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.

Parliament has to start directing the Brexit negotiations

The moment it became clear that the EU would give full backing to Ireland’s wish for no hard border, and on the assumption that the UK side would not allow a sea border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, it was clear what the range of possible deals between the UK and EU would be. The maximum possible change that would prevent the need for a hard border is that the UK stay in the Customs Union (CU) and Single Market (SM) for goods, while not accepting Freedom of Movement (FoM): the Jersey option. The minimum possible change is that the ‘transition’ became the final deal, with the UK staying in the CU and complete SM including FoM: the BINO (Brexit in name only) option. The final deal between the EU and UK has to lie somewhere between this minimum and maximum.

It is also where any final deal should have been anyway, given how close the referendum was. All the evidence we have suggests that those who voted Leave do not want a deal that will make them significantly poorer, which means that the final deal should be one that does the UK little economic harm. The negotiations should have focused from the start on what limits to FoM were possible at what cost in terms of (partial) membership of the SM. These negotiations should have taken place informally before Article 50 was invoked to give the UK some bargaining power.

Instead Theresa May allowed the whole process to be hijacked by the Brexiters, who treated the referendum like an election win with no manifesto. They believed they owned the referendum victory, and so acted as if they had the right to decide what Brexit means. As a result, we have wasted time talking about impossible deals, rather than negotiate within the space that a deal can be done. It is in fact worse than that. May and the Brexiters, by refusing to let go of their fantasies (about a technological solution to the border problem or about the EU caving into their wishes to be part of the club without signing up to the rules) have split the negotiations into two parts: the preferred deal and the backstop.

As has now become clear, the idea of a backstop is predicated on there being a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The EU should never had allowed this device because they should have understood that such a border would be politically impossible. Instead they took far too seriously May’s red lines, which they interpreted as the UK wanting a FTA which would in turn require a border in the Irish Sea to avoid a hard land border. They made the mistake of thinking that because this was obvious to any objective observer the UK side acknowledged this fact. May encouraged this belief by appearing to agree in December to a sea border, only to be pulled up at the last minute by the DUP. In short, the EU made the mistake of thinking it was negotiating with a rational counterpart, rather than one that was at war with itself.

This is the context of the parliamentary votes on the Lord’s amendments on 12/13th June. Parliament is, in effect, trying to manage the negotiating process because those conducting the negotiations so far are getting nowhere. Some of these amendments attempt to direct the government towards negotiating in the relevant range (the CU amendment proposed by Lord Kerr), and to give them the space in which to do so (by removing the date of exit which was inserted into the bill by May as a way of appeasing her Brexiter colleagues or Paul Dacre). I suspect May would privately welcome both amendments if she has any understanding of what is going on.

The EEA amendment appears to suggest a specific point in the range of possible deals, which is why the Labour leadership and some of their MPs dislike it. I think their attitude is a mistake. The way to think about the EEA amendment, which is only expressed as a negotiating aim, is to steer the government towards the possible range of final deals, which has to include staying in the Single Market for goods. If this is not passed we will just waste more time as May fiddles around trying to inch closer to the possible range without the Brexiters throwing their toys out of the pram. [1]

There is also a purely short term political reason for the opposition supporting the EEA amendment. As I noted above, May will probably find it a relief to be directed to stay in the CU. She is already at the stage of realising that the UK staying in the CU is essential for a deal. The Brexiters will huff and puff, and Fox may even resign, but their anger will be directed at parliament more than May. The EEA amendment in contrast is likely to cause far greater discomfort in government: it is difficult to see how any Brexiter cabinet ministers will suffer this. So in terms of damage to the government, EEA inflicts much more than the CU.

May will also not welcome what is perhaps the most important amendment, proposed by Hailsham, which gives parliament the ability to direct the Prime Minister if the negotiations fail or the deal is voted down by parliament. However she has only herself to blame if this is passed, in particular for threatening no deal if parliament rejected her deal. By allowing the Brexiters to hijack the negotiations process, it is not surprising that parliament should decide that they need to start calling the shots. As Labour seem quite likely to reject a deal if she manages to achieve one, this amendment is crucial to minimise the subsequent chaos. The amendment is not quite parliament taking back control of the negotiation, but it does mean that May will have to start taking directions from parliament rather than the Brexiters. That has to be good for democracy in the UK.

[1] Nor should the EEA be seen as something that is inflexible. It already contains a brake on immigration, where countries can take "appropriate measures" if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectoral or regional nature arise and are liable to persist. There are lots of other issues that would have to be addressed if the UK signed up to the EEA outside the EU, which means there will be the opportunity to negotiate around issues to do with immigration or state aid.

Postscript (13/06/18) The government did not lose a single vote yesterday, and it will be surprising if they do today. Rebel Conservative MPs did get some concessions which will hopefully allow them to have some influence over a situation where MPs vote against the final deal or there is no deal, and the rebel numbers were increased by the resignation of Justice minister Phillip Lee. But they completely failed to start directing how May conducts the negotiating process, which leaves the Brexiters as a constant drag on May's efforts to start negotiating something that the EU might accept.

At the end of the day, Conservative MPs have put party before country. Brexiters have hijacked the negotiation process, and Conservative MPs are content to let that continue, even though time for a deal is running out. The bill they voted on yesterday and today involves a substantial transfer of powers from parliament to the executive, and Conservative MPs do nothing about it. A rabid right wing press encourages far right nutters to murder one MP, attempt to murder another, with one Conservative rebel requiring armed guards because of threats, and the same Conservative MPs do nothing about it because that press helps their party. Just as in the United States, nowadays a pluralistic democracy is unsafe when the main right wing party is in power. Based on this record, I cannot see Conservative MPs voting against any final Brexit deal, which in turn means the chances of a second referendum - always slim - have all but vanished.  

Why Brexit means more than Brexit

Some people think I go on about Brexit too much. That is easy to explain. The costs of a no deal Brexit almost certainly exceed the cost of UK austerity for the average UK citizen, and I went on about austerity a great deal because its costs exceeded those of anything else in macroeconomics.

But for me there is something else about Brexit that I find deeply worrying. It is that so many people could be persuaded to believe in a fantasy, from the ordinary voter to ministers of state. The number of people who will actually benefit from Brexit are extremely small indeed, yet they had the power and influence to persuade half a nation to leave the EU. That is both extraordinary, and something that should be of great concern to any democrat.

Understanding which groups were susceptible to this fantasy is important, but it is only part of any answer. As I have said before, we can show why groups become alienated from the social, economic and political system, but that does not explain why they start believing the snake oil salesmen, particularly when we know the snake oil will do them much harm. Perhaps alienation is necessary to start believing in harmful fantasies, but it is surely not sufficient.

The fantasy was that Brexit would do the UK no economic harm. I’ve talked at length about why this was central to victory. Why most Leave voters were not willing to pay to reduce immigration because they thought reducing immigration would make them better off by improving access to public services. Why in reality the opposite is true. Will Jennings from Southampton University produced this nice chart which shows just how different the economic perceptions of Leave and Remain voters became.

The fantasy was so powerful that it encompassed the perpetrators as well. David Davis, the secretary of state for leaving the EU, has said we can do a deal with the EU that would give us the exact same benefits as membership of the Single Market and customs union. He would not have given that pledge if he did not believe it. But anyone based in reality knows that when the EU say any deal must be costly for the UK, they are stating an inevitable truth. This is not punishment but survival: leaving has to involve a cost for the sake of preserving the remaining EU. This is why the leaked accounts of the May-Juncker supper worry so many. The fantasy that Brexiteers concocted to win the referendum has also taken hold of our political leaders.

For ordinary voters, I can trace how the fantasy was created, and why it was believed. A key part of that analysis involves shielding voters from the experts (not just some experts, but pretty well any experts) who could have easily brought voters down to Earth. But a year after the vote, reality is beginning to win through. Leavers are beginning to see the costs of Brexit in the high street, and a clear majority now say they want to stay in the Single Market even though that means accepting free movement (here, p7). Yet our political leaders, who really should have been told what experts know, remain deluded about key aspects of the leaving process.

This is why Brexit means more than Brexit. It is an example of how half a nation, included its leaders, can be persuaded to embark on a process that we know will do them great harm. I cannot think of anything like it during my lifetime, and I find that both interesting and appalling. It seems to me to be imperative to understand how this could happen so it does not continue to happen.