls: what was once a fringe preoccupation spread to shape Tory politics, and what shaped Tory politics spread, via, the referendum to shape national politics. What the EU has now done – after showing a considerable amount of patience with the ditherings, delays and insults during the negotiations – is to say ‘enough is enough’: it is not going to shape the politics of Europe.

Be that as it may, it is too late for the UK. Brexit is going to poison our politics for years to come – the more so as the Brexiters scream blue murder about the EU not giving in to their demands. For the fact that Brexiters are being forced to face reality does not mean that they will accept it as such. But that is no longer the EU’s problem. It’s ours.
 

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