Johnson suspends parliament to force a crash out Brexit

On Brexit at least (and who knows what may be next) UK democracy has been suspended. Yesterday the Prime Minister drastically reduced the number of days parliament will sit until we automatically crash out of the EU. On the critical issue of Brexit, the Prime Minister has become an unelected dictator. He intends to use his dictatorial power to restrict the supply of medicines and food to the British people.

The device he has used is a quaint part of the UK constitution where the Queen decides when parliament sits or does not sit. Nowadays the Queen has no power so she takes advice from the executive. The Prime Minister instructed his lackeys to ask the Queen to prorogue (the technical name for suspend) parliament for 5 weeks and the queen approved. It is as if the President could shut down Congress whenever he liked, and in particular whenever they were about to do something he disliked.

It was cleverly done, in that it allowed parliament to sit for effectively four days in early September and probably about a week just before we crash out of the EU, so the PM could claim parliament still had “plenty of time” to discuss Brexit. Johnson, like Trump, is a serial liar. As the former head of the civil service Lord Kerslake said, to believe this is anything other than an attempt to critically curtail the chances that parliament can stop us crashing out is an insult to the intelligence.

Johnson knows that only the most foolish will believe the 'plenty of time' lie. But Johnson's big idea that he wants wavering Tory MPs to believe is that the EU will only change the backstop if they truly believe the UK will crash out. This is one more Leave misjudgment about the EU, in a long list of them. The EU do not want the UK to crash out, but they are not going to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland to avoid it. Any UK government not made up of anti-EU fanatics would want to avoid that to.

Like so much in the UK’s unwritten constitution, the Queens right to decide when parliament sits is a hangover from our history that has been allowed to remain because it was understood that the Queen would follow the advice of the Prime Minister (the last monarch that didn’t had his head cut off) and the Prime Minister would respect the will of the parliament. In the UK parliament is sovereign, but only because there were unwritten norms that assumed no government would be undemocratic enough to disobey.

Article 50, the process by which the UK is negotiating to leave, also makes an assumption that governments reflect the interests of its citizens. It says that after two years, unless the EU extends that deadline, the leaving country crashes out with no trade deal, and indeed no deal on anything else. It was assumed that no rational government would ever want to crash out and so this deadline was a great incentive to agree to a deal of the EU’s liking. The UK now has a government that relishes the opportunity to leave without a deal, which the government’s own advice suggests will lead to shortages of food, fuel and medicines.

Does this affront to democracy matter if it is restricted to the issue of Brexit, where a referendum voted to leave? It matters because in that referendum the Leave side only talked about leaving with a deal. That is the mandate that this advisory referendum provided - to leave with a deal. So leaving with no deal does not even respect the referendum.result.

Here are some comments by MPs about the idea of a Prime Minister proroguing (i.e. suspending) parliament to get their way on Brexit.

“I think it would be a terrible thing that having said we should have more power in this country and trust our institutions more ... and shut the door on parliament”

“[Proroguing parliament] goes against everything that those men who waded onto those beaches, fought and died for and I will not have it.”

“It is a ridiculous suggestion”

“Delivery on democracy while trashing democracy. We are not selecting a dictator.”

Not any old MPs, but now ministers in the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Yet none has expressed any regret at it actually happening, now that they have some power. How far the Conservative party has fallen.

Let’s think about what this actually means if we crash out of the EU. A measure that will have profound implications for most UK residents will come into effect without approval from the House of Commons and with hardly any scrutiny. The official document that sets out the likely impact on food and fuel supplies, medicines and much else remains secret, and no House of Commons committee has had a chance to examine claims that the government has somehow avoided the shortages this document predicts.

You may say that parliament overwhelmingly gave the approval for the government to start the Article 50 process, but on this occasion - and time and again subsequently - MPs have not anticipated how fanatical those advocating No Deal are. They will certainly not have anticipated a No Dealer becoming Prime Minister and suspending parliament to crash out via Article 50. If you had said that more than two years ago you would have been laughed at. UK democracy has fallen a long way in two years.

For those tempted to say this is just one issue and just five weeks (the total length of parliament’s suspension), I would say two things. First, this is hardly a minor issue, but one of the biggest issues that the UK has had to deal with in decades. On this vital issue, Johnson is trying to force an outcome that most people do not want. Second, pluralist democracy normally does not end with a bang but in stages of plurality. No doubt when the Hungarian government in 2011 abolished its fiscal council plenty of Hungarians thought little of it. That has been followed by the end of judicial independence and and independent media. It is clear this government also has little respect for parliamentary democracy.

Will the majority of MPs in the little time they have left do enough to stop us crashing out of the EU? I honestly do not know, but I am pessimistic because only Johnson can extend Article 50 and I now think it is quite likely he will try to frustrate parliament in other ways and that he will ignore parliament if it did succeed. A vote of no confidence may be the only option MPs have. Will Johnson’s suspension of parliamentary democracy unite enough MPs to do this? Again I have no idea, but I can say this.

If Jeremy Corbyn in government did anything similar to this in order to get one of his policies through, I would argue he was no longer fit for office. But perhaps putting power above principle, as the MPs whose quotes I show above clearly do, is today a characteristic of almost the entire right of UK politics? The principle at stake right now is parliamentary democracy itself.

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Are the Labour leadership attitudes to Brexit just the austerity story all over again?

with a short coda on yesterday's events

Labour party voters overwhelmingly want Labour to come out in support of remaining in the EU, because it is the right thing to do. But apparently allies of Corbyn say that private polling and focus groups conducted by the party suggest that doing so risks preventing Labour from winning the next general election. Does this debate ring any bells? It certainly does for me. The debate over austerity took exactly this form within Labour from 2010 to 2015.

Austerity, like Brexit, was clearly a bad policy in the sense of making pretty well everyone worse off. But austerity, like Brexit, was popular among many voters, because they believed what they were told about its desirability. Just as the EU was about to open the floodgates of Turkish immigration to the UK, so austerity was required to prevent the bond vigilantes causing financial havok.

Labour began 2009 by ignoring the deficit and embracing an expansionary fiscal policy to end the recession. But later, while still in government, they began to talk about the need to support the recovery and reduce the deficit. In opposition this became a message of moderation: Osborne’s cuts were too far too fast. Before the 2015 election they were pledging to be “tough on the deficit”, even though their actual policy involved substantially less austerity than Osborne’s plans. After that election defeat some senior Labour figures suggested Osborne’s fiscal policy had merits.

This gradual change in message had very little to do with a changing view about the economics. [1] Instead it seems pretty clear it was about one thing only: austerity was popular. In good part this was because the media overwhelmingly adopted the austerity narrative, and so Labour found it almost impossible to argue for an alternative (standard macroeconomic) narrative. In the end some Labour politicians decided that if you couldn’t beat them you had to join them. This helped lead to Corbyn’s victory.

Labour’s policy on austerity during the 2015 election was a classic example of triangulation. Talk the talk on austerity but through detailed policy signal to your base that there would be much less austerity under Labour. Under the leadership of Corbyn, Labour’s policy on Brexit has followed a similar triangulation path. Indeed the parallels are even closer. If we equate the referendum with the 2010 election, before both we had some compromise towards austerity/Brexit (with Brexit Corbyn campaigning separately and did not endorse Remain’s economic case), and after both Labour triangulated, conceded the austerity/Brexit case but promising to reduce the economic cost.

The lesson from austerity is that Labour made two clear mistakes. The first, before 2010, was to muddle the message by arguing to both encourage the recovery and reduce the deficit at the same time. Will history view the leaderships acceptance of the 2016 result, and its consequent failure to point out the contradictions within Brexit, in the same light, or will they see it as essential to avoiding a 2017 general election that was all about Brexit? [2] The second mistake was to triangulate for too long, and miss the point where voters began to turn against austerity. With the gap in favour of Remain in the polls widening, have we already passed that point [3]?

Brexit, like austerity, is based on a huge lie. It reduces any politician who is persuaded that to keep votes, they too have to peddle the lie. It is pathetic watching senior Labour figures pretend that they, rather than the other side, can produce a Brexit unicorn: leaving the EU and increasing sovereignty without any economic cost. If you argue that these politicians have to demean themselves in this way to avoid losing votes, then you have also to accept that Labour before 2015 were right to accept some degree of austerity.

But whatever the rights and wrongs of this argument, we have now reached a critical point with Brexit. A clear majority of the country no longer believe in the Brexit unicorn. Labour’s membership overwhelmingly do not. Until now the decisions over Brexit have been made elsewhere, so Labour could just about get away with triangulation. But very soon Labour will have to make up its mind. [4] Is the Labour party of Corbyn and McDonnell strong enough to survive betraying its supporters over by far the biggest issue of the day? The parallel with austerity suggests not.

Update

I wrote this before May decided to delay (cancel?) what is now laughably called the meaningful vote, but also before the confirmation that the UK could revoke A50 unilaterally. One of the many unfortunate consequences of her actions is that Labour will continue to delay the day they finally accept they have to campaign to end Brexit. Waiting for the right moment to table a no confidence motion may be like waiting for Godot (just before May finally allows a vote in late March, anyone?). This in turn will make that eventual move to supporting a peoples vote look even more opportunistic.

But Labour’s dithering over Brexit is the least of our current problems. On the 26th November 2016 I wrote a post called “A Little English coup”. I argued that Brexit represented a coup against our pluralistic parliamentary democracy. I was attacked for using emotive language, and I wondered whether I had let emotion get the better of me. But consider what just happened. Parliament was on the point of overwhelmingly rejecting May’s deal, which could have led to a process whereby parliament debated over the best way forward. That is what should happen in a parliamentary democracy. Instead, May intends to waste time so she can present the same choice when there is no time for such a debate, all the while saying with a straight face that a second referendum would damage UK democracy. It is uncertain whether she needs to come back to the house on 21st January. Maybe not quite a coup, but a serious attack on parliamentary democracy nonetheless.

[1] A caveat might be that in office the Treasury had been able to persuade Darling about the need to quickly cut back on the deficit more than they might have been able to persuade Brown or Balls.

[2] While the 2017 election argument is compelling, a counter argument is that with a Labour leadership firmly committed to arguing the case for staying in the EU, Labour’s popularity would have been higher and there would therefore have been no 2017 election.

[3] A comparison many people make is with the Iraq war: popular at the time but when it all went wrong everyone decided they had been against it from the start. There is another structural similarity: with both cases we have had large popular movements against a policy that is backed by both major parties. Will the Labour party leadership be on the wrong side of both these popular movements?

[4] Labour’s policy of aiming to get a general election and if they won to then negotiate their own version of Brexit would be disastrous in practice. They would in all probability agree something pretty close to BINO. That would be a disaster for Labour. Any thoughts that at least the minority of Labour Leaver voters who are left would be grateful will be short lived. The Tories would become united in their opposition to the deal. Together with the right wing press they would attack Labour for reducing UK sovereignty with no gain. Many Labour Leavers would be able to see the evident truth in that claim. Fairly soon Labour Leavers would be condemning Labour for having given away UK sovereignty. This is the curse of Brexit - it destroys anyone who tries to implement it because all forms of Brexit are worse than staying in the EU, and are certainly worse than the fantasy promises that were made in 2016. Implementing Brexit, in short, is a vote loser.

The Single Market was Mrs Thatcher’s great achievement for the UK

Parliament should be able to vote on whether leaving the EU means destroying this legacy.

The story of how Mrs Thatcher helped in the creation of the Single Market is told by Helene Von Bismarck here. She believed it would be of great benefit to the UK, and she was right. Here is a nice chart from this CBR report I discussed in my last post.

It shows the share of UK exports as a percentage of the GDP of the area exported to, for both the EU and the rest of the world. The rapid increase in the UK export share, doubling between 1990 and the beginning of the financial crisis, has to be largely down to the Single Market. [1]

But didn’t the CBR report say that the benefits of the Single Market had been exaggerated by the Treasury? Yes it did. Here is some of its reasoning. That growth in UK export share after the Single Market is not as impressive as it looks, because there is an underlying 6% 3.5% ** positive trend in the share relative to non-EU penetration, which you can detect before we joined the EU. That looks pretty on a picture, until you realise it is nonsense. A 6% 3.5% trend rise in an export share will imply that at some point not too far away UK exports to the EU will be as high as total EU GDP. UK exporters are just not that much better than exporters in other countries. There is no underlying trend rise in the UK’s export share.

As I say in The Independent, the rationale for going down the route of leaving the Single Market is completely wrongheaded. First, the Brexit vote was close - hardly a ringing endorsement for undoing Thatcher’s legacy. Second, all the evidence we have is that large numbers of Leave voters are not prepared to accept a reduction in their living standards as a price for reducing immigration, a reduction which is in the process of happening right now as a result of the collapse in Sterling. If you say we have no real evidence for this, show me your evidence that the referendum vote was a vote to leave the Single Market. If May really believes it when she says that the recent strength of the economy has convinced her that the costs of Brexit will not be that great, she is a fool. Third, the logic of saying that we cannot accept Single Market rules because we would have no say in what they are makes no sense because we will be worse off not accepting them. Once again, a majority of the country does not want to ‘take back control’ if it costs them money.

I say in The Independent that this is happening because May wants to finally show that she can bring down immigration, after 6 years trying and failing. It is also because she thinks she has to do this to keep her party together. But what Brexit means should not be up to the Prime Minister, particularly one who cannot be objective about immigration and who is a hostage to the Eurosceptic half of her party. The Single Market decision should be up to parliament. Leaving the Single Market was not on the referendum ballot paper, so it is not the ‘will of the people’. It does not follow automatically from the Leave decision, as many Leave campaigners correctly assured us before the vote.

Parliament should decide on whether we leave the Single Market as part of leaving the EU, not Theresa May. That is what living in a parliamentary democracy is all about. If the government denies MPs the chance to vote for leaving the EU but against leaving the Single Market, then that is effectively a coup against our democracy. MPs should block approval of invoking Article 50 until they get the opportunity to vote, in a way that is binding on the Prime Minister, to stay in the Single Market.

** I made a mistake in the original version of this post: corrected figures and clarifying text are in italics. For more details see this post

[1] The chart also casts doubt on the argument that being in the EU has held back UK exports to the rest of the world. This share was falling before we entered the EU, but has stabilised while we were a member.  

A little English coup

In August 1991, hardline elements in the army and KGB staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, shortly after Gorbachev had agreed to reorganise the USSR as a new confederation. To many this seemed like an end to the reforms that Gorbachev had brought, as the coup leaders appeared to have the support of the whole military. Yeltsin was defiant in Moscow, but those who remembered the Prague Spring probably thought the tanks would win out. Then the coup’s nominal leader, Gennady Yanayev, gave a press conference in which he looked nervous with his hands shaking, and it became clear that the coup leaders were meeting serious resistance. It collapsed shortly afterward.

I remembered this when watching the proponents of hard Brexit shout down any concern about what the government might agree following the EU referendum, and attack anyone who pointed out the difficulties that leaving the single market might bring. They too have carried out a sort of coup against parliamentary democracy, and maybe declaring judges enemies of the people is the equivalent of Yanayev’s shaking hand. They cannot quite believe what they have done, and fear it may all collapse when people realise what is going on. Our Prime Minister has had to draw on her faith in God to enable her to continue leading this coup.

If you think coup is too strong a word, think about what has happened. An advisory referendum decided by a very narrow majority to leave the EU. That is all this slim majority of the electorate decided. They did not vote to leave the single market (SM), partly because most leaders of the Leave campaign told us (correctly) that leaving the EU was quite compatible with staying in the SM. They did not vote to end freedom of movement. Leaving the EU is not one policy, but a whole range of possible policies with quite different effects, and the electorate have said nothing about their preferences among these possibilities. In short, the referendum was about the EU and not the SM, and whatever they say now we know that you can be in the SM without being part of the EU.

Yet a new government, with no mandate from the voters, has decided that only it should be allowed to interpret what leaving the EU should amount to, and the electorate through their representatives in parliament should have no say in the matter. The people, having indicated a change in direction, are to be allowed no say whatsoever in where exactly they are to be led. The differences between these alternative paths out of the EU are immense, and this choice on how exactly to leave the EU will have a huge impact on every citizen. Yet the people and their representatives are not even to be allowed to know what options the government are aiming for. (The OBR was even denied knowledge of how the government intending fulfilling its guarantees to Nissan.) The pretext for this coup, involving keeping their negotiating hand secret, is as thin as the Soviet coup’s claims that Gorbachev was unwell.

Any attempt at parliamentary control over what might happen is described as trying to stop Brexit. Why not seek to stay in the SM? Just asking that question means to the coup leaders that you are trying to stop Brexit (of course it does not). Why not see what might be on offer before starting the clock on being thrown out with nothing? That is just a delaying tactic, they say. Why not have a second referendum on the final deal? Finding out what the electorate thinks once that the exit deal is clear would be against the will of the people, they chime without irony. When you are told that consulting the people or their representatives is against the will of the people, you know there has been a kind of coup.

But I fear that in this case the coup leaders’ nervousness is unwarranted. Three judges have thrown MPs a lifeline, a chance to stop this coup, and MPs look like throwing it right back. Those Conservative MPs who know what damage this will do have decided they can do nothing to stop the Conservative party being taken over by fanatics. The Labour party appears pathetic: its leadership wanting exit from the SM for their own reasons (talking shamelessly about ‘access’ in the hope of muddying the water) and the PLP is more concerned about losing votes than improving their electorate’s welfare (it is the story of austerity all over again). They had a chance of coming together to lead the opposition to this coup and they have blown it. Instead of Boris Yeltsin, we have Tom Watson, who joins in the mantra that opposing triggering Article 50 is going against the will of the people.

And instead of courageous citizens of Moscow we have Labour party members saying it is best to bide time and work within for change. This timidity is obnoxious to see: they should instead be demanding their MPs take back control. It is their prosperity that will be diminished by this coup, their right to work in the EU taken away. It seems to me that approving Article 50 is the last chance for representative democracy to have its say. Once that vote is in the bag, the government can do what it likes and nothing can be certain to stop them. (A vote on any final deal is no choice, because the consequences of saying no will be far worse.)

So MPs are acting like turkeys voting for Christmas. They know that in all likelihood voting to trigger Article 50 will throw away their chance to stop the government ending our membership of the SM, thereby reducing their constituents access to public services and the chance to keep young people’s right to work in the EU. They will be handing all the levers of power to a government that seems to be run by a minority of fanatics. Is this what a once proud country has allowed itself to become? Is this what a parliament that once stood up to kings has been reduced to?