Will we get No Deal because Brexiters want it more?

“The reason we might have a no-deal Brexit in Britain is because its advocates want it more than their enemies want to stop it. They are making it happen whilst their opponents spend their time only wishing it would stop.”

When I first read this in an article by Sky journalist Lewis Goodall I thought it was nonsense, and stopped reading. It obviously does not apply, for example, to EU citizens living in the UK or all those who march against No Deal. But then I watched this, a talk by Dominic Cummings on his referendum victory (HT @ericlonners), and I realised what Goodall was talking about.. I went back to the article, read it in full and mostly agreed with it.

The trigger was a point that Cummings makes in his talk about most of the media covering politics. They are essentially interested in the government, parliament and its MPs, and so everything they say has to be taken in this context. It is a point I have made myself before, but it is easy to forget. Goodall is not talking about those who march for Remain, or the trivial numbers that march for Leave, but instead he is talking about MPs in parliament. And I think on this he is right.

Take the discussion of a possible coalition of national unity that MPs could vote for if the only way of stopping Johnson allowing No Deal is to vote him out. The job of the coalition would be to get an extension of Article 50 and then call a General Election. The idea is that rebel Tory MPs could only do this if Corbyn does not lead that coalition, because Corbyn “has become toxic”. So avoiding No Deal is less important than allowing a Corbyn government, even if that government would last no more than a month! That supports Goodall’s thesis.

The LibDems seem to be saying the same thing. They would not vote for a Corbyn led coalition government even, it seems, if the alternative was No Deal. Again avoiding No Deal is less important than allowing a very temporary Corbyn government. That supports Goodall’s thesis too, and it comes from the so called ‘party of Remain’.

Finally the Labour leadership has ruled out any kind of coalition of national unity if it was not led by Corbyn. I can see why - it is hard to admit so publicly that your leader is toxic to other Mps just before a General Election - but nevertheless it means they are also putting party before preventing No Deal. Goodall is right again.

But what does all this actually mean? Simply that all these MPs or party leaders are prepared to put party interests ahead of national interests. We can but hope that at least some of this is posturing ahead of negotiations, but such posturing can in itself be harmful to the cause of preventing No Deal.

Of course the corollary is not that Brexiters are putting country ahead of party. A No Deal Brexit is only something that a fanatic would do. A better formulation of Goodall’s idea is that No Deal will happen because No Dealers are fanatics and opponents of No Deal are putting party before country.

What about the nonsense that No Deal is required to respect democracy in the form of the 2016 vote? This is preposterous because 2016 cannot be a mandate for a No Deal Brexit when No Deal was ruled out by the Leave campaign. Bexiters implicitly acknowledge this is true by pretending that they had talked about No Deal in that referendum. But if you want to see what kind of mandate 2016 does represent, it is well worth watching the talk by Cummings noted above.

As well as showing an acute understanding of how the UK broadcast media works, his comments on what won the referendum for Leave are interesting. He notes that before the referendum most people knew little about the EU, and in addition were not particularly exercised by it as an issue. (Polling confirms this.) So, quite simply, to win the referendum the Leave campaign had to associate the EU in a negative way with things people were exercised about. Cummings talks about keeping the original Brexiters, who did want to talk about the EU, well away from the campaign.

Cummings notes three things people did care about. The first and most obvious was immigration. He says this issue had become 'associated with the EU', and there were two reasons for this in my view. The first was the Conservative targets for total net immigration which had not been met, together with the rhetoric that blamed reduced access to public services on immigrants rather than austerity. The second was the idea put forward by the pro-Brexit press that these targets had not been met because of Freedom of Movement. In this respect the following ONS chart is revealing:

Before the referendum non-EU immigration was equal to EU immigration, so it is not at all obvious that Freedom of Movement was the only reason targets were not met. Immigration has been broadly stable since the referendum, because the fall in EU migration has been offset by a rise in non-EU immigration.

The second factor Leave had going for it, according to Cummings, was the outcome of the Global Financial Crisis, and I would add austerity. The reason is obvious, but again little to do with the EU. The third was the problems with the Eurozone, but again the Eurozone’s problems all stemmed from a single currency, and not the trade and other arrangements of the EU. Therefore what all three have in common is that they have little to do with the EU.

Which brings us back to whether the people saying they want No Deal care more about it than those who want to stop No Deal. Cummings’ analysis suggests that they don’t, because by his own admission they were voting for issues that had little to do with the EU. They evidently don’t because we have not seen hundreds of thousands march on Westminster in support of any kind of Brexit. The best they could manage were ‘thousands’ when the March deadline was missed. We have seen six million sign a petition to revoke Article 50, but a tenth of that number signing a petition for No Deal.

The fact that Remainers want to stay in the EU more than No Dealers want us to crash out should come as no surprise. Leaving the EU takes away basic rights from EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, and confers no new rights in return It takes away the right of young people to work visa free in the EU. It takes away many people’s European identity. Crashing out will make almost everyone poorer and few better off. It will cost lives. All for the notion that we will become ‘independent’, when few Leavers can name a law imposed on them by the EU that they disagree with, and even fewer an EU law that the UK voted against. Brexit is one part of the population imposing considerable costs on the rest, for reasons that have little to do with the EU.

There is no mandate for No Deal

We are told constantly that the 2016 referendum gives our government a mandate for a No Deal Brexit, and that we would not respect democracy if we failed to leave. Both arguments are obviously false, yet they so often go unchallenged in the media.

The 2016 referendum was narrowly won by the Leave side. It does not matter how many people voted in that referendum, the margin of victory was narrow. What many Leavers would like you to believe is that this referendum requires the UK to leave the EU in some way or another. This is false. The referendum did not say that we must Leave the EU whatever the circumstances and whatever the cost or whatever leaving meant. None of those words were on the ballot paper, and they were not implicit either.

Just suppose the 2016 vote had led to the recession predicted by the Treasury. No recovery from this recession was on the horizon. Suppose too that Trump had not become POTUS, and Clinton said she had no interest in doing a trade deal with the UK anytime soon. Polls overwhelmingly suggest that Scotland would seek independence if we left the EU. Polls showed support for leaving the EU had dropped to less than 30%, and so on and so on. Are we really saying that despite all this, we still had to leave the EU because of a 52% majority in an advisory referendum. The realism of this example is irrelevant if you want to defend the idea that the referendum was like some kind of contract that had to be followed come what may. You certainly have no right to call it democratic, or the will of the people

The question was whether to Leave or Remain. As a result, not surprisingly people voted on the basis of what they thought Leave or Remain meant. So to see what people voted for, you need to look at what was discussed. In particular, the Leave vote will have been influenced by what the Leave side said. And almost without exception, no one on the Leave side mentioned Leaving without any deal at all. (Of course some Brexiters are now pretending they talked about it all the time - lying is second nature for these people.)

Normally when someone says that a government has a mandate for a policy, it is because that policy was in the manifesto presented at the election. The Leave side did not have a manifesto, and that was a fatal flaw in Cameron’s referendum. In the absence of a manifesto we have to base any assessment of what any mandate was on what the Leave side said Brexit would entail. And almost without exception the Leave side said it would involve a trade deal with the EU of some sort.

It is true that the Remain side talked about No Deal as an extreme case in the list of possible forms of leaving the EU. But when looking at mandates, we look at what the winning side said, not the losing side. The Leave side spent a great deal of time ridiculing Remain predictions as Project Fear, and that included ridiculing the idea that we would not get a deal with the EU. Some on the Leave side said it would be the easiest deal in history.

The reason why No Deal is the only Brexit option left standing is that militant Brexiters have done everything they can to get us there. They voted down alternative options their government proposed. It is militant Brexiters, not a majority of the public, that think No Deal is the only true form of Brexit. When Brexiters claim that voters were really voting for No Deal they should be laughed at, but instead our supine media lets it pass.

What about the idea that we have to leave with No Deal because otherwise democracy (the 2016 vote) will be betrayed. This is a favourite claim by Farage. The people who have in fact betrayed Brexit are Farage himself and fellow Brexiters. They have turned a vote for a Brexit involving a deal with the EU into something quite different.

Such a claim only gets mileage because, thanks to the Brexiters, parliament failed to agree on a deal. But such an outcome was implicit in the 2016 result. Because the referendum did not specify what type of Brexit should be attempted, we have no a priori reason to believe that any particular option would command a majority. Indeed with such a close victory the presumption must be otherwise, and the polls show this to be the case. Parliament’s failure to agree a deal simply reflects the fact that there is no majority for any particular deal.

The idea that we must go through with Brexit even though there is no majority for any form of Brexit is nonsensical. It is an illusion created by a flawed advisory referendum narrowly won which politicians foolishly said at the time that they would implement. Luckily no politicians is bound by the foolish promises that other politicians made.

Again a hypothetical example shows this point. Suppose a similar referendum had been held on the proposition to increase spending on the NHS by raising taxes, and it had been narrowly won. However polls also suggested that when you asked about specific taxes (should we increase NHS spending by raising income taxes etc) there was no majority to raise any specific tax. Should the country nevertheless go ahead and raise spending and choose some arbitrary tax just because of the original referendum result? It makes no sense to enact something that a majority object to on the basis of a flawed referendum.

So why do Brexiters get away with still talking about the will of the people when a majority clearly favours Remaining to any form of Brexit? Not because we cannot rely on opinion polls - Leavers will not allow any further vote to confirm the opinion polls! That in itself is a crystal clear indication that Brexit is undemocratic. Some even say that a further vote on a specific Brexit deal is undemocratic. In what topsy turvy world is a public vote to confirm a previous public vote undemocratic.

It is a world where Brexiters have control of most of the media, and where Brexiters and some of the people who voted for Brexit are desperate for some democratic justification for what has become an assault on pluralist democracy and evidence based policy. If you repeat something often enough you are in danger of believing it yourself. Once Tory politicians said at every opportunity that the previous Labour government was profligate, and because it went unchallenged people believed it even though it was obviously false. (Just look at the numbers.) Equally if no one contradicts you when you say we must leave with no deal because of a narrow referendum win where no one on the winning side talked about leaving with no deal, you can convince yourself to enact the biggest act of self-harm in modern UK history on an unwilling majority.

Why are we in this political mess?

I am sick and tired of being told that the 2016 referendum gave the government a mandate to leave the EU. It did not. It did not because it did not specify a method of leaving. The Leave campaign was all over the place on how we would leave, and deliberately so. It maximised their vote. It was Cameron’s failure not to see that. He could so easily have made it a condition for holding a referendum that the Leave side put together a coherent, independently assessed and costed plan for leaving, but he didn’t. That, together with austerity, will be his legacy.

I heard a good comparison the other day. Some colleagues after work decide it would be great to go out together for a meal. They all agree enthusiastically. That is decided they say. But then someone asks where they should go to eat. One says definitely not Indian. Another says they are fed up with Italian food. And so on: whatever it is someone says they definitely don’t want to go there. But they all agree they must all eat together. They end up calling the whole thing off.

The lack of a specific plan agreed in the referendum would not have mattered if one of two conditions were true. The first is that everyone who voted to Leave preferred all forms of leaving to staying in the EU. That clearly is not true. The second was that the majority to leave was so large, and stayed large, such that whatever form was eventually chosen commanded a majority. In reality the majority to leave was small, and polls now show a much larger majority wanting to stay. As a result, the first referendum in itself demands a People's Vote.

The logic of this is clear. Once you add in the fact that more Leavers than Remainers are changing their mind and the case for a People’s Vote is overwhelming. More people don’t laugh when Brexiters say a People’s Vote would be undemocratic because the Brexiters and the Brexit press are shouting so loud people find it hard to think. What is happening in parliament reflects these divisions within the country. It is impossible to get a majority for any form of Brexit in parliament, just as there is no majority for any form of Brexit in the country.

Parliament does differ from sentiment in the country for one reason: MPs are clearly intimidated either by the referendum vote itself, the Brexit press or the Brexit majority in their constituency. This gave Theresa May an opportunity. If she had understood what the closeness of the result meant, she would see that at best there was only a mandate for the softest of Brexits. I think she could have got that through parliament, especially if she had held cross-party talks before invoking Article 50 to agree a plan. The Brexiters would have huffed and puffed, but May would have got a deal passed with Labour’s help.

We all know what she actually did. One consequence of that was both sides hardened their positions. A key mistake in a long litany of errors was to believe that ‘No Deal is better than a bad deal’ was a good bargaining ploy. The EU saw it was nonsense, but it gave Brexiters hope that they could actually get No Deal. That in turn led to two heavy defeats in parliament. Thanks to the Brexit press Project Fear applies to anything negative said about leaving the EU, so many voters think having a ‘clean break’ sounds like a good idea.

This hardening of positions means that the current negotiations are extremely dangerous for May and Labour. But May has nothing to lose except her legacy. Labour have everything to lose. Too many Lexiters within Labour have the attitude that Remainers have nowhere else to go. That was never true, as they could always not vote or not campaign. Alternatives have no increased with the creation of UKC and a Lib Dem party that is no longer a party of austerity. To throw away the next election for the sake of not having a People’s Vote does merit the use of the word betrayal. Betrayal not just of Remainers, but also of all those people that want or depend on Labour winning the next election.

The 2016 referendum was a badly designed rigged vote corruptly and unfairly won. Why is there so much deference to it?

We are probably about to take the huge step of leaving the EU that a majority of the population no longer want. We will do so because certain political forces have elevated a rigged, corrupt and unfair vote into something all powerful, that demands to be obeyed. If you doubt this think of all those who claim a second referendum would be undemocratic: a statement which is a contradiction in terms unless 2016 has some unique, special status. The purpose of this post is to argue it does not deserve this status.

The UK is a representative democracy that very occasionally holds referendums. Although referendums have been reserved for constitutional issues, it is not the case that constitutional issues are always decided by referendums. Instead they often tend to be used by governments to put to rest major internal debates over constitutional issues. Cameron promised to hold a referendum on EU membership in order to (temporally as it turned out) silence internal debates within the Conservative party.

I discussed why the referendum was badly designed here. Leave were not required to settle on a particular alternative to being in the EU: EEA membership (Norway), being in the Customs Union or not, being in the Single Market or not etc. For that reason Boris Johnson can claim that leaving without a deal is closest to what Leavers voted for even though No Deal was never proposed by the Leave campaign. This lack of specifics also made it easier for the Leave campaign to spin fantasies like ‘the easiest deal in history’.

The result of the referendum would have its impact on two main groups above all others: UK citizens living in the EU and EU citizens living in the UK. The only people in that group allowed to vote were UK citizens living in the EU and registered in a UK constituency less than 15 years ago. However Commonwealth citizens resident in the UK were allowed to vote. In the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence EU residents were allowed to vote. How do you describe excluding UK residents who would be most affected by a referendum as anything other than rigging that referendum.

Vote Leave broke election law in at least two ways, yet neither of the main political parties seem to care (one for obvious reasons, the other less so). We still do not know whether the Leave campaign was funded by Russian money or not. To dismiss this by saying the extra spending probably didn’t influence the result misses the point. If all that happens after one side breaks spending rules in an election is a fine then we are on the road to US style elections where money plays a very big role. That in turn leads to a plutocracy of the kind I describe here and which Jimmy Carter has recently talked about. The penalty for overspending has to be very large, and the obvious penalty is to cast doubt on the validity of the vote. Rather than speculate on whether law breaking influenced the result, we should just say the vote was corruptly won.

But there was a much deeper unfairness with 2016 than Leave campaign spending, and that is the behaviour of much of the media. Most of the right wing press effectively groomed their readers long before the referendum with constant stories, often simply false, of an interfering Brussels bureaucracy: so much so that the EU set up a website to correct untruths. During the campaign most of the right wing press (80% by daily readership) were effectively part of the Leave campaign, providing what is best described as propaganda. The influence of the press was particularly important because, unlike a General Election, most people before the campaign were uninformed about the EU. This propaganda might have been counteracted with information provided by broadcasters, but the BBC in particular decided to balance truth with lies. Elections where information is replaced by propaganda are not fair. 

For all these reasons 2016 was not a free and fair referendum. But the same political forces that had championed Leave in the campaign went about deifying the (narrow) victory. Brexit quickly became the ‘will of the people’, as if the 48% who voted to Remain - and especially EU residents whose future was put in doubt - had either ceased to exist, or have become traitors. This alliance between Brexiters and the right wing press is the main reason why support for Leave has stood up despite everything that has happened since: who wants to be a traitor? An indication of how successful this continuing campaign has been is that if you ask people about how the economy has been since the vote, they will probably mention first the pre-vote Treasury short term forecast that predicted a recession, rather than actual events like the fall in real wages caused by the Brexit depreciation.

Once it became clear that the Leave campaign’s claim that the EU would allow us to retain the benefits of being in the EU after we left was pure fantasy, it was natural for the Brexiters and most of their press allies to migrate to advocating No Deal. It is the only outcome that might give the UK some more sovereignty (or perhaps US regulations), albeit at a terrible economic and political cost. Project Fear easily transfers to what might happen with No Deal.

In a rational world, and dare I say in any real democracy, the possibility of No Deal would be eliminated with ease by MPs, who would simply mandate the executive to Revoke Article 50 on March 27th if no other way forward had been agreed. That this has not been done, and all sensible MPs dare propose (and narrowly win) is something weaker, is indicative to the hold that the 2016 referendum still has on MP’s attitudes.

When this is all history will people struggle with how a narrow victory in a rigged, corrupt and unfair referendum could lead MPs to vote for a Brexit that a far greater majority of people no longer want? Not really. It is pretty obvious how people with lots of money to spend combined with extreme neoliberals and little englanders to subvert the political process in the UK. Just add to this a tendency of too many on the centre-right to appease the far right, from Cameron who allowed a rigged referendum that was badly designed to May who constantly set policy to please the Brexiters in her party, and you get the subversion of democracy that is Brexit

How Brexit circumvented democracy

It is difficult to overstate the mess that UK politics is in, and the harm that is doing to many of its citizens. MPs have accepted a mandate from the people that Brexit should go ahead, but cannot agree on what form Brexit should take. With the possibility of leaving with No Deal a 100 days away, firms are having to make decisions to move jobs abroad to avoid the impact of that outcome. That in turn reduces the living standards of everyone in the UK. Rather than trying to convince them to stay, the government is actually urging firms and citizens tio plan for No Deal, as if No Deal was some kind of natural disaster. Billions of our money is being spent to plan for a disaster that the government can stop in an instant by revoking Article 50.

Let me put this another way. Theresa May and her government are spending our money to plan for a disaster that they might allow to be inflicted on the country they govern. It is the ultimate blackmail by the executive against parliament: vote as we wish or we will allow this disaster to occur. I cannot think of anything like it in my lifetime.  

It is worth taking a step back to see how politicians have got themselves, and us, into such a damaging mess. It results from one huge mistake, and that was the decision to allow a referendum in the first place. Even if you like the idea of referendums in a representative democracy, 2016 had two fundamental flaws. First, how we left (the form of Brexit) was allowed to be unspecified. That was a mistake Cameron made. The second, which he could not avoid, is that any Brexit plan required assumptions about how the EU would negotiate, and that again allowed wishful thinking on a colossal scale.

It was like offering to sell people fruit without specifying the type of fruit or its price. There is a great danger that people would say yes to fruit, and then be presented with rotting bananas that they didn’t like at an exorbitant cost. But when people say they don’t like bananas and these were too old and the price was unacceptable, they are told they had agreed to buy fruit so there is nothing they can do but pay up. You can see this problem in the polls: where Remain currently has a modest majority over Leave in a rerun of 2016, but it has a much bigger majority against the deal negotiated by May, with Remain versus No Deal somewhere in the middle (the last is probably flattered by many thinking No Deal means nothing happens). Therefore a consequence of both flaws in the 2016 referendum was that a second referendum, where both the form of Brexit and what the EU would allow were clear, became a democratic necessity.

But despite all they say, neither May nor the Brexiters are democrats in this sense. All the talk of will of the people is entirely bogus. They want their form of deal, however unpopular it is. We can pinpoint exactly when this anti-democratic move began. It was triggering Article 50 without any agreement from parliament about the trade deal that should be negotiated. All A50 requires is a withdrawal agreement before a country leaves, with trade arrangements to be decided later. Most MPs were foolish enough to fall for this trap. They couldn’t see the difference between a request for fruit and the delivery of a particular kind of fruit with a price attached. So although the Brexiters and May’s intentions in triggering Article 50 were undemocratic (remember she didn’t want MPs to vote), MPs made it democratic through their own folly. They signed the country up for whatever rotten fruit May produced.

May and the Brexiters’ plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for the Irish border, which the EU decided quite rightly should be part of the withdrawal agreement. They insisted that in any deal Northern Ireland would have to remain in the Customs Union and Single Market for goods to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland whatever the rest of the UK agreed on trade (the backstop). The withdrawal agreement was now in part about trade. The fact that the Irish border was hardly discussed in the 2016 referendum campaign illustrates how that referendum cannot be a mandate for a particular deal.

The Brexiters did not want the UK to be part of the Customs Union or Single Market, and were quite happy to see a hard border in Ireland. But as the EU had ruled out doing any trade deal on these terms, that logically meant that the Brexiters required just one type of Brexit: leaving with no trade deal with the EU at all. This was certainly not what Leavers had talked about in 2016. May and the rest of her party were not prepared to suffer the economic consequences of this form of leaving, and so the actual Withdrawal Agreement (WA) May negotiated with the EU involved the UK staying in the Customs Union.

For Brexiters, this type of leaving was in many ways worse than being in the EU, so they refused to vote for the WA. Because most of Labour’s members want a second referendum the opposition dare not vote for the WA. We are therefore stuck. Stuck because of a badly conceived and poorly thought out referendum, because of May’s undemocratic nature (reflecting the very undemocratic Brexiters), and the EU’s laudable insistence on the backstop.

The curse of Brexit is that while a thin majority of voters wanted to leave in 2016, they cannot agree on how to leave, and many Leavers would prefer to remain in the EU rather than accept a form of leaving that was not their preferred (and often imaginary) option. The WA is much less popular against Remaining compared to the unspecified idea of Leaving. Quite simply allowing a decision to leave based on a thin majority in 2016 based on fantastic notions of what Leaving meant almost guaranteed that any particular realistic form of Leaving could not get a majority over staying in the EU.

This in turn is reflected in parliament, where neither the WA or No Deal can command the support of a majority of MPs. If MPs cannot find a deal that commands a majority (which they may well fail to do [1]), in a democracy that should mean no Brexit, or if MPs are too timid to make that decision themselves it would mean a People’s Vote. This is where the UK has departed from the representative democracy it is supposed to be. May refused to allow a vote on the WA, and therefore denied parliament its ability to work its way out of the impasse we are currently in. They say parliament is sovereign, but it appears this is not the case if the Prime Minister is determined to sideline it and MPs protect their party rather than their constituents.

We are trapped in a poker game between the two forms of Brexit few people want. The Brexiters are happy to continue to oppose May’s deal, because they know we leave with No Deal by default in March 2019. Furthermore huge amounts of money have been spent on preparing for this eventuality, an outcome only a minority of people want. The NHS is spending money on refrigerators rather than training nurses or doctors. May, who is known to be extremely stubborn, is not shifting from wanting parliament to pass her deal (also only wanted by a minority of the UK public), and she hopes as the March deadline approaches she can scare MPs into voting for it.

If either she or the Brexiters win their poker game we will embark on a form of Brexit that most people do not want, achieved by means that no one could call democratic. People do not want the WA or No Deal [2], MPs do not want the WA or No Deal, but we could well get one or other through a process of blackmail. On this issue the UK does not have a representative democracy, which is disastrous when it concerns one of the most important decision in my lifetime. Even if one side folds, we must remember the politicians who wasted so much public money, and squandered many UK jobs, just so they could play their silly poker game.

As this may be my last post before Christmas, have a good Christmas despite it all. 

[1] Corbyn dares not vote for any form of Brexit for the reasons I have given (which is why a government of national unity will not work). The Brexiters only want No Deal. That means a majority is extremely difficult for any form of Brexit without some form of coercion (like a threat to allow No Deal). It seems many Conservative MPs have not understood this.

[2] As the experienced pollster Peter Kellner says: "All the signs are pointing to the public losing faith in Brexit fast. It’s clear we need a People’s Vote." If you do not believe the polls, then lets find out with a real vote.