For too many Conservatives there is no spoon

The Tory party has lost its battle with reality. But there remains one hope, a man with a joke and a smile that can set the UK free from the EU. Unfortunately to do that he may set the UK free from democracy as we know it.

For those not familiar with the film Matrix, there is a scene where the hero Neo encounters a boy bending a spoon with his mind. The boy hands the spoon to Neo. The dialog goes on:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Neo then appears to bend the spoon with his mind. In the film the spoon isn’t real, but a digital simulation fed to unconscious humans to keep them alive. But what would happen in the real world if you really, really wanted to bend that spoon, and there was another world where you could make that happen? You could get to that world by talking a blue pill offered to you by a kind of anti-Neo.

Welcome to the contest for our next Prime Minister, where the electorate is just a small group of party members and Conservative MPs. The current contest is all about Brexit. Brexit is stuck. The goal of Brexiters, taken up by many (but definitely not all) who voted for it, is to gain complete independence from the EU and all its rules and regulations. They hoped to do this by leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, and replacing them with a free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU. Unfortunately they brushed aside two obstacles: the Irish border and the Good Friday Agreement.

Together they are a spoon that so many Conservatives want to bend by wishing it so. The Irish government and the EU live in the real world, so they know that an FTA with the EU would require a hard border on the island of Ireland. A hard border is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement. As a result, either Northern Ireland or the UK has to keep their trading rules such that there cannot be a hard border in Ireland. The backstop ensures this will happen. Complete independence for the UK from the EU is therefore impossible, just like bending a spoon by thought alone.

Most Conservative candidates for Prime Minister pretend they can really bend the spoon. Many suggest it can be bent using soon to be invented technology. Technology that would make a hard border anywhere near the actual border unnecessary. But these candidates have a problem. If such technology could be found, the EU have said they would be happy to apply it. And if such technology is just around the corner, why would the Brexiters object to the backstop that will soon be removed? The fact that the same Brexiters who say the technology is almost apon us also refuse to accept the backstop suggests they do not really believe in bending spoons.

One or two candidates say that, if only they are given a chance to stare into the whites of the EU negotiators eyes, they can make the EU bend. This is also impossible. Others suggest that we can leave in October with No Deal and then we can do the FTA we want, because the EU will want the £39 billion that we have already agreed we owe them. In reality if we break our existing agreements with the EU after a No Deal Brexit the EU can do things like fail to let our airplanes fly.

Many of those voting for our next Prime Minister may understand all this deep down. They agree with the spoon boy that you cannot bend a spoon by thought alone. Instead they want to take the blue pill, and go to a world where almost anything is possible if you want it enough. A world where you can wish away the Irish border problem. The same world where we once stood alone and won WWII all by ourselves.

These Conservative party members are not hanging on every detail of alternative arrangements for the Irish border to check that they will actually work. They don’t mind too much how we leave and what is done to parliament to make that happen. They just want their blue pill and their anti-Neo to make all their difficulties disappear. They want someone to get Brexit done and banish Farage and then diminish Corbyn so they might actually win another election. They want there to be no spoon, because life would be too difficult if today’s reality turned out to be all there is. In particular, and to mix imaginary tales horribly, if they recognised reality they would have to give up their precious, Brexit.

Just after the 2017 general election I wrote about the Zugzwang that the Conservative party found itself in. Zugzwang is a term in chess where a player finds themselves in a position where every move that it is possible to make ends up making them worse off. In that situation the chess player would like to skip their move, but the rules say they cannot. What I had in mind then was that most Tory MPs wanted to be rid of May because she was clearly a hopeless leader who had called an unnecessary election with a commanding lead in the polls and lost it all. Yet these same MPs could not get rid of May because they would get a Brexiter instead.

I underestimated the Zugzwang the Conservatives were in. I hadn’t realised the depth of the rabbit hole that Brexiters were prepared to take the Conservative party and its members. Brexit could have happened if the Brexiters had not voted against May’s deal. Instead they have taken a referendum that promised the easiest trade deal with the EU in history and pretended it is mandate for No Deal at all. Their supporters in the press egg them on and most in the broadcast media let this pass.

At the bottom of the rabbit hole of Brexit, where only complete independence for the EU is acceptable, you can only survive by taking the blue pill. The blue pill takes you to another place where most Conservative members and MPs want to live. And Boris Johnson, who can seemingly make any bullets fired at him stop dead in mid air with a joke and a smile, is the person who can make this happen. Boris Johnson will offer you a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill that is reality and the blue pill where thought can bend spoons. Pills like the two articles he wrote before he decided to champion Brexit.

Unfortunately that other place where you go if you take the blue pill is not fictitious. They have seen it across the Atlantic. Johnson is in reality their Trump. Trump can get away with so many things that once were considered outrageous, and he only gets away with it because he has a party machine and media behind him that is prepared to tolerate and justify anything Trump does so they can stay in power, as long as the party serves its backers’ interests. A UK version of Trump is the only way of delivering an outrageous thing like No Deal Brexit.

Johnson, like Trump, is criticised for his lies and personal behaviour but he just laughs it off and nothing seems to matter. There are much more worrying similarities between the two. Johnson, like Trump, cannot concentrate for long, says or does the wrong thing at critical moments, has no vision except his own advancement, and makes serious mistakes that go beyond his words and his personal life. His genius is to turn his own incompetence into a joke, so he appears so refreshing compared to most politicians. Although the jokes may be well rehearsed, the incompetence is real. When you are worse off because of his incompetence it isn’t funny anymore, but you just need enough people who are yet to experience his incompetence first hand and who appreciate a funny politician and the job is done.

Which leads to a critical realisation. If Johnson is the UK’s Trump, then the spoon is not just the Irish border, or the consequences of a No Deal Brexit. The spoon has to be politics as we once knew it, democracy as we once knew it.

The first spoon that will be bent is an independent media that asks critical questions based on facts. As William Davies and others have observed, Johnson’s first leadership press conference was positively Trumpian. Journalists who ask tough questions were booed. Later pressure will be brought through the Tory media or elsewhere such that journalists quickly learn that asking such questions is more trouble than it is worth. Small outposts of critical thought may remain, because you only need to control what most people see and read to bend the spoon to your will. Whereas Trump plays the media through his tweets, Johnson can shrug off using racist imagery about Muslim women by offering the MSM cups of tea.

The spoon may become the judiciary, that has already raised the wrath of parts of the governing party, its press and its members by daring to allow parliament the final say in enacting Article 50. The already unprecedented number of attacks by politicians on the civil service will morph into a politicisation of the civil service that Thatcher would never have dreamed of. And very soon the spoon may be parliament itself. Johnson is committed to imposing the most devastating kind of Brexit on the UK if he cannot get a deal by October, and parliament may well try to stop him. Johnson has not ruled out ignoring or suspending parliament and going ahead anyway. If his poll numbers are not as favourable as some hope, or the deal he offers Farage is rejected, he may be tempted to bypass parliament rather than call an election.

The spoon that Johnson and his party want to bend or to pretend doesn’t exist is pluralist democracy itself. It will happen slowly, each stage seemingly not so bad because each happens with a joke and a smile. We can only hope that just because most Conservative members want to live in a world where there is no spoon, enough voters prefer changing the real world in ways that enhance rather than diminish our democracy.

Is Brexit still possible?

My last post was about how Labour should move from supporting Brexit to supporting Remain, because there is no chance that their kind of Brexit deal either being approved by parliament or attracting majority support from voters. This holds before and after any elections.

You may think Labour should support Remain simply because it is the right thing to do. I have written many posts saying exactly this. But many within Labour, including crucially Corbyn himself, do not agree. This is why we should also think about whether supporting Brexit is a feasible strategy, which is what my last post does. The post also shows why supporting Brexit will now lose Labour votes.

But the logic of that post also applies to any deal, including the government’s own. There is always a blocking group of MPs made up of a combination of Brexiters and uncompromising Remainers, and if the deal ever squeezed through parliament there would always be a large majority of voters who would hate it and take their anger out on the government.

May tried relentlessly to get her deal through without any support from the Labour leadership. I cannot see how events might conspire to help her in the period before she leaves. Indeed the success of Farage will embolden the Brexiters, particularly as they are close to getting a Brexiter as Prime Minister. Unless Corbyn wants to commit suicide on behalf of the Labour party, May’s deal is the proverbial dead parrot, with the government as the shopkeeper.

The only chance she had was to make serious compromises with Corbyn in the negotiations. Doing something that could split her party is not something she would do. Even with a joint deal the numbers look tight if there is no second referendum attached, The number of Conservative MPs who voted for her deal the first time they voted was just under 200. That rose to 277 by March, but with Farage as background and a general aversion of Tory MPs for ‘doing a deal with a Marxist’, the number could be more like the first vote than the last.

Among 246 Labour MPs, perhaps 120 would vote against a joint deal because it didn’t include a People’s Vote. That leaves around 125 who would vote for a joint deal. The majority needed is 320. It is close, but perhaps not large enough to get all the Brexit legislation through. If a People’s Vote was included that would probably be a stable majority, but in that case the deal would easily be rejected by a combination of Remainers and Brexiters.

Would a Brexiter Prime Minister make any difference? How could it? It would increase the size of the Brexiter block. The idea that the EU will substantially improve their deal with a Brexiter as PM is pure fantasy. Brexiters will play the long game: hope to gradually increase their number in parliament, and to win an election with a big enough majority to get No Deal through parliament. A Conservative party committed to No Deal is the only way the Tories have to neutralise Farage.

This all suggests that Brexit in any form based on Article 50 is just not possible. A May-Corbyn deal was the best shot, but I don’t think either side are prepared to do it at the end of the day. Yet no one will admit that Brexit is stuck with no obvious way forward. It may require a new Prime Minister to admit the inevitable. They have a big incentive to do so, as at the moment Brexit has brought normal government to a halt.

What about the EU - will they want to go on extending Article 50 again and again? At some point they will issue an ultimatum: no more extensions so agree a deal, revoke or leave without a deal. That will certainly ‘stress test’ the analysis above. Will that persuade enough MPs to agree a deal? If it does not MPs will vote to revoke. The most likely outcome of this stress test is a vote for a referendum and a request to the EU to allow time for one, which they will give. Any referendum will be won by Remain unless parliament is foolish enough to put No Deal on the ballot, because Brexiters as well as Remainers will campaign against it.

So Brexit is stuck, with no foreseeable way to successfully implement it. I have waited some time before writing a post with this conclusion. I have kept saying this is wishful thinking and something unexpected will turn up to make Brexit happen. It still could, but I suspect Farage is the final straw. It seems odd writing that Brexit is on its deathbed, in a coma but with no chance of recovery, when a year ago the Remain cause seemed hopeless. The thing everyone under estimated was the way Brexiters themselves would effectively kill Brexit.

If you enjoyed the last two years and want more of the same, vote for May’s deal

Trade negotiations happen after the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) is signed, so why don’t those wanting a softer Brexit just vote for the WA and argue about trade later? The Political Declaration which does talk about trade is vague and non-binding. The reason is straightforward. Parliament will get very little say on the framework for those trade talks. The only real chance most MPs will get to influence the type of trade relationship the UK has with the EU is by directing the government now, as the price of passing the WA.

However so far parliament has largely failed to do that, largely because Conservative MPs have put party unity above the future health of the country. So what will happen to politics and the economy if parliament votes to pass May’s deal, either today or in a few months time? The first and well known point to make is that nothing would immediately change as far as UK firms and citizens are concerned, because we would start a transition period where we remain inside the Customs Union (CU) and Single Market (but no longer have any say on the rules of either). There will be little economic bounce from ending No Deal uncertainty, for reasons outlined below. So the immediate action will be about the politics of negotiating what happens after the transition period ends.

If you want to know what that would be like, just look at the last year or two. Most of the arguments within the Conservative party over the last year or so have been about trade, and not the content of the WA. So signing the WA settles very little. It does mean that we have signed up to the backstop, but May still pretends that this backstop means we can still stay outside the CU. I cannot see Brexiters meekly accepting that the UK should join the CU either. We will continue to have endless discussion of unicorn ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border designed only to avoid us being up to a CU. The inevitable truth of course is that the backstop implies some part of the UK has to be in the CU, but as the last two years have shown large parts of the Conservative Party refuse to accept reality when they don’t like it.

At some point during the transition period Theresa May could be replaced as Prime Minister. It seems very likely, given the views of Conservative Party members on Brexit, that a Brexiter will be elected in her place. The likely outcome of that, as far as Brexit is concerned, is either that nothing changes, or that the government attempts to persuade the EU to do the impossible.

For example Theresa May is determined that we should leave the Single Market (SM) because her primary aim is to end Freedom of Movement (FM). Any successor is likely to want to leave the SM because they do not want to be bound by EU regulations on minimum workers rights or the environment. Because of the economic damage that will cause (see below) the government will attempt to get a trade agreement with the EU that mitigates that harm. They will find out, yet again, that it is impossible to get anything close to the benefits of the SM without being in the SM. And because the UK will not want to accept that, the negotiations will go on and on.

But at least No Deal will be off the table? Unfortunately just as you think you have avoided one cliff edge, another appears. If no trade deal is done during the transition period, we crash out much like we would with No Deal now. And the Brexiters in government will be saying not to worry the EU always cave at the last minute. They will fight extending the transition period from 21 months, even though it is impossible to negotiate a trade agreement in that time, because the ERG wants to fall off a cliff.

In short, if May’s deal is approved we can look forward to a politics dominated by internal squabbles within the Conservative Party, and the absence of constructive negotiations with Brussels, for perhaps the next four or more years. Much as we have seen for the past two years. This is because the WA does nothing to resolve internal Conservative conflicts, and more fundamentally conflicts inherent with Brexit itself.

If, despite it all, the government manages to negotiate a trade agreement with the EU, what will be the economic and political consequences for the UK? Will it all be worthwhile in the end? A good guide to the economics is the study involving a collaboration between the Centre of Economic Performance and The UK in a Changing Europe, which is both authoritative and representative of similar work. They believe that from 2030 onwards UK GDP per capita will be lower by between 1.9% and 5.5% as a consequence of leaving the Single Market. The midpoint of that range represents lost resources for each household of about £3,000 each year. There will of course be a large hit to the public finances, implying higher taxes or less public spending, even after allowing for an end to contributions to the EU.

Why such a large range? The 1.9% mostly comes from the direct effects of lower and more costly trade, using standard trade modelling techniques together with reasonable estimates of the barriers created by leaving the SM. The government using a similar model get similar numbers. The higher figure in the study’s range is based on empirical evidence for the impact of trade on productivity, which captures other effects such as lower foreign direct investment or reduced competition. Because the empirical evidence captures many more effects than the model, we would expect it to be larger. Those who dispute numbers of this scale in this range have to explain not only why the models, including those used by the government, are wrong but also why the simple correlations between trade and prosperity more than back the models up.

Our best guess is that we have already lost over 2% of GDP as a result of stagnant investment and sterling’s depreciation. As a result, most people will probably not notice the economic impact of ending the transition period, because most of the firms that were going to leave will have already left as a result of cliff edge uncertainty. Instead Brexit will be a gradual decline in the UK relative to the remaining EU.

What about Global Britain? Most trade agreements involve tariff reduction, so being in the CU largely limits the scope for Mr. Fox to do new trade deals. In addition, who would want to harmonise their regulations with the UK, when the gains from doing the same for the EU are much greater. A more likely outcome is that we harmonise our regulations with the US.

The government will be desperate to sign a trade deal with the US to show that ‘global Britain’ is more than a slogan, and that means the US will largely get their way in terms of regulations (including food standards) and participation in the NHS. Thus the longer term political consequence of parliament agreeing to May’s deal is the gradual transition of the UK into a US style economy.

In an age where the regulations governing trade in goods and services are increasingly decided by large regional blocks, the only rationalisation of Brexit that makes any kind of sense is that we move from the EU block to the US block. That is what a lot of the Brexiters want, which is why they resist the backstop so much, because that ties our tariffs to the EU. But the political consequences of tariffs are less important in shaping an economy than regulations on things like working conditions and the environment. That is why, even with the backstop, Brexit will mean we will become more like the US economy. Whatever the merits or otherwise of that, a big difference is that we had a say in how the EU is run but we will have none in what the US does. A 51st state without representation if you like. Taking back control it is not.

No deal syndrome: why do people keep buying snake oil when it doesn’t work?

Using a very broad brush, the Leave vote represented the votes of two groups: social conservatives who felt threatened by immigration, and the group often referred to as the left behind. Both groups were sold snake-oil by the Brexiters. There would be more money for the NHS, we would avoid a flood of immigrants coming from ‘about to join’ Turkey, we would get the easiest deal in history with the EU (because we held all the cards), and we would get lots of advantageous trade deals that the EU were not able to make on our behalf. To mention just a few of the lies that were told to sell their snake oil.

Their lies were gradually exposed over the two years following the referendum vote. There would be less money for the NHS, and even with the money it has they cannot hire enough nurses or doctors because EU citizens no longer want those jobs. Turkey didn’t join, and the EU will not give us all the benefits we had as members. Mr. Fox has not even managed to replicate third party trade deals we have enjoyed as a result of being in the EU, for the simple reason that the EU have a lot to offer and great experience at doing trade deals and we have neither.

To say ‘but both sides lied’ misses the point. We knew what Remain was, while the Leavers sold a prospectus that was false in almost every detail. As a result, the Brexiters stopped talking about the easiest deal in history and started talking about No Deal. In fact they knew before 2016 that there was no plan they were happy with before the vote. But because they hate the EU (either because they want a neoliberal paradise or they are nostalgic Little Englanders who want to rule the waves again) they have just moved from one set of lies to another.

The only difference between the lies they told in 2016 and the lies they tell now is the scale of disaster they are pretending will not happen. Leaving in a controlled and partial way would hurt business but they would get time to adjust. Leaving suddenly and completely has business in an absolute panic, and consumers as well as workers would soon feel the impact. The snake-oil sellers are unmoved: just more ‘Project Fear’ they say. In addition our political influence in the world, already severely dented, would crash to zero under No Deal. No worries, say the snake oil sellers, we stood alone once before, as they endlessly churn out utterly misplaced WWII analogies. (This is only possible because none of them actually lived through WWII, but instead just remember santised histories and films.) As David Heniq says, that this is happening is political failure on a grand scale.

In US popular culture, snake oil sellers peddled their wares in Wild West medicine shows. In the UK they do so in much of the press, and relentlessly in the broadcast media. Even when BBC journalists know their claims are all garbage, most are too frightened to challenge them because they fear being picked out as another example of Remain bias by the right wing print media. Brexiters have all the time in the world to appear in the media because they do not need to analyse policies. They just pick up the latest sound bite and off they go.

No Deal is like someone who hates modernity but cannot work out why, and so retreats to living as a hermit in a cave. It will not last long. No country on earth wants no trade deals, which is why recent history is all about new trade deals being done rather than undone. Just as Lexiters talk of deals with Bolivia and other countries that have ‘true socialist’ governments, the Brexiters end state is for the UK to become an unincorporated territory of the US. Ask the people of Puerto Rico what that feels like.

Why do so many of the public still believe these lies, when it is obvious that these snake oil sellers lied, or to be too charitable got it so wrong, in 2016? Being fooled once is understandable, but twice in such quick succession? Well not all those who vote Leave are fooled. In particular, a few of the left behind group have switched to Remain, and others in that group can see that No Deal would hit them hard.

But a remarkable number of 2016 Leavers still back the snake oil sellers. One reason goes back to the media. The Brexiters pretend that Remain told as many lies as they did in 2016, and that 2016 Project Fear has been proved to be such, and unfortunately too many in the broadcast media believe this. In reality, most forecasters got the decline of GDP and real wages as a result of the referendum over the last 2+ years roughly right. As often happens, the media’s narrative and reality are very different, because the media does not talk to experts.

However a misleading media narrative is not the only cause of popular belief in the virtues of No Deal. We have, I fear, a UK example of Trump support syndrome. Many of Trump’s supporters accept that he lies all the time but still support him. They believe that Trump supports their identity and values. Social conservatives feel threatened by multiculturalism, by social liberalism, by feminism (no dealers tend to be men), by the green movement. They also tend to be nostalgic for an old order. What better figure to represent all that than Rees-Mogg. Of course the old order they remember involved an industrialised economy with strong unions and a strong welfare state, while a No Deal UK run by the Brexiters would be a completely service economy with few unions and little welfare state. This is an irony of No Deal: its supporters are nostalgic for a pre-neoliberal past while its leaders want to give them even more of neoliberal modernity. 

These Brexiter leaders are like the Republicans in the US they so admire: politicians armed with an ideology who know little about the policies they peddle and the reality these policies would change. What they do specialise in is selling policies. The rest of the Conservative party may be too attached to business to swallow No Deal, but they were happy to enact austerity and the widespread use of sanctions for benefits. There may be some obvious liars who lie about lying, but more generally there is a party that continues to pretend that stopping money to the poor has nothing to do with an explosion in food bank use. The One Nation Tories of old are almost gone, and have little future in a party whose members, as Tim Bale explains, are obsessed with Brexit and mostly want No Deal.

There will always be people who buy snake oil, particularly if it is linked by its sellers to medicines of old. If real snake oil sellers still existed today they would be banned from touting their wares. The mechanism we used to have to keep these people out of politics was a critical media, but most of that media today seems either to be advertising the benefits of the snake oil, or incapable of challenging the snake oil sellers’ claims. The consequence of letting these charlatans run loose with no checks on the lies they tell is a country stockpiling food and medicine, and preparing to put troops on the streets, for no other reason but that too many people bought snake oil.

Will the Brexiters kill Brexit?

How do we rationalise the Brexiters refusal to vote for May’s proposed Withdrawal Agreement (such that she pulled the vote), and then attempting to bring her down? It appears like the actions of a petulant child that refuses to accept they cannot have the expensive toy they have just seen in the shop, even after they have been offered a less expensive toy. Rationally they must know they are a clear minority of MPs, and so their desired outcome of No Deal is not going to ever be voted for by MPs. But they hope that they might still get what they want by other means.

That other means is of course the fact that, if the UK does nothing, we leave at the end of March 2019 with no deal. So their strategy has always been one of obstruction and delay. Refusing to vote for May’s deal was part of that obstruction, and when she refused to be formally defeated by pulling the vote they took their opportunity to bring a vote of no confidence. (We should not overestimate their prowess at strategy. An earlier attempt had failed: they needed May to try and subvert parliament by pulling the vote to get the necessary 48 MPs to trigger the vote.)

I was pleased they failed, because success would have almost certainly increased their chances of pushing us over the March cliff edge by denying MPs a say. With Conservative members having the final vote on the leadership, an ERG member was quite likely to win that vote (which was of course the main reason why they didn’t win their No Confidence motion.) The executive denying MPs a vote should not be possible, and its legitimacy could be questioned (including by the EU), but that would not stop a Prime Minister from ERG’s ranks trying. The ERG and their press backers have shown zero respect for parliamentary democracy since they secured their 2016 referendum result.

They didn’t win, and in toddler tantrum style they responded by a fairly direct threat to bring down the government if May did not get a major concession from the EU (which she will not). However it is unlikely this threat will work: May has always wanted a deal rather than No Deal, and she is likely to persist with trying to get this through parliament. But it is hard to see how she can, as the ERG will still vote against and Labour and almost all of its MPs will not dare to support her deal in its current form. We seem to be at an impasse.

In pushing things to the wire, the Brexiters are risking that there will be no Brexit. Given time I suspect MPs would vote for a referendum, and if they did not and there was still an impasse they now know that the day before the UK formally leaves they can call the whole thing off by revoking Article 50. So why are the Brexiters risking an end to their whole project? It is partly because they are pretty fanatical and prepared to take such a risk, but there is something else.

A mistake some people make is to see Brexit as some kind of continuum, with No Deal at one end and BINO/perpetual transition at the other. In which case, why don’t the Brexiters compromise with something like May’s deal? But as I argued here, Brexit does not work like that. If your concern is sovereignty, it is arguable that you have more as part of the EU than you have under May’s deal (see the diagram here). When the ERG talk about the UK becoming a vassal state they mean it. May’s deal effectively keeps the UK in the Customs Union as long as the EU wishes it, and the Brexiters do not want the kind of deal that would make the backstop unnecessary. So May’s deal is not even a staging post to what they want.

To be honest this is the second big mistake I have made about Brexit. (The first was seeing rather late, although not as late as many, the importance of Ireland.) I have until recently been unduly pessimistic about the chances of a People’s Vote because I had implicitly assumed that the Brexiters would back a compromise, figuring that it would be a stepping stone to a harder Brexit at some later stage. The fact that for Brexiters a compromise may be worse than staying in the EU will lead them to risk Brexit itself by going to the wire.

Why Theresa May should not get anyone’s sympathy vote

She may have fortitude in the face of misfortune, and it is easy to feel sympathy for her in comparison to the Brexiters in the Conservative party. But to a large extent she has brought that all upon herself, from the moment she became Prime Minister. Here are some of her bigger mistakes.

1. Appointing Brexiters to key posts in cabinet, including the minister who would be in day to day charge of the negotiations, and Boris Johnson. A clever wheeze, some political commentators opined, to make the Brexiters own the result. In reality not so clever when the aim of the Brexiters is not to get a deal. In the end she had to take over negotiations herself to get anywhere at all, and of course she owned the result.
   
   
2. Rather than listening to experts on the EU, law and economics when formulating her plan, she listened to her political advisors whose only interests were in keeping the party together. As a result she wrote red lines that she has had to cross over to get a deal, and wasted a lot of time in between.
   
   
3. If she had listened to anyone with even the slightest knowledge she would not have rushed to start the Article 50 process.
   
   
4. Holding a General Election in 2017, in the middle of the negotiation process, and then holding on to power when that gambit failed by bribing the DUP with, as the Tories like saying, taxpayers money.
   
   
5. Ignoring the Irish border for over a year. Then agreeing a deal on the Irish border in December 2017. Then declaring in the House of Commons that no Prime Minister could ever approve such a deal when the EU put that agreement in legal form.

Two things seem to have motivated her throughout this process: to appease the Brexiters, and to end Freedom of Movement. Both have influenced the Withdrawal Agreement, although not in ways she suggests. In the two years she could have been outlining a deal that brings the UK much closer to the EU, but she has quite deliberately done the opposite.

There is a story going round that she had no choice in all this. She had to appease the Brexiters at every turn because her survival depended on it. This is simply not the case. She has brought her present position on herself through her constant appeasement of the Brexiters. She could and should have marginalised the Brexiters at the very start of her premiership, when she was at her most powerful, and been honest with people about what the trade-offs were. The Brexiters would have huffed and puffed, but they never had enough support to bring her down, particular in the early months of her premiership. If she had done that, and listened to sound advice, the last two or more years would have been a much calmer and more rational period.

But she was not going to do that because of her obsession with ending freedom of movement and reducing immigration. May is the author of the hostile environment, that has inflicted suffering on so many people, just so she can try and meet some arbitrary target. Yet when Amber Rudd, her replacement as Home Secretary, had to deal with the flack that the hostile environment caused when the media discovered it was being applied to the Windrush generation and their descendants, May allowed Rudd to resign without a hint of apology from herself as author of the policy. Her recent description of migrants who came to the UK when we were in the EU as 'queue jumpers' is unfortunately all to typical of this Prime Minister. 

It is a mistake to see stubbornness as fortitude, particularly when the person’s misfortunes are entirely self-inflicted. It would be a serious mistake to be sympathetic when she is finally standing up to the mad Brexiters when she should have done this 2 years ago. Her failure has given us a deal which makes voters worse off and gives them less sovereignty. She has put this country in a position that we have only months before we leave with no deal, saying you take my deal or you have chaos. She has done all this with only one thing in her mind: it is a strategy that maximises her chances of staying leader for longer (see this post on perpetual Brexit). When you keep making serious mistakes, having someone who is stubborn and self-centred as Prime Minister is extremely dangerous.

Why Brexiters look defeated

One reason Brexiters split in stage one of the Brexit endgame is that there is no good way forward for them. When Boris Johnson calls the EU’s Irish border backstop “a monstrosity” he is talking about its impact on the plans of the Brexiters rather than its impact on the UK. It destroys their hope of a Canada type Free Trade Deal with the EU, because the EU will not agree to anything like that without the backstop, but the Conservative and Unionist party cannot agree to a backstop that ends the UK single market.

Those that split over Chequers (the quitters) have one hope left, which is we crash out with No Deal. Those that did not, like Gove and Javid (the schemers), hope that one of their number can at some stage grab the party leadership and then change any agreement to their liking. But neither strategy is likely to work because of that ‘monstrous backstop’ and parliament’s ability to stop No Deal.

One way No Deal could happen is that May fails to compromise enough to get a Withdrawal Agreement (WA). If nothing else then happens, we get a catastrophic No Deal. But if she cannot make a deal with the EU she has to report to parliament on 21st January (ht Steve Lawrence). Parliament can then vote down this ‘neutral’ motion, and perhaps amend it if the speaker allows. But I suspect this is a bit academic, because what parliament is likely to request is what May herself would want, which is an extension of Article 50 (A50).

The EU does not want No Deal anymore than May does. So they are likely to agree to that request, but probably at some political price. The whole point of A50 is that all the power lies with the EU. What that price will be I do not know, but in any iteration between the EU and parliament I cannot see a No Deal outcome unless either party seriously miscalculates. This is not a sequence of events that looks good for May, which is one of the reasons why May is likely to conclude a deal.

In that eventually (there is a WA) the quitters will hope that they can defeat the deal in parliament. How many of the quitters will stay firm in that resolve is unclear, because the outcome of the deal being defeated is unlikely to be No Deal. Quitters apart, MPs want No Deal even less than they want whatever WA May puts to them. In the political chaos that results something like a referendum or a general election may emerge as a way forward (and the EU will extend A50 to allow time for this). Brexiters do not want a referendum, because for all their talk of the will of the people they only want that will if it agrees with their own wishes.

Given all this, the schemers may seem to be on firmer ground. Let the WA pass, and then change anything that is agreed subsequently once one of their number becomes Prime Minister. Note in passing that the Brexiters and May have a common interest in what I have called a perpetual Brexit: the Brexiters because it keeps the issue in members minds when they come to vote for May’s replacement, and for May because for that very reason the majority of Conservative MPs who are not Brexiters will want her to stay.

The problem for the schemers is that after the WA they face exactly the same problem Brexiters face now but more so. The Irish backstop will now be enshrined in a treaty. Any attempt to reduce the degree of alignment of regulations between the UK and EU, for example, would end the UK’s single market. Enough Conservative MPs will object to that and so prevent it happening.

The big flaw in the Brexiters’ plans to free ourselves of pesky EU regulations on employment, the environment etc is the Good Friday Agreement, the laudable wish of the Irish government to keep the spirit of that agreement intact, and the admirable wish of the EU to stand by one of its members. If that had not been the case, they might have got away with a FTA with the EU, but instead they are stuck with the ‘monstrous’ backstop. In the end the Brexiters have failed because they are just not very good at what they see as details. The critical detail in this case is the large island to the west of Great Britain.

The Brexiters may have failed in their primary aim, but they have caused considerable damage nevertheless. Estimates of the GDP loss so far are around 2%, and real wages have fallen by a lot more than that because of the depreciation. Unless MPs can, directly or indirectly, stop Brexit, we will end up at best with less sovereignty than we had as members of the EU. The damage to the UK's reputation, both as a safe place to export from and more generally as a pragmatic tolerant nation, will take a very long time to repair, and that time will not start until the Brexiters themselves lose their political influence.

A decade of political deceit

It is tempting sometimes to portray the Brexiters (the politicians and the media leading the Brexit campaign, not those who voted Leave) as bumbling fools who just are not very good with reality in all its detail. Boris Johnson encourages that idea, particularly when you know his true reason for supporting Brexit is personal ambition.

I considered writing up a little fantasy shortly after water was discovered on Mars, Johnson had resigned as Foreign Secretary and May had won a vote by breaking pairing. I imagined the PM had convinced Johnson to captain a spaceship put together by the New UK Space Agency so he and David Davis could sign a trade agreement with whatever lived on Mars. It had to be hush hush so the EU did not try and get there first. When Johnson expressed concern that he might miss the vote on the final deal May assured him his vote would be paired, and when he returned in triumph the leadership would be his. After days when the press asked where is Boris, NASA reported receiving distress calls from what seemed like a spaceship heading in the direction of the sun.

But while Boris is in it for himself, the motives of many members of the ERG are rather different. As Time Bale describes, they need Brexit to be able to fulfill their vision for the UK, ably described in Britannia Unchained, written in 2012 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss. He calls them hyperglobalists. It is a UK of less welfare provision and even more ‘flexible’ labour markets, so that UK firms can compete ‘unhindered’ with the rest of the world like some kind of imagined Asian dynamo. Sort of Thatcher on steroids.

I’m not too interested on this occasion in the idiocy of such a plan, but the fact that this was never on the side of any red bus. It is another example of political deceit of the highest order. Their plan is not why most people voted Leave: quite the opposite in the case of many. As Tim writes:

“Does this disjunction between what “the people” currently say they want and what they supposedly need actually bother Tory hyperglobalists, except insofar as it prevents them, at least for the moment, from revealing all?

No – the reason being that they are Leninists, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher, their inspiration and icon, was a Leninist. Just like her, in 1979, they believe they know what we want better than we do ourselves right now. And just like her, they have a crusading vision whose details, inasmuch as they’ve been fully worked out, are best kept under wraps until the time is right and we can be made to realise – they hope gratefully rather than grudgingly – that there truly is no alternative.”

We have been seeing rather a lot of this Leninist deceit lately, similar to what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine, or what John Harris describes as "the odorous whiff of the hypocrisies and deceptions that tend to come with privilege". Austerity as a very costly device to shrink the state, for example. And immigration targets which Cameron and Osborne knew would hurt the economy if they were seriously pursued, but made them nevertheless to help attract social conservatives to vote Conservative. Pretending immigration was a problem for the NHS or welfare payments was also a useful way to deflect criticism over the impact of austerity.

I know some people will respond that all politicians deceive, and of course they do in minor ways to sell policies that help ‘their side’. But politicians who deceive at such a high level because they are Leninists at heart are something less common. It is hard to argue that any of the Prime Ministers before Thatcher were so willing to hide their true intent. Occasionally perhaps for certain foreign ventures: Eden, and then Blair. But not Brown or Miliband. The SNP over the cost of Independence, certainly. But austerity, lying about immigration and Brexit still seem an order greater in terms of the extent of the deception: promising X to really get an undisclosed Y.

There may be a reason for why this total deceit is relatively new, and it has to do with how the political process is perceived as part of neoliberalism. If you see politics like a market place, policies have to be sold like products, and politicians are the salesmen as Chris Dillow describes here. [1] So if you can sell a car by creating an image of what that car embodies, so you can sell a policy by pretending it is something else. The fact that you do not have the equivalent of the Advertising Standards Authority for political advertising just makes doing that more attractive.

Just look at the lack of shame in pretending that austerity was all about clearing up the mess Labour made (a claim easily refuted by looking at the data), or that the economy was strong when it was actually very weak in 2015. But that was dwarfed by what was to come with Brexit. Nothing was sacred in doing whatever it took to win that vote. And when it was shown that this included overspending during the campaign, they had no shame in spinning this as a mere allegation by Remainers. Anything goes, including disrespecting our pluralist democracy, just so they get what they want. 

This is all related to what I called neoliberal overreach, and whether it was something we could have easily avoided or something that was bound to happen. For many neoliberal politicians and advocates their ideal economy and society is not achievable through honest campaigning, because it is not what the great majority of people want. In 2016 48% of people wanted higher spending and taxes, while less than 5% wanted lower spending and taxes. Rather than patient persuasion they prefer complete deception, and crucially the ideology can be seen as endorsing that. For this reason, I am happy to add Brexit to austerity and anti-immigration rhetoric as examples of probably inevitable neoliberal overreach.

[1] Chris Dillow suggests that one of the first great neoliberals, Margaret Thatcher, did not share this view. Perhaps her ideas were sufficiently popular - at least for a time - that she didn’t need to pretend they were something else. It would be interesting to know if Tim Bale agrees.