A People’s Vote or a General Election: how does Johnson’s new deal change things

There is a big debate at the moment among those who support a People’s Vote (PV) about whether it should become before or after a General Election (GE). Let’s assume for now there are sufficient MPs willing to vote for the PV before a GE option, and that Johnson prefers a GE which he thinks he can win so there would be no PV. From a Remain point of view, should a GE or PV come first.

I last discussed this when a Johnson deal was dead and there was talk of the Conservatives advocating No Deal in a General Election. I made the point, which those advocating a PV before a GE do not appear to have considered, that if parliament passed a PV before a GE Johnson could boycott that PV. As I was told at the time that I was not living in the real world, let me explain why I think a Johnson boycott would have been almost inevitable.

Consider Johnson’s options if parliament force him to hold a PV before a GE where May’s deal is on the ballot. If he accepts the ballot’s legitimacy, he is in an impossible position. Does he try and campaign for a deal that he himself voted against twice? Farage will certainly describe the ballot as illegitimate, and that would damage Johnson's prospects in the forthcoming GE. If he wins he gets May’s deal, probably a split in the Conservative party and a loss at the GE. If he loses he loses Brexit, which is his main asset in any GE

In contrast, if he says the ballot is illegitimate he protects his Farage front, and can continue to run an election based on parliament versus the people. His excuse for a boycott is obvious: who wants May’s deal? With no one recognisable prepared to argue the case for May’s deal, the ballot begins to look like a farce. Remain might get a vote greater than 17 million, but it is more likely the inevitability of a Remain victory means some Remainers do not bother to vote. I’m afraid those suggesting a boycott wouldn’t happen in those circumstances do not know how Johnson and Cummings work.

You might think that even with a Johnson boycott it is still worth it. If you think it would end Brexit I have bad news. If Johnson wins a GE having boycotted a PV he will say the PV was illegitimate and restart A50. With a majority in parliament Brexit (either very hard or No Deal) becomes a certainty. All the PV would have done is delay the inevitable. 

The critical question then becomes what impact a PV might have on the GE result. Will it reduce Johnson’s vote because some Leavers think the game is up, or will it fire up his Leaver base who feel they have been cheated out of the 2016 result. The latter is what the Brexit press and most Tory and all Farage politicians will tell them. I don't know the answer on whether a PV helps or hinders a Johnson GE defeat, but it seems to me this is the crucial debate for the PV before GE question.  

How does a Johnson deal change this calculation. I think it is reasonable to assume that a final deal will not be done with the EU before the EU summit.[1] The reason is simple. Any deal the EU would be prepared to agree to will leave the DUP and part of the Conservative party unhappy, and will almost certainly mean he will not get that deal through parliament. Johnson also knows that in all likelihood he will have to ask the EU for an extension and that the EU will grant it. It will be better for him to go into a GE arguing that he is on the brink of getting a deal, rather than a deal just having broken down.

It should be now clear that this situation makes a PV before a GE more likely to lead to a Johnson boycott than previously. The PV cannot have his prototype deal on the ballot as it has not been signed off by the EU. Johnson will say, with MSM credible justification, that a PV on any other deal is ridiculous, and that he should be given a chance to get his deal through. Because that logic will seem plausible to most Leavers, a PV before a GE looks increasingly like a desperate attempt to stop Johnson getting his deal. The chances of the PV before a GE increasing Johnson’s prospect in a GE increase significantly.

The fundamental lesson is that a PV has to go with political change. The Tories can boycott a referendum at any time, so a PV will only secure the end of Brexit if that vote is taken by a parliament that will not shortly afterwards start the process up again. That in turn means having a GE in which the Conservatives are defeated by Labour and the Liberal Democrats winning their marginal seats (and keeping their own). It means tactical voting by Remainers in the next General Election. The idea of a LibDem overall majority is a fantasy worthy of Brexiters.

Those who say a Corbyn led government would be worse than No Deal or a very hard Brexit are therefore working against Remain. Those who say Corbyn is not fit to be PM are working against Remain. Those who say Corbyn allowed Brexit to happen are working against Remain. Some of the people saying these things may call themselves Remainers, but tactical voting is the only realistic option for true Remainers.

To those who say to me that they cannot vote for Corbyn because he is a Brexiter, I can only respond in this way. Brexit is effectively impossible under a Labour government, because the Tories and Remainers will vote against it in parliament unless it goes to a PV, and in a PV many Leavers and all Remainers will vote against a soft Brexit. Whatever you think Corbyn’s beliefs are cannot change that. It is why the People’s Vote campaign is promoting tactical voting. Anything other than a tactical vote for Remain in the forthcoming GE is a vote for Brexit.

[1] The idea of attaching a PV to any approval of Johnson's deal when it finally comes to the Commons is very different, and not what I am talking about here. 

How the Brexiters have controlled the narrative around Brexit

“Senior allies of Boris Johnson have warned that Britain will face civil unrest on the scale of the gilets jaunes protests in France or the riots in Los Angeles if Brexit is frustrated.” So reports the Times. A well known far right activist says on TV that he is amazed that there have not been riots yet, and also says there should be. In truth the absence of riots is not amazing at all.

Let us leave aside the implication that when Leavers protest it will be a riot rather than a peaceful protest. If you are talking about people protesting or worse on the streets you are not talking about Vox Pops where people tell an interviewer that they are angry parliament has failed to get on with it. You are not talking about responses to opinion polls. Instead we are talking about evidence that people are prepared to protest on the streets.

We have evidence here. When we failed to leave in March, despite repeated promises we would, you might have expect a very angry reaction. Farage addressed a demonstration in which he called the Houses of Parliament ‘enemy territory’. The demonstration was news because anything Farage does seems to be news and also some right wing thugs got aggressive. But in terms of people, we are talking about a few thousand people. A petition for a No Deal Brexit gained a bit more than 600,000 signatures.

If those numbers seem large, compare it to around 6 million signatures for a petition to revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. Or regular large marches all around the country for a People’s Vote, with the biggest in London involving hundreds of thousands of people, all entirely peaceful. It terms of anger and passion, it seems Remainers outnumber Leavers by between 10 and 100 to 1.

If you think about it, this is hardly surprising. If we are honest Leavers have little or nothing to gain after Brexit, and probably a lot to lose. In contrast Remainers have a great deal to lose. Everyone will lose the right to work in the EU. Brexit takes away a European identity. EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens in the EU, have a great deal to lose.

Will the media ever talk about this asymmetry between gains and losses. Of course most of it won’t, because in truth the number of people who are passionate about delivering Brexit are heavily concentrated in the press, and our media is too dominated by that press. The number of people passionate about Brexit is limited to a few thousand people who have convinced themselves it matters to them, politicians in the ERG and Brexit party, the Brexit press, right wing thugs, and those frightened of no longer being able to avoid tax in the EU.

Despite all the evidence, the idea of riots if we fail to Brexit is firmly implanted in the media. But this is just one aspect of how the Brexiters have dominated the narrative around Brexit. It started of course with the referendum. Cameron no doubt talked about the economics of Brexit during the referendum because he thought the talk of rights would not cut through to those who didn’t feel it. But with two words the Brexiters managed to throw all the expertise involved in Cameron’s warnings into question. The broadcast media obliged by repeating the question ‘isn’t this just Project Fear’ endlessly, and the BBC balanced the expertise of every single academic whose subject was international trade and institution with knowledge of international trade with Patrick Minford.

After the referendum, talking about the emerging impact on the economy of the result to Leave became impossible. The recession predicted by the Treasury did not happen because consumers dipped into their savings, and this forecasting failure became the reason why few talked about the expected depreciation reducing real wages, or the steady divergence between UK GDP and its comparators, and the collapse in investment. If they did try, Leavers would just start talking about the Treasury forecast.

The myth of the need to threaten No Deal as part of the negotiations soon became another piece of the entrenched narrative. I am sure some Brexiters believed it, because they never bothered to understand how the Single Market worked. It was forced upon other Brexiters when the cavalry in the form of the German auto-manufacturers who were going to force the German government into concessions never turned up. But it soon began to have a much more sinister purpose. It was not long before many in the ERG realised the only form of Brexit they would be happy with was No Deal, and from then on their aim was to try and achieve No Deal by default. What better ruse was there for this group than to spread the idea that we could not rule out No Deal for negotiation reasons.

I will end with two narratives at the moment that are the opposite of the truth. The first is that we must leave by October 31st because parliament has already had three years to get Brexit done and has failed. The reality is that the reason a deal has not been done is because of the actions of our current Prime Minister, his predecessor, and those in the ERG who are pushing this narrative. May made getting a deal through parliament difficult by choosing a form of hard Brexit the opposition could not sign up to. However the people who ensured it could not get a majority were the ERG, whose aim was No Deal. The current Prime Minister voted against May’s deal twice. Parliament has failed to agree a deal because the ERG do not want a deal.

It is therefore ludicrous that the people who prevented May getting a deal should pretend they represent the frustrated public against a prevaricating parliament, when they themselves did the prevaricating. Yet this nonsense is repeated time and again and is largely unchallenged. Also ludicrous is the idea that a No Deal Brexit fulfills the wishes of the 52% who voted in the referendum, when those campaigning to leave in the referendum said a deal was certain to be done. Only the Brexiters can get away with using the warnings of the side that lost as proof voters in 2016 knew that No Deal was a possibility, a possibility Brexiters called Project Fear at the time.

The second incredible narrative is that we need to end Brexit with a clean break, and then we can get back to doing other things. A clean break Brexit inevitably leads to 10 years at least of negotiation with the EU, negotiations in which the UK side will eventually be forced to accept the terms the ERG now despise. The longer our government holds out in those negotiations the longer it takes. In reality the so called clean break Brexit is a promise to continue Brexit negotiations but from an even weaker position.

Why have the Brexiters dominated the Brexit narrative over the last three years? One reason I have talked about before is while Remainers tend to focus on facts, most Brexiters are largely uninterested in the details of Brexit and instead concern themselves with generating spin. But the more fundamental reason is that most of the press (by readership) are deeply involved in pushing the Brexit project, and the BBC is too timid to question the narrative pushed by the Brexiters. .