Should a second referendum happen before the General Election and what should accompany Remain on the ballot?

Some have suggested that an interim abC Prime Minister (abC = anyone but Corbyn), appointed by parliament after dismissing Johnson in a vote of no confidence, should hold a second referendum before a General Election. If the idea of this is to end the Brexit issue before an election, I think it is misguided for one simple reason. Johnson is likely to boycott the referendum.

The reason is straightforward. Brexit is the issue that could win him the General Election. If the polls are correct and he captures most of the Brexit vote, but the Remain vote is split between Labour and the LibDems, then he gets to form a government with an overall majority for the next five years. I know there are reasons why that might fail, but it is the centre of his strategy. The alternative where he gambles on winning a referendum looks worse odds for him.

The best this strategy could achieve from a Remain point of view is a victory and revoking Article 50. But Johnson would then talk about how the winners of the 2016 referendum have been cheated by an unelected PM and an illegitimate second referendum, which would ensure this claim became the major issue in the subsequent General Election. It would help Johnson win, and he would promptly start Article 50 all over again. All that would have been gained is a delay in what was now an inevitable Brexit.

For this reason the strategy of a referendum before a General Election looks flawed. Of course if Johnson gets an overall majority in a General Election there will be no referendum. So there appear to be two possibilities in which a second referendum could happen. The first is a Labour government (perhaps with the support of the SNP). Here we know what will happen: Labour will negotiate its own deal and hold a referendum where that is the Leave option, and Remain is the alternative. As the referendum would be boycotted by Farage and the Conservatives, Remain would win. 

The second is a minority government where the smaller parties hold the balance of power. This in itself does not guarantee a second referendum, because pretty well all Conservative MPs would vote against it, as might the DUP and some Labour rebels. But if there is a majority of MPs in favour of a referendum, what is the alternative to Remain that they should choose?

Once again a key question is whether the Conservatives would participate. If the Leave alternative was May’s Deal the answer would almost certainly be no. So some may be tempted to choose No Deal as the alternative in order to get the Conservatives to participate. It would be argued that only a second referendum where No Deal was an option would have legitimacy.

We need to unpack what is meant by legitimacy here. The justification for the second referendum is that it is a natural consequence of the first. The first referendum did not specify the form of leaving, and because the result was close it is far from clear that there is any majority for a particular way of leaving the EU. This is what parliament has found: although both parties were prepared to leave, the deals they had in mind were very different, and neither was prepared to accept the others.

This is the answer to the perennial point made by leavers: if not two why not a third? If the second is designed to check there is a majority for a specific form of leaving, chosen by parliament following the first referendum as the best form of leaving, then a third makes no sense. The second referendum is not a rerun of the first, but a consequence of the first.

If we see a second referendum in this light, then it seems clear that the form of leaving that should be on the ballot is some form of deal with the EU. The case for Leaving put forward in the first referendum was all about the deal which the UK would obtain. Leavers never suggested that the UK might not be able to obtain a deal. If the Remain side occasionally did so that is irrelevant, because those suggestions were dismissed by the Leave side as Project Fear and Leave won. So the only mandate the 2016 referendum gives is to Leave with some form of deal, and therefore a Remain/No Deal option would not be a legitimate consequence of the first referendum..

I think this is not the legitimacy that people who suggest No Deal should be on the ballot have in mind. What they mean is that Farage and Johnson would agree to participate and respect the result if No Deal was on the ballot. Here I think people are making the same mistake as Cameron made in offering the first referendum. Cameron’s dream that his 2016 referendum, if won by Remain, would end calls to Leave for a generation were never going to come true, as some Leavers made clear before the result.

The period from 2016 until now has shown us that the No Deal virus has infected not just the Brexit party but also Conservative party members and therefore the Conservative party itself. Because of the influence that Farage and the Brexit press have on voters and Conservative party members, Brexit is not going to be put in a box any time soon.

So would Johnson agree to participate in a No Deal vs Remain referendum? He would have the perfect excuse not to. He has always argued that he could get a good deal out of the EU if only the threat of No Deal was real. It is nonsense, but he gets away with it. So he would say that the only way to achieve a good Brexit deal is to elect a Conservative government with an overall majority prepared to implement No Deal so he can get that good deal. Minority governments are unstable and so his chances that would happen still exist, if only voters would give him an overall majority.

Agreeing to a second referendum would also weaken one of the Brexiters strongest rhetorical cards: 2016 gave the government an instruction to leave which it promised to fulfill. Once Johnson agrees to participate in a second referendum he legitimises it, and so that rhetorical card is one he cannot use again. Another factor is that if Johnson did say yes to a second referendum, Farage would say any second referendum is illegitimate, allowing him to sweep up Brexit votes from the Conservatives if Remain wins the second referendum.

So I suspect we reach the following position: Johnson will only participate in a No Deal/Remain referendum if he is pretty sure he can win. Which is an excellent reason not to hold such a referendum. Again we need to remember a fundamental lesson. Choosing referendums that appease opponents can come back to haunt you later.

I therefore think it is wise that any second referendum should either involve a new deal negotiated by Labour, or May’s deal. But it is almost certain this referendum would be boycotted by the Conservatives and Farage, so the referendum is not going to make Brexit disappear for a generation. It might end the Article 50 process, but that process could be started up again by a Conservative government with an overall majority at any time, using the 2016 referendum as a mandate. Brexit is now in the DNA of the Conservative party, and no referendum will make them give up.

If you are a Remainer, this has profound implications for UK politics over the next decade. A second referendum wins the crucial battle to end the current A50 process, but it does not end the war. If the Conservative party were to ever win an overall majority, the whole process would begin again. I have suggested before that the only thing that will be sure to end Brexit for good is demographic change and a long period of Conservative opposition until their final realisation that Brexit and power cannot go together.

Why the UK cannot see that Brexit is utterly, utterly stupid

If you talk to almost anyone overseas, except those at the right wing extreme (like Trump) or part of a tiny minority of the left, their reaction to Brexit is similar to the former Prime Minister of Finland. What the UK is doing is utterly, utterly stupid. An act of self harm with no point, no upside. Now sometimes outside opinion is based on incomplete or biased information and should be discounted, but on Brexit it is spot on. So why are so many people in the UK unable to see what outsiders can see quite clearly.

The days when Leavers were talking about the sunlit uplands are over. Liam Fox has not even managed to replicate the scores of trade deals the UK will lose when we leave the EU. As to independence, Leavers just cannot name any laws that the EU imposed on the UK they do not like. Since the referendum even public attitudes to immigration have become much more favourable.

Instead there has emerged one justification for reducing real wages, for allowing our economy to lose over 2% of its GDP, to allow firms to make plans and enact plans to leave the UK: the 2016 referendum. People voted for it so it has to be done. It is described as the will of the people. Yet few bother to note that almost half the people voted the other way, with those that would be most affected not even having a vote, and that this victory was won by illegal means. All that is brushed aside.

But what is really remarkable is the way what this vote was for has gradually mutated over time. Just before the vote, the Leave campaign talked of many ways of leaving, with Norway (which is in the EEA) as one option. They did this for a simple reason: every time Leavers came up with a feasible way of leaving other Leavers did not like it. Yet within little more than a year Leavers were declaring that the vote was obviously to leave both the Customs Union and Single Market. During the referendum campaign the Leave side talked about the great deal they would get from the EU, but within two years many of the same people were seriously pretending that voters really wanted No Deal. A vote for the ‘easiest’ deal in history has become a vote for no deal at all, apparently.

In much the same way, as Alex Andreou notes, what was once described as Project Fear transforms in time into ‘the people knew they were voting for that’. Claims there will be no short term hit to living standards made before the referendum has now become people knew there would be a short term cost. (Remember Rees-Mogg told us that short term means 50 years.)

Meanwhile warnings from important UK businesses become an excuse to talk about WWII, yet again. What people from outside the UK can see that too many inside cannot is how the case for Leaving has become little more than xenophobia and nationalism. What people overseas can also see but we seem unable to is that there is a world of difference between a vote to Leave the EU in an unspecified way and a real, practical plan. Which means that the first referendum, particularly as it was narrowly won, needs to be followed by a second referendum over an actual, realistic way of leaving. In other words a People’s Vote. When Jonathan Freedland says “the notion that a 52% vote for a hypothetical, pain-free Brexit translates into an unbreakable mandate for an actually existing Brexit is shaky at best” he is wrong: the notion is simply wrong.

Some of the arguments against this are so dumb, yet are allowed to pass as serious. ‘Why not the best of three’: there is no reason for a third referendum. ‘The first referendum was an unconditional vote to leave’: of course it could never be. [1] Suppose we found out that everyone would lose half their income under any specific way of leaving - would you still argue that in 2016 voters voted for that? Or that a second referendum means that ‘politicians have failed the people’. Most politicians voted to Remain because they knew that any realistic way of leaving would be bad for people. They have been proved right and a majority of the electorate might well agree.

But by far the worst excuse not to hold a People’s Vote is that a second referendum would be undemocratic. Orwell must be turning in his grave when he hears politicians say in all seriousness that a second referendum would undermine faith in democracy. This is the language of dictators and fascists, but few seem to mind. Given the difference between the final deal and the promises of the Leave campaign the case for a second referendum is overwhelming, but you would not know that from the UK public debate. There is only one way to make sense of the ‘People’s Vote = undemocratic’ equation, or the ‘will of the people’, and that is that the first referendum effectively disenfranchised Remain voters. [2]

That is exactly what happened after the 2016 vote. Those wanting to Remain to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. If we are just talking about Leave voters, then of course most will be disappointed by a second vote. Is this why Labour MPs just worry about Leave voters in their constituencies, because Remain voters no longer matter? It is why we get endless Vox pops from Leave constituencies, and no mention from EU citizens who have lived here for years who are worried sick because the computer might say you have to leave.

How did Remain voters get effectively disenfranchised? Why is the lunacy of what this country is doing only apparent to foreigners? Answering this question is not hard for anyone who has read my book ‘The Lies We Were Told’. What we have that foreigners do not is a public discourse shaped by a handful of newspaper proprietors who just happen [3] to be intensely hostile to the EU. Partly through intimidation by that same press and their political allies, the BBC follows this discourse. This is where the ‘will of the people’ came from. It was this press that puts rebel Conservative MPs on their front pages, and that uses language like saboteurs and traitors. It is intimidating MPs in order to influence the democratic process, but of course few in the media call it that. 

As I discuss in my book, I have seen this before in a milder form at least twice in recent times. In the first the UK convinced itself that austerity was the only way forward, despite most academic economists saying otherwise. It was the media that promoted claims that governments were just like households, even though first years economics students are taught why this is not true. And then it was the media that pushed (or left unchallenged) the idea that austerity was the result of Labour profligacy: it was a straight lie but it played a critical part in the 2015 election.

If people have doubts about my argument that the media played a central role is misdirecting the public then (and many do), well Brexit should be a test case. And so far Brexit has gone exactly as these newspaper proprietors would have wished. Three coincidences is a row? The reason why those overseas can see that Brexit is utterly, utterly stupid while the UK stockpiles food and medicine, and the Prime Minister tries to blackmail MPs into supporting her deal, is because those overseas are not influenced by the UK media.

[1] As this one seems very popular, it is worth spelling out why it is rubbish. The 2016 referendum was not some kind of contract, where all those voting to leave committed to support any vote to leave for all time. It is highly likely that some people voted for a particular kind of Brexit and would prefer Remain to other types of Brexit, which is crucial given the narrow victory. (Which is also why claims that Remain cannot be on any second referendum ballot are also nonsense.) Some may have voted Leave to give more money to the NHS and to stop Turkish immigrants, in which case they may have changed their minds. It does not say "we should leave whatever the form of leave at whatever cost" on the ballot or the small print, because there is no small print.  

[2] There is a serious and quite compelling argument that referendums in a representative democracy are a bad idea, but this equation is about a referendum that has been necessitated by an ambiguous first referendum.

[3] Well maybe not ‘just happen’: see here

How Leavers can believe that a People’s Vote is anti-democratic

How many times have you heard Brexiters, or Theresa May, argue that to hold a second referendum is impossible because people have already had a vote. The people have decided and the government is carrying out their instructions. To hold another referendum would break that contract between the people and government, and would as a result destroy the people’s faith in democracy. And so on. Some even say flatly that it is anti-democratic.

When people put forward similar arguments I have found that a good question to ask is this. Suppose that the polls showed 99% of people thought Brexit was now a mistake: would you still insist that we should not hold another referendum, and go ahead with Brexit? Replying of course not allows you to repeat the question with a smaller percentage. The moment they say that isn’t a big enough percentage, you can simply ask why 52% was good enough to hold a referendum but some higher percentage is not enough to justify asking the question again.

For this reason most have argued with me that even if 99% of people didn’t want Brexit today, it should still go ahead because of the 2016 vote. This is the logic behind the view put forward by most of those who would deny another vote, because their argument is never qualified by referring to current public opinion. A vote has been taken, a decision has been made, and now parliament has to enact that decision to retain faith in democracy. Thus a second referendum, in their eyes, can be anti-democratic.

If you, like me, think it cannot be right to not have a second referendum if 99% of people, or even 56%, no longer want Brexit, you are of course right. The problem with their argument is that the people in 2016 cannot bind the people in 2019. In most cases they will be the same people, but those same people have a right - a democratic right - to change their mind. This right is absolute, in the sense that people are not required to justify why they have changed their mind.

At this point the argument usually turns to comparisons to general elections. Once a government is elected, it cannot be thrown out just because the public starts disliking the government (as they used to do, regularly, 2 or so years after being elected). Just as in a general election people vote for a government to last 5 years, so a referendum result on a particular issue must last unchallenged for a certain number of years.

Except, of course, general elections do not necessarily last five years. MPs can decide on a general election if a certain majority want it (as perhaps we may be about to find out). In exactly the same way, MPs can legitimately decide to hold a second referendum. There seems to be a view that because the 2016 referendum was around 40 years after the previous one, that is some kind of rule, but one observation does not make a rule.

Equally it does not matter in the slightest that David Cameron in his wisdom said the 2016 referendum was for a generation. Just as a vote in 2016 cannot bind people 3 years later, the words of David Cameron certainly should not bind MPs 3 years later. We know that an awful lot of what was said in that referendum was a complete lie.

Cameron has a great deal to answer for in this matter. Not just holding the referendum itself, or saying things like the result would hold for a generation, but also allowing a form of words which left the Leave side completely free to propose whatever type of post-Brexit arrangements took their fancy. It was an open invitation to the Leave side to make up tall stories about the arrangements they could negotiate with the EU, and the Leave side accepted the invitation gleefully. In many respects the need for a second referendum on the negotiated deal was inevitable given the open-ended Leave option in the first.

To argue, as some do, that nothing much has changed in more than two years is laughable. We now know many things that were not clear in 2016. Turkey is not about to join the EU. The OBR have said that Brexit will mean less money for public services, and the government has accepted that projection. (So less, not more, money for the NHS etc.) Doing a deal with the EU is not the easiest in history: it took 2 years just to get a withdrawal agreement. That agreement requires the UK to effectively stay in the Customs Union because of the Good Friday agreement: hardly discussed in the referendum, and then dismissed as Project Fear. And so on and on.

So it makes sense to hold a referendum on the withdrawal agreement for those reasons alone. Those arguments are helped by the polls, which for about a year have shown a majority to Remain and a widening gap of late. (Again I have been told the polls conflict and are neck and neck, and in characteristic Leave style this is just false. As this mapping over time of 100 polls show, Remain has been consistently ahead of Leave for over a year, and the gap has been steadily widening. This is despite neither of the two main parties championing Remain.) I have been told that polls are unreliable, which is why we have actual votes and why MPs feel they need a referendum on the withdrawal agreement rather than revoking it themselves. 

Just as MPs can choose to hold a general election at any time they want, they can hold a referendum at any time they want. People have a democratic right to change their mind. This right is absolute, but it becomes obvious why there should be this right when you have a referendum based on fantasies that look nothing like the reality that has emerged. There is a different argument about a second referendum: not that it is anti-democratic but that it would be dangerous or unfortunate. That will have to wait until another post.

You cannot blame people for arguing that the 2016 referendum result must be enacted and cannot be rescinded, because they are being told this by newspapers and politicians all the time. Which is a very irresponsible thing for newspapers and politicians to do, because it embeds within a minority that were once a majority a view that parliamentary democracy has somehow cheated them of something that was rightfully theirs. If we do get another referendum, those same politicians and newspapers are sure to play to this idea of being cheated that they have themselves fostered. This is why it is important for everyone else to keep saying that a basic part of democracy is allowing people to change their minds.   

MPs need to get real about Brexit

If, as is widely expected, MPs reject the deal that Theresa May has done with the EU, they will have put this country in a very dangerous position. I say this not to encourage acceptance of the deal, but to emphasise that this negative act needs to be accompanied by a collective positive one. If it isn’t then we either leave without any deal (an outcome that only the ill informed, the mad and the Brexiter wish for) or MPs will just end up accepting May’s deal.

Like annoying noise on a railway train, the best thing to do with complaints from Brexiters is to ignore them. Once May’s deal falls, they are no longer part of the equation. They will never get rid of the backstop unless there is No Deal. May extended the backstop to cover the whole UK and so now the UK is in the backstop until the EU says we can leave. The best way to look at what the Brexiters are doing is that they want to sabotage any solution so we leave with No Deal. Luckily we can ignore them if MPs, rather than May, is in control.

There seems to be a lot of talk about Norway plus a Customs Union as a potential way out once May’s deal is rejected. It is, after all, what any Prime Minister worthy of that title would have had in mind from the start, because it superficially appears something that could unite the 52% and 48%. But as I have argued before, thinking about compromises of this kind does not work with Brexit. Here is a not very pretty diagram that illustrates what I mean. It plots various options on two axes, economic welfare and sovereignty, in relation to where we are within the EU. (Staying in the EU is where the two axes cross i.e. zero on both axes.)

Leave voters wanted more control over events and a better life. That is what they were promised. That combination is just not possible by leaving the EU.

A compromise of sorts for Leavers would be to give them greater sovereignty at a very large economic cost to themselves and others. This is No Deal. It is not an option that most MPs can accept for very good reasons. Even if you believe the reports that some leavers would sacrifice everything for more control (I don’t), you cannot justify imposing that kind of cost on the other (more than) half of the country. It will only happen if MPs really screw things up.

May’s Deal is a large yellow square because it leaves many issues unresolved, partly in an attempt to keep Brexiters on board. Any deal May does will end Freedom of Movement (FoM), so you have a little more control if you never intend to work abroad, but a lot less control if you wanted this as an option. But any positive on this account is negated by making the backstop UK wide. By leaving the Single Market for services, it has a significant economic cost (details here, summary here).

The position of Norway plus a Customs Union, which is very similar to staying in transition or what I call Brexit in Name Only (BINO), is that it reduces as far as possible the economic cost of Brexit. However it quite clearly loses a lot of control compared to staying in the EU. In the EU we have a say and a veto over key issues, while with BINO there is no UK veto. I prefer to call this BINO rather than EEA+ or whatever because this name describes what it is.

To be clear, BINO is better than May’s deal (as the forward to this should perhaps have made clearer). They both give up sovereignty, but because BINO keeps us in the Single Market and Customs Union it is clearly better in economic terms. But once May’s deal falls at the first attempt, MPs need to come up with an alternative that commands a majority in the house if they are really going to take back control from ruinous May. Going back to renegotiate the deal, even if it were possible which seems unlikely, is not going to produce anything that is fundamentally different from the deal MPs reject.

If MPs want to take back control they will have to choose between a second referendum (or just revoking A50) and BINO. Which you prefer I suspect depends entirely on how you see the politics of Brexit. If you think the first referendum requires Leavers to have something to take away as a victory, then BINO is a price worth paying to avoid alienating voters. The problem with that argument is that the Brexiters and more importantly the press will be quick to point out that they now have even less control over their lives (they have been ‘cheated’), and for once they would be right. BINO can be seen as the ultimate insult to Leave voters: you asked to leave the EU, so we have technically done so, and we hope you do not notice that you now have even less of what you wanted Brexit to give you.

On the many meanings of ‘politically impossible’, with applications to Brexit

Many people, and perhaps particularly economists, will have been told at some point that whatever policy idea they are trying to put forward may make perfect sense but doing it is ‘politically impossible’. Sometimes this has some real meaning which the proposer needs to address, but sometimes the statement can stand for little more than village gossip, or the wisdom of crowds, where the village or crowd is Westminster, Washington or wherever.

Take, for example, simplifying the tax system. Any simplification generally creates winners and losers, and politicians are often reluctant to embark on such schemes because the losers always seem to matter more than the winners. In this case being politically impossible means something concrete.

But not always. As my first Brexit example take starting the Article 50 process. It seemed to me at the time that anyone with any expertise on the issue, or who had given it some thought, had concluded that starting A50 when the UK did was a terrible idea if you wanted to make a success of Brexit. It was, to be honest, blindingly obvious. As we are now all too well aware, the A50 process ends in the UK leaving in March 2019 whether a deal has been done and approved or not, unless the EU decides otherwise. It is a negotiation with a gun at the head of whichever country is leaving, and it was designed to be exactly that way.

Some argue that the UK had no choice because the EU refused to negotiate outside the A50 framework, and indeed were encouraging the UK to start as soon as possible. But given that the whole process was designed to put the screws on the leaving country they would of course say that. Even if they had given no hint at what was possible and what was not before that process began, the UK could have at least got their own act together before starting the process. As we now know, most of the two years was wasted because of internal negotiations within the Conservative party.

But at the time we did start A50, the consensus at Westminster was that it was politically impossible not to start. I think this is an example where politically impossible just meant the wisdom of the Westminster village. Brexiters and their press backers pushed for it because they couldn’t quite believe their luck at winning the referendum and feared popular support would quickly vanish, but that was never a rational reason for the majority who were not Brexiters to follow their twisted logic.

The responsibility for this failure in doing what was obviously the wrong thing to do must lie primarily with the Prime Minister. If she or her advisers had understood what a disaster an unplanned A50 process would be, she could have easily resisted her Brexiter MPs and press by going over their top to explain the dangers of an unprepared A50 process to the people. But instead her advisers probably told her it was politically impossible to delay. Once she had decided this it was difficult for the opposition to oppose, because to be frank they do not get the exposure and perhaps also it would have been personally embarrassing to Corbyn given his immediate reaction to the result.

I wonder whether we are seeing the same problem with planning after May’s deal is voted down. Sure the Brexiters want us to crash out with no deal, but the overwhelming majority of MPs do not. Yet many MPs seem to think that having come this far it is politically impossible not to end up with a deal of some sort. If not May’s deal, then some other deal. But this is nothing more than the wisdom of the Westminster crowd. The reality is that any deal is going to look terrible. You could reduce the economic damage with something closer to BINO, but that just makes the loss of a UK say in the rules it has to obey that more obvious.

There may be a similar problem with those calling for a second referendum, suggests Steve Richards here. It is deemed politically impossible for MPs themselves to revoke Article 50, because faith in democracy will be destroyed. Richards suggests a betrayal narrative will develop whatever parliament does: it is already there every time a second referendum is incredibly described as overruling the wishes of the people. If No Deal is not on the ballot (can we seriously risk the possibility of the Brexiters doing yet more damage through a No Deal win?) those who incredibly favour No Deal will say they have been disenfranchised. 

Whether its through a second referendum or directly revoking A50, it is time MPs started doing what is best for the country. We have had two years of chaos, economic damage and neglect of other issues because MPs have slavishly followed the result of a referendum illegally and narrowly won. That referendum result was based on a view of what is possible that events have shown is simply false. It is time for MPs to start winning back the trust of those who think the EU, or EU immigration, is at the heart of their problems by being honest, and enacting policies that actually addressed the problems of those who have been left behind. It is only this that will stem a revival of UKIP or worse: the EU referendum process is a lesson in why pandering to the false tales of the far right is a road to ruin. 

If May loses her Brexit vote, what happens next?

If the withdrawal agreement is defeated in parliament (due to too many Brexiters and Tory Remainers voting against and not enough Labour rebels voting with May) what happens next? Answering that question has some impact on whether the agreement with the EU will be voted down, of course. As I noted in an earlier post, what May says will happen before the vote will have virtually no implications for what actually happens because May has no interest in keeping her word.

I want to pursue one possibility, but I’m making no predictions this will actually happen. It is, in a way, a precautionary tale, because it tells us what might happen if parliament is not very active. Losing the vote will be a huge personal blow for May. In those circumstances, the last thing a Prime Minister wants is to appear to be powerless. She will therefore try to regain the initiative quickly.

One option is to go back to the EU and ask for more time. If the vote is very close this will be very tempting. She will be thinking about twisting arms of certain rebel MPs to try and get them to switch. But I suspect the EU will not play this game, partly because agreeing any serious extension of Article 50 would have to involve all member states, and partly because they would fear subsequent requests after each further failure. An instant rebuff from the EU will not be the look the already weak PM will want, so this road is not as attractive as it might first appear.

Announcing a General Election is another possibility, but this too is problematic, essentially because she has already tried this trick in 2017 and failed dismally. She will need a two thirds majority of MPs, and it is possible that her party from Brexiters to Remainers would not follow her. She could also decide to call the whole thing off, but I suspect even imagining she might do that is wishful thinking.

Which leaves a referendum. She has ruled out “under any circumstances” a second referendum, but she also ruled out a general election before she called one in 2017. I would be surprised if the EU did not agree to extend Article 50 if a second referendum was called. But if she did go down that route, I would be incredibly surprised if the two choices she would propose were not No Deal or her deal. This is where parliament would need to act. But it would require the Conservative rebels on the Remain side to step up and be counted - something that they have often failed to do.

In addition, would the Labour ("We can't stop it") leadership vote to put Remain on the ballot, and even if they did how many rebels would defy any instruction to do so? It seems to me that any attempt to get Remain on the ballot by parliament would be a very close call. Added to that would be the further problem of how Remain appears on the ballot. Does it replace No Deal, which some might feel (not me) is anti-democratic? If not, someone needs to come up with a more complex referendum choice (e.g this suggested by Chris Giles) that a majority of the House will support.

The more I think about the option of going for a deal or No Deal referendum, the more attractive an option it looks for May. She will be fighting on just one flank, rather than multiple flanks. If parliament fails to get Remain on the ballot, it seems almost certain that she will get the popular vote for her deal she wants. Remainers and Labour might talk defiantly of boycotting the ballot, but that would only increase the chances of No Deal winning, and I doubt they would carry many voters with them, as it would be a futile and dangerous gesture. Parts of the press would push No Deal, but May would hope enough ‘sensible leavers’ would unite with ‘fearful Remainers’ to defeat them. MPs would not dare to vote against a deal backed by a referendum victory.

That way, May turns a disaster (losing the vote in parliament) into a triumph. Which is why I really hope that behind the scenes certain key MPs are planning for exactly this scenario. The executive have a huge first mover advantage over parliament, and leaving this planning until after May’s deal with the EU is voted down would probably be too late. Advanced planning in some detail is needed, something that the other Mr Johnson can fill his newly found spare time doing perhaps.

The Next Referendum Question

I wrote in January about the “unanswerable case” for a referendum on the Withdrawal Agreement (it is not a second referendum but nor is it a referendum on the final deal), and I have not changed my mind in the slightest. To say such a referendum would not be democratic is self-contradictory. I personally would be happy for parliament alone to call a halt to Brexit, but if MPs believe that to do so would be seen as undemocratic then we have to have a referendum on the Withdrawal Agreement (WA).

Does it bother me that this will not be a referendum on the final deal, because the WA is likely to be vague on the final trade arrangement? No, for two reasons. First a referendum on the final deal will be meaningless because we will have already left (something which I do think is undemocratic). Second, we now have a huge amount of information compared to 2016.

We now know that there are essentially two types of deal with the EU we can do. The first is some kind of FTA (free trade agreement), where Northern Ireland would stay in the Single Market for goods and Customs Union (the Irish backstop). Theresa May says that is something no Prime Minister could agree to, but more worrying from my point of view is that we would be a lot poorer as a result because we would do less trade with the EU and many of the third countries that currently have trade agreements with the EU. Those who tell you that getting our own trade deals with those third countries would be a piece of cake are the same people who told you that we held all the cards with the EU.

The second option is that we stay in the Single Market and Customs Union, but have little say in how those emerge. That avoids the need to implement the Irish backstop, which is why it will be the most likely option that May will agree to in the end. The economic hit from that would be much smaller than the first option, but we end up with substantially less sovereignty than if we stayed in. May would like to persuade the EU to leave open the idea of extending the backstop to the whole of the UK, meaning we stay in the CU and SM for goods only, but I think the chances of the EU agreeing to this at the end of the day are slim, and as geography is as important to services as goods we would be worse off as a result.

This choice was not clear to even experts at the time of the referendum, and it was certainly not clear to voters. The campaign hardly mentioned Ireland (and when it did, it did not imagine a backstop), and voters were told there would be more money for the NHS (there will be less), Turkey was about to join (it is not), EU immigration hurt the public finances (it does the opposite), we held all the cards in any negotiation etc. The Remain side may have exaggerated the immediate economic hit, but two years later GDP is around 2% lower as a result of the uncertainty created by Brexit and the fall in Sterling has in addition cost each household an average of £400 per year. That is fact not Project Fear.

So the case for a referendum on the WA is overwhelming, given all the extra information we have. That nearly all this information has been negative for Brexit is reflected in the polls. So what should the referendum question be? I do not think No Deal should be an option. No one seriously campaigned for No Deal in the first referendum, and only a minority of Conservative MPs (60?) support it. The obvious question to ask is do you want to accept the WA negotiated or do you want to Remain in the EU. This does not disrespect the original referendum vote any more than the 2017 general election disrespected the 2015 one.

John McDonnell on the Today programme yesterday (here, 2:10 hours in) seemed to suggest a question like do you accept the WA, yes or no? Some took the 'no' as implying No Deal, but I doubt that as Labour would be campaigning for no and have already said No Deal is not an option. Instead it would be a suggestion to reopen negotiations. But if Labour cannot force a General Election, and with May saying this is the best deal she can get, what is the point? If you think a no result would put pressure on the EU, see what happened after the Greek referendum in 2015. I think many voters would realise this, and just vote for the WA to speed the end of the paralysis in government that Brexit had created.

Not only does his suggestion make little sense, but it was politically disastrous, given the overwhelming support for a referendum that included the Remain option among Labour voters and members. Just after a composite motion had been agreed which is itself a compromise between Remain members and the leadership, he appears to undercut it at a stroke. The words he should have said came from Starmer later in the day.

So the referendum on the WA should be a simple choice between accepting the WA as negotiated or cancelling Article 50 and remaining in the EU. What about all those working class Labour voters in the towns of England and Wales who will feel betrayed if we stay in the EU? Those people were sold snake-oil, and you do not expose snake-oil by prescribing it on the NHS. Instead you make sure you enact policies that reduce the demand for snake-oil, and hopefully that is what a future Labour government will do.

When two mass movements clash

Last week saw leading lights in one mass movement, the Labour party, attack elements of another mass movement, those who want to remain in the EU. What led to this attack seemed to be posters issued by an organisation called OFOC depicting John McDonnell in the pocket of arch Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg. My own view is that these poster were a waste of money and hardly worth bothering with. But leading lights in the Labour movement tried to suggest to grass roots Remain supporters that they are being used as a way to attack Corbyn, as here for example.

As it happens I have quite recently suggested that some Remain campaigners risk the danger that their message is sounding very similar to the numerous anti-Corbyn attacks you can find throughout the media. For example suggesting that the only thing in the way of stopping Brexit is Corbyn (ludicrous) and that therefore he has to go (won't happen). As the only chance of a vote on the final deal is if Labour supports it such a message is positively counterproductive.

However the attacks from Bastini, Mason and others took a different tack, listing in great detail how OFOC was connected to, and possibly funded by, certain Tory and LibDem figures. This was the basis of the ‘being used’ claim. There are two big problems here. First, Remain is a cross party movement. So what exactly is the big deal with establishing all these links? So what, you might say. Second, Remainers have every reason to be critical of Labour policy, which is now clearly not to stay in the EU. 

The days of triangulation are over. We now know that the Labour leadership wants a negotiated deal with the EU that has some safeguards on nationalisation etc, and for some MPs at least some limits to free movement. As the great majority of Labour members and voters support staying in the EU, this is a difficult position for the Labour leadership to take. Labour are therefore acutely vulnerable. Indeed as there is a chance that Labour might back a people's vote but May never will, it is sensible that Remainers now concentrate any pressure on the Labour leadership. 

Picking a fight with some Remainers by suggesting they are, knowingly or not, just an anti-Corbyn front because they attack Labour on Brexit seems to both miss the point and to be terrible politics. I guess it can be what happens when two mass movements with considerable overlap in terms of membership clash. Of course any Brexit negotiated by Corbyn would be less harmful than the Brexit May might be able to negotiate, and Labour still might vote against the final deal and support a referendum on it, but until Labour do start saying No Brexit is better than May’s Brexit Labour are vulnerable and have to accept that Remainers will try and put pressure on them.

All of which is of course a minor sideshow to what will be the main story of the next few months: will May be able to negotiate a deal with the EU? Labour are completely irrelevant in answering this question. The answer will depend on whether May will finally break with the Brexiters, and how much these Brexiters react to this rejection. The deal that will be done, which involves at a minimum being in the Customs Union and the Single Market for goods, is anathema to most of the Brexiters based on their past behaviour. That deal, as I have argued before, represents the almost complete failure of the Brexiter project.

The Brexiters have two choices. They can try and make it as hard as possible for May such that she fails to get a deal, and hope that the UK leaves with No Deal as a result. Although there is much you can criticise in May as a Prime Minister, her stubbornness probably means she will not allow her deal to be sabotaged in this way, but that will probably not stop the Brexiters trying. The second choice Brexiters have is to park their displeasure at the deal until we leave in 2019, and hope that they can achieve further breaks from Europe subsequently, perhaps by getting a Brexiter as Conservative party leader. The problem with this strategy is that time is not on their side: demographics, losing the Mail, and people seeing how the UK steadily falls behind the rest of the EU are just some of the reasons why.

There is no doubt that May will do what she can to get a deal, and I suspect the Brexiters will not have the support or the will to stop her once she stops appeasing them. Which leaves Labour in a dangerous position, where they may alienate Leavers by voting against the deal, and alienate Remainers for not supporting Remain. The days when they could keep both groups happy by triangulating, and almost win a general election, are over. They cannot be crazy enough to vote for or abstain on the final deal, because then they become complicit in all the economic harm that Brexit will do, as well as alienating the majority of its own members and voters. It would mean four years of Labour  losing Leave voters to the Conservatives (as the Brexit press would spin anything other than a vote for the deal as Labour opposing Brexit), and Remain voters to the LibDems or Greens.

One thing we have learnt in the last week is that most of the handful of Tory rebels will not have the courage to vote against any deal May makes. (No deal is another matter.) So Labour will lose the parliamentary vote on the final deal. Labour are not in government, and the deal is being done now, so what they would want to do in government is irrelevant. That means that they have little to lose by backing the popular people’s vote against May’s deal as well as voting against that deal. No Brexit is better than May’s Brexit. That way, they allow the two movements to march as one.

Postscript 27/06/18

Conversations with some Labour party activists both before and after this post suggest that Labour has to focus on winning over Leave voters in traditional Labour held constituencies, and so has to appear to back Brexit where it can. There is a danger that they are taking for granted many who voted for them in 2017 because they thought Labour would stop Brexit, and still do (See, for example, this poll in January 2018, where only 19% of Labour voters think Labour is pro-Brexit.) There is a danger that we are seeing a repeat of what happened over austerity in 2015: Labour taking for granted that anti-austerity voters would vote for them, and at the same time failing to win over pro-austerity voters with talk of being 'tough on the deficit'. Much the same happened with immigration.   

Amendment wars and Corbyn wars

In the real world, UK business is tearing its hair out not knowing what on earth Brexit is going to look like. The EU warns its manufacturers about the dangers of sourcing parts from UK firms if the UK leaves the Customs Union, as Theresa May intends. Meanwhile the UK cabinet continues its arguments about which plan to choose out of two the EU has already rejected. And Remain twitter talked about Corbyn betrayal. While May is definitely in fantasy land, Remain twitter was also a little behind reality.

The Lord’s EEA amendment presented a great opportunity. But this opportunity died at a meeting of the PLP shortly after it was passed by the Lords. There are a significant number of Labour MPs who voted to Remain but who subsequently feel that some notice should be taken of those who voted to Leave. What this means specifically is that in the Brexit negotiations some attempt should be made to end or modify Freedom of Movement (FoM). Those MPs combined with a few Lexiters - Polly Toynbee thinks there are 60 odd - would have voted against the EEA amendment even if the leadership had backed it.

That, as they say, changed everything. There was no point in pro-EU Labour MPs putting a huge effort into changing Corbyn’s mind on the EEA amendment if it was going to fail anyway. All that Corbyn would have achieved if he had supported the amendment is to allow a distraction of Labour divisions on what hopefully will be a night of setbacks for May and Brexit. I think the Labour MPs who want to focus on immigration control are quite wrong to do so, but they cannot be ignored.

Voting down the EEA amendment alone would have sent a purely negative message to Labour’s overwhelmingly Remain supporting members and voters. So an additional amendment was put forward by Labour. Now this may have no chance of passing because ‘it comes from Corbyn’, but that tells us that the Tory rebels are also capable of putting party before country. It is vague, but it has to be so to keep the pro-immigration control Labour MPs on board. And I agree with Ian Dunt it is better to have than not.

As Ian says, it makes it more likely that Labour will vote against the final deal and that this vote is the crucial one if a referendum on the final deal is to become possible. I think some Remainers sometimes forget that the only way a referendum will happen is if parliament votes for it, and the only way that will happen is if Labour supports it because May will not. Finally the only way Corbyn will not be Labour leader when that decision comes is if he falls under a bus. So gradual pressure and persuasion is the name of the game. The more the Remain campaign resembles a get rid of Corbyn campaign, the more difficult it is for people within Labour to apply that pressure.

Unfortunately, press comment on anything to do with Labour increasingly resembles a pro or anti Corbyn debate. The fact that it was not common knowledge that there were a significant group of Labour members not attached to Corbyn who opposed EEA is quite understandable if you read the press comment at the time. Although that was the news at the PLP meeting, most reports just made it another Corbyn versus MPs story. That was what press coverage was like before the 2017 election, which helps explain Labour's dramatic increase in popularity during the election as voters saw for the first time what their policies were, and the media has now reverted back to this narrative. 

In my experience these MPs that want to try to end FoM for the UK or at least modify it tend to come from strongly leave voting areas. It is easy to say that they are being unrealistic in their wish, because the four freedoms are indivisible for the EU, but they are after all only reflecting the views of their constituents that the UK should try. Although we may strongly suspect the EU will say FoM has to go with being in the Single Market, this is a question that Theresa May has yet to ask because ironically the Conservative Brexiters are not very interested in controlling immigration.

Let me stress that I am in no way supporting these MPs refusal to back the EEA amendment - I support FoM - just as I think the leadership's reluctance to do so for different reasons is misguided. But to overcome objections to EEA you first have to understand where they come from. The idea that if it wasn’t for Corbyn Labour would be solidly behind joining the EEA is not only wrong, but it risks associating the Remain cause with the constant stream of attacks on Corbyn that can be found in the media on an almost daily basis, which in turn dilutes the pressure from Remain on the leadership and anti-FoM MPs.

Remain fundamentalism

An argument I have often heard is why are people talking about getting a softer Brexit (by staying in the Customs Union (CU) or Single Market (SM) for example) when what we should be doing is staying in the EU. There is a more extreme version of this which says that attempts to get a soft Brexit are dangerous, because they make the prospect of remaining in the EU less likely. I will call this more extreme position Remain fundamentalism.

I want to argue against Remain fundamentalism by imagining a soft Brexit that involved the UK staying in a comprehensive Customs Union with the EU and staying in the EEA. (For an excellent discussion of what the EEA is and is not, see Ian Dunt here, here and here - in that order.) [1] That is what the current UK withdrawal bill specifies as amended by the Lords, so let me call this the Lords’ Brexit. Compare this to the only hardish Brexit deal that can be done (assuming, as I think is reasonable, that parliament would never pass No Deal), which is something close to what John Springford and Sam Lowe have called the Jersey option: staying in the CU and the SM for goods but not services, perhaps allowing some UK flexibility on freedom of movement.

We have no idea whether the EU would accept either option, because the UK government has been wasting its time (which given they are supposed to be running the country on our behalf is also our time) trying to choose between fantastical solutions to the Irish border problem that the EU will not accept. But for the sake of argument suppose that May ignores her Brexiters, and perhaps with parliament’s help chooses something like the Jersey option and that the EU agrees to it, or instead that May has to go with the Lords’ Brexit and the EU (and EFTA) agree to it.

The Remain fundamentalist argument is that because the Jersey option does more economic damage to the UK than the Lords option (because the EU has a comparative advantage in exporting services, and immigration from the EU is beneficial to the UK), it is more likely that parliament would grant a referendum on it and that people would reject that deal in favour of staying in the EU. I actually think the opposite is the case, We are much more likely to see parliament grant a referendum if we go for the Lords’ Brexit, and that people would reject the Lords’ Brexit in favour of staying in.

The case for a referendum on the final deal is much more clear cut if the deal is the Lords’ Brexit, because the Lords’ Brexit has virtually no advantages compared to EU membership and a clear disadvantage. In practice being in the EEA would mean accepting rules adopted by the EU with no say on those rules. In short, we gain nothing by having no say on the rules we have to obey. I cannot imagine any politician being able to get people to vote for the little bit of wriggle room and influence being in the EEA gives you compared to the having a real seat at the table.

In contrast, with the Jersey option things are much more complex. There will be perceived advantages of this option compared to staying in, such as greater control over immigration. You can be sure that the more Mrs. May can fudge the agreement such that she can pretend these advantages are there even when they are not, she will.

Now add in a powerful group of Brexiters. They would angry that they did not get the hard Brexit they want, but in the Jersey option they would still see hope in ambiguity. More importantly, with the Jersey option there would be plenty of meat for this group to work on, including immigration of course. But with the Lords’ Brexit it is hard to argue a strong case for why this is preferable to be in the EU, even if you are a Brexiter politician or newspaper.

I would be the first to admit that these arguments are not clear cut. But the Remain fundamentalist position only makes sense if you can be sure that a harder Brexit makes a referendum more likely. To me, at least, it is not obvious that it does. The more you can eliminate the economically damaging but superficially attractive aspects of Brexit, the more chance people have to see that the whole thing is a complete waste of time.

[1] There are a lot of differences between being part of the EEA and what is called BINO: the UK being in the Single Market and Customs Union and everything else to do with the EU except being absent from its political structures. I am assuming that there would be no problem being in the EEA and a CU, that agreements with the EU would also be made on agriculture and fisheries that would at least allow a soft Irish border, that the EU and EFTA would allow all this and so on.