A year and a half after the vote to leave, and the government has still not decided on what form of Brexit it wants. This is despite triggering Article 50, which means we will leave in about a year. If this isn't chaos in government, what is? But why is the UK government making such a mess of Brexit?
That is the question
addressed by Tony Yates in a New Statesman article.
He makes the case that all the problems we are seeing, and in
particular the fact that the government have still not yet agreed
what they want, come back to the referendum question. Because it did
not specify how we would leave, it allowed quite conflicting visions
of Brexit to unite. And it is not just a matter of working out which
of those visions wins, because the losers may well decide they would
rather stay than leave on those terms. Hence the inability, but also
the reluctance, of May to spell out exactly what our Brexit plan is.
I think there is a
lot of truth in that, but it is far from the full story. It might
have been possible to have got all those advocating Leave to sign up
to a single vision before the referendum. It might not have won, but
it could have come close to winning. But that vision would have been
based on fantasy: fantasy about the economic consequences of any
particular path, and a fantasy about how the EU would respond.
Brexiters are not
details people. They deal in visions, as Johnson’s recent speech
showed. But worse still, they are so attached to their vision that
they will not let details (like everyone being 8% poorer as a result) get in the way. A less kind way of saying this is that Brexiters are
fantasists or ideologues.
Am I being unfair?
Just look at what is now happening in relation to the Good Friday
Agreement (GFA). The GFA is now in the way of the Brexit vision, so they
are all saying the GFA has passed its usefulness. Anyone sane can see
such a statement is completely mad and utterly irresponsible. However
it also shows us something else. It was clear the moment the
government signed up to the first stage agreement that the Irish
border issue would to a considerable extent dictate the terms of any
final agreement. It has taken the Brexiters this long before they
realised this, and started attacking the GFA. They are not details
people.
You might think that
people who would allow their vision or ideology to become more
important than details like a 8% GDP loss or peace in Northern
Ireland shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power, and
you would be right. One of the side effects of Brexit is that because
May feels she has to have some sort of balance between Leavers and
Remainers in her cabinet, we have an even more incompetent
Conservative administration than usual. Yet more chaos.
Unfortunately, that
incompetence is shared by May herself. The number of mistakes she has
made is endless. The moment she was elected leader she should have
realised that she had to exclude the fantasists from government as
much as possible, but instead she gave them key government posts. She
drew up red lines that were impossible to negotiate. She invoked Article 50,
which instantly put the UK at a tactical disadvantage, without any
agreed plan of how to undertake the negotiations. She made all these
mistakes because she was afraid that the Brexiters would try and
depose her and the press would turn on her the moment she started being realistic. But the point at which she was elected she had the most power (over both Brexiters and the press) she would ever
have, and she didn’t use it. That is incompetence.
What this all means
is everyone is right. Tony is right: the referendum was too vague and
put the government in a difficult position. But no government
knowingly cuts UK GDP by percentage points unless it is convinced
there is some greater danger, and the EU is hardly a danger right
now. So even if the referendum had been more precise it would have
been a precise fantasy, either about the economic consequences or
what the EU would allow. As a result, Brexit was always, and remains,
an impossible project for any sane government. But even saying all
this, the government has still managed to try doing the impossible in
an extremely incompetent way.
These different reasons for chaos are all related, and all stem from the disastrous referendum vote. May is Prime Minister because of that vote. Fantasists are at the heart of government because of the vote. And if anyone is tempted, for other reasons, to get on a high horse to talk about press freedom right now, remember the main reason that disastrous vote went the way it did. Social conservatives and the left behind were sold snakeoil, and the main salesmen were the press barons of the right wing press.
