Why are we in this political mess?

I am sick and tired of being told that the 2016 referendum gave the government a mandate to leave the EU. It did not. It did not because it did not specify a method of leaving. The Leave campaign was all over the place on how we would leave, and deliberately so. It maximised their vote. It was Cameron’s failure not to see that. He could so easily have made it a condition for holding a referendum that the Leave side put together a coherent, independently assessed and costed plan for leaving, but he didn’t. That, together with austerity, will be his legacy.

I heard a good comparison the other day. Some colleagues after work decide it would be great to go out together for a meal. They all agree enthusiastically. That is decided they say. But then someone asks where they should go to eat. One says definitely not Indian. Another says they are fed up with Italian food. And so on: whatever it is someone says they definitely don’t want to go there. But they all agree they must all eat together. They end up calling the whole thing off.

The lack of a specific plan agreed in the referendum would not have mattered if one of two conditions were true. The first is that everyone who voted to Leave preferred all forms of leaving to staying in the EU. That clearly is not true. The second was that the majority to leave was so large, and stayed large, such that whatever form was eventually chosen commanded a majority. In reality the majority to leave was small, and polls now show a much larger majority wanting to stay. As a result, the first referendum in itself demands a People's Vote.

The logic of this is clear. Once you add in the fact that more Leavers than Remainers are changing their mind and the case for a People’s Vote is overwhelming. More people don’t laugh when Brexiters say a People’s Vote would be undemocratic because the Brexiters and the Brexit press are shouting so loud people find it hard to think. What is happening in parliament reflects these divisions within the country. It is impossible to get a majority for any form of Brexit in parliament, just as there is no majority for any form of Brexit in the country.

Parliament does differ from sentiment in the country for one reason: MPs are clearly intimidated either by the referendum vote itself, the Brexit press or the Brexit majority in their constituency. This gave Theresa May an opportunity. If she had understood what the closeness of the result meant, she would see that at best there was only a mandate for the softest of Brexits. I think she could have got that through parliament, especially if she had held cross-party talks before invoking Article 50 to agree a plan. The Brexiters would have huffed and puffed, but May would have got a deal passed with Labour’s help.

We all know what she actually did. One consequence of that was both sides hardened their positions. A key mistake in a long litany of errors was to believe that ‘No Deal is better than a bad deal’ was a good bargaining ploy. The EU saw it was nonsense, but it gave Brexiters hope that they could actually get No Deal. That in turn led to two heavy defeats in parliament. Thanks to the Brexit press Project Fear applies to anything negative said about leaving the EU, so many voters think having a ‘clean break’ sounds like a good idea.

This hardening of positions means that the current negotiations are extremely dangerous for May and Labour. But May has nothing to lose except her legacy. Labour have everything to lose. Too many Lexiters within Labour have the attitude that Remainers have nowhere else to go. That was never true, as they could always not vote or not campaign. Alternatives have no increased with the creation of UKC and a Lib Dem party that is no longer a party of austerity. To throw away the next election for the sake of not having a People’s Vote does merit the use of the word betrayal. Betrayal not just of Remainers, but also of all those people that want or depend on Labour winning the next election.

If the Tories lose an election before we leave, Brexit is unlikely to happen.

There is more talk of a general election, although of course that does not mean it will happen. In that context I frequently hear people say that a general election would do nothing to get the country out of the huge Brexit hole it has dug itself. I strongly disagree. If there is an election before we leave the EU and if Labour formed the next government, I think it would make a huge difference. Unless Labour win so many seats that it has a massive majority, I think the chances are that Brexit would just not happen at all.

Let us suppose that Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer manage to negotiate some form of soft Brexit with the EU. The crucial question to then ask is what the attitude of the Conservative opposition would be. As a result of losing the election (if not before) they will have a new leader, and given the attitude of most Conservative members that leader is likely to be a Brexiter. As the Brexiters in the current party find it hard to accept the hard Brexit proposed by Theresa May, they will almost certainly oppose any soft Brexit negotiated by Labour. Brexiters are happiest when complaining, and so the line they will probably take about any Corbyn Brexit deal is that it represents a betrayal of the ‘will of the people’.

Another reason that they will oppose Labour’s soft Brexit is that they do not want Labour to be able to do something the Conservatives were unable to do. It would be the ultimate humiliation that a party that is increasingly defined as being the Brexit party could not negotiate Brexit, yet a Labour government could.

The Conservative party is increasingly looking like the Republican party in the US, with an activist and very right wing base fired up by Murdoch owned and other partisan media. The health care programme that Obama successfully introduced was very similar to something the Republican senator and presidential candidate Mitt Romney had passed in Massachusetts in 2006. Despite this the Republicans in opposition unequivocally rejected Obama’s similar reforms and fought them with all their might.

Some more moderate Conservative MPs might be tempted to support Labour because they themselves would be quite happy with a soft Brexit. They could quite plausibly argue that their aim should be to get Brexit over the line and a future Conservative government could distance the UK further from the EU. But something we have learnt over the last few years is that Tory Brexit policy has been strongly influenced by the Brexiters, and the rest of the party is extremely reluctant to break the party line. Furthermore many Tory Remainers may be happy to see Brexit fail. As a result, Corbyn cannot count on rebel Tories coming to his aid.

The final reason the Conservatives, and their supporters in the press, will not want to assist Labour in delivering Brexit is that they will scent the chance of embarrassing the new government. There are plenty of Labour MPs, backed up by many more Labour party members, who do not want to see Brexit at all, and they might vote against any agreement. In that situation the Liberal Democrats and SNP might also vote against. Shortly after an election where the Conservatives are still in shock they are extremely unlikely to help out a Labour government in difficulties.

With the Tories opposing any form of soft Brexit, Corbyn’s actions will be guided with what might happen if his Brexit plans were ever put to a referendum. Labour have now said they would hold a referendum on any deal they negotiated, and they would not be allowed to backtrack on this because a combination of Tories (yes, I know, but see above), smaller parties and Labour rebels would insist it be held. A People’s Vote under a Labour government will be a very different affair from anything held under the Tories. Tory politicians, and more importantly the Brexit press, would oppose it with all the vigour we have seen over the last few years. As so many Brexit supporters derive their devotion to the cause from the press they read, they are likely to follow that press in declaring Labour’s Brexit deal to be a betrayal. Of course Remainers would also oppose it. Labour would find both Remainers and many Brexiters campaigning against them. They would not have a chance, and Brexit would fail.

A Labour government trying to get a victory in a Brexit referendum looks like a lose lose option. They would fail to get a majority for their Brexit deal and be humiliated by the result. Once the Conservatives make their opposition clear, Labour should see this coming. But how do they avoid that outcome, as the clock will still be ticking on an extended Article 50? The issue cannot be kicked in to the long grass, and Labour will have a manifesto commitment to try and get a Brexit deal. One possibility is that after talking to other party leaders, Corbyn will announce that a Brexit deal is impossible because of Conservative and minor party intransigence and he will put to parliament that Article 50 should be revoked. That will be passed by a narrow majority (the Tories and perhaps a few Labour MPs would oppose). He will endure a day of negative headlines in the Brexit press, but just another day in a continuum of negative headlines is hardly a great cost. Most of the country will breath a large sigh of relief.

If this is the case, why would Labour promise to enact Brexit in their manifesto, if they could see it subsequently failing? For a start Labour could not be sure what the Conservative opposition would do, and it might hope to get a majority large enough to overcome its own rebel MPs. But the main reason is the same as it was in 2017. The party will want to avoid the election being about the merits or otherwise of Brexit. The Tories in an election will want to pin the blame for their failure to achieve Brexit on Labour, and if Labour switched to being a Remain party just before the election that tactic will probably be successful. Having come this far as a Brexit party, Labour will be on much firmer ground in an election if it continues to say it wants Brexit and has a better chance of succeeding than the Tories who have failed for three years.

Would it be ironic that a Labour government would fail to enact a form of Brexit because of Tory opposition? If you think about it, the Conservative government has failed to enact a form of Brexit laregely because of Tory opposition. The reason we are in this Brexit hole is that Brexiters who won a mandate for a soft Brexit then decided that only the hardest of Brexits would do. It would be poetic justice and good for the country if Brexit failed as a result.

Will Brexit make austerity worse?

There seems to be some confusion among some on the left about the impact of Brexit. Statements like ‘Brexit will make austerity worse’ by Remainers are imprecise, so let me spell this out. Because of the controversy this generates I’m afraid this is going to be a rather dry, analytical post. But if you think government spending can somehow reverse the negative economic impacts of Brexit, this post is for you.

Brexit will reduce UK trade relative to what it would be if we stayed in the EU. How much will depend on the type of Brexit. As I outlined here, it will not be possible to come near to replacing that trade through new trade deals. So less trade is a given.

Less trade reduces GDP mainly because it reduces productivity. Trade allows specialisation. Instead of Honda cars being produced in each EU country they can be made in just one, which allows (in part because of what economists call economies of scale) the cars to be produced more efficiently. Trade also increases competition (you can buy many makes of car in the UK) which improves efficiency. Therefore if you restrict trade, you reduce productivity. Less productivity means less GDP. I discussed how much GDP could fall under May’s preferred trade arrangement here.

A reduction in productivity is a supply side decline in GDP. It is very different from a demand deficient recession of the kind we had after the GFC. In a demand deficit recession fiscal policy (more government spending or lower taxes) can be used to restore demand and therefore GDP, and must be used if interest rates are stuck at their lower bound. The tragedy of austerity from 2010 is that the opposite was done. The decline in GDP brought about by lower productivity following less trade cannot be tackled in that way.

When GDP falls, taxes fall. To keep the deficit constant, that requires a reduction in government spending. Brexit will reduce government spending compared to what it would be if we stayed in the EU. To that extent Brexit makes austerity worse. To say that those who point this out are advocating a continuation of the policy of 2010 austerity are wrong.

It is important to note that what I am doing here is comparing two states of the economy, and saying what the differences would be between those two states. This type of comparison confuses many people. I am not saying government spending is going to be lower than it is now - it almost certainly will not be. People say cannot we do something to mitigate the impact on GDP of Brexit? There are many things that can be done to improve GDP, like more public investment, but they could also be done if we stayed in the EU. If you think there is still spare capacity in the economy then GDP can be raised by fiscal or monetary policy, but that is equally true in or out of the EU.

Does government spending have to lower out of the EU compared to inside the EU? The answer is no, which is why statements like Brexit will make austerity worse are incomplete. You could keep government spending at the same level in and outside the EU. But that would raise the deficit, which requires higher taxes. So in that case Brexit would increase taxes. So a correct statement would be that Brexit either reduces government spending or raises taxes or some combination of the two.

At this point you get MMTers up in arms. The deficit does not matter for a country with its own currency and so on. Or even worse, that government spending determines taxes and not the other way around. This is a very good illustration of how misleading MMT rhetoric can be. To see why, go back to the case where government spending falls in proportion to GDP under Brexit, which means the deficit is unaffected by Brexit. Now suppose you increased government spending to the level it would have been without Brexit. That is an expansionary fiscal policy, which stimulates demand which raises inflation. The obvious way to reduce demand and inflation is to raise taxes so the deficit is back to its original level. It does not matter whether you need to keep the deficit unchanged because you have a fiscal rule, or you have fiscal policy stabilising the economy as MMT advocates, you get the same result.

Some MMT followers never admit they are wrong, so I got a lot of stuff about how you can use other measures to reduce inflation like credit controls. But you could use them if we stayed in the EU as well to allow higher government spending or less taxes. There is no obvious reason why leaving the EU makes such measure more effective.

The correct statement about the impact of Brexit on the public finances is that it means government spending will be lower or taxes higher or some combination of the two. Furthermore the overwhelming majority of economists think GDP will fall as a result of Brexit, and I have not come across an academic whose field is trade economics who thinks otherwise. If you think, as I do, that this government has reduced public spending way beyond the level that people want, and therefore you want to raise that spending, Brexit makes that more difficult. .

Left behind movements do not just reflect deindustrialisation, but also geography, inequality and lack of representation.

There was extensive analysis after the UK EU referendum of the characteristics of those who voted for Brexit and those who didn’t. A robust finding was that those who voted for Brexit tended to be older and had less years of education. But some noted a link between a tendency to vote Leave and areas of deindustrialisation. The idea of the ‘left behind’ was born. It gained force when rest-belt states in the US swung to Trump in the same year.

This characterisation of the left behind was attractive to many on the left, who have been critical of the globalisation they saw as the cause. Yet as Martin Sandbu points out, the period of what is often called hyper-globalisation is the 1990s, and much deindustrialisation occurred before then. Some of that was a result of automation rather than globalisation, and in the UK 1980s deindustrialisation was hastened by a large appreciation of sterling caused by a combination of discovering North Sea Oil and monetarism. Why the 30 year delay for the left behind to finally find its political voice?

If we look at the geography of the Brexit vote, areas of deindustrialisation is not the only thing that strikes you. Much more obvious is that people in large cities voted against Brexit, and those in smaller cities or towns or the countryside voted for Brexit. The same was true for Trump, and Trumps core support comes from rural areas. Is this simply a consequence of differences in age and education already discussed?

It could well be. As the Centre for Towns showed, UK villages and towns have been getting older and cities have been getting younger. Jobs that attract the university educated tend to be in cities rather than in towns and villages.The old tend to be more socially conservative, and so are attracted to the anti-immigration message that was a key part of the Leave and Trump campaigns.

There is no doubt these factors are important, but do they explain all the the geographical nature of the support for Brexit and Trump, or is there more to it? I think the gilet jaunes from France can shed some light on this question. As John Lichfield outlines, the gilet jaunes come from peripheral France: the outer suburbs and countryside. That may include some areas of deindustrialisation but it goes well beyond that. Their protests are self-organised and remarkably persistent. They do not fit any clear left/right categorisation. Immigration, or race, are not high up among their concerns, which is why they do not feel represented by the far right party of Marine Le Pen.

What do the gilet jaunes want? Specific demands are varied and often contradictory. But a dominant theme is that they want to be valued and represented. They feel that the centres of power in France, the government but also other organisations, do not speak for or even respect them. They think the major cities are getting all the benefits of growth while they are falling behind.

The gilet jaunes tend to be working or lower middle class, sometimes self-employed, sometimes retired. Initially their protests were sympathetically viewed by most French voters, which was one reason why Macron responded with tax breaks for pensioners and low income workers. As time goes on and the violence has continued their popularity among French voters has waned. Whether they have a future as a coherent force may depend on whether they can transform themselves into a conventional political group that wins seats in the forthcoming European elections, a process which has already led to some fragmentation along traditional left/right lines.

Macron’s election as President of France had led many to think that the wave of populism influencing democracies around the world could be held back or even beaten. What the gilet jaunes show is that this cannot be done just by electing a charismatic President. Indeed the character of Macron, clearly part of an affluent city elite, may even have been a provocation.

Can the gilet jaunes tell us anything about those who voted for Brexit or Trump? All three movements come from outside of the main cities, so perhaps geography is more than just an incidental factor. What is unique about the gilet jaunes has been self-organisation, made possible through social media, and the variety of their political demands. In contrast Trump is a Republican, and Brexit is a very specific cause. But perhaps this difference just reflects the ability of some politicians and parts of the media to capture the discontent of the geographical areas that feel left behind?

The EU was not considered an important issue among most voters until the referendum. Immigration was, but a good part of that was because the government and press had managed to deflect anger at declining public services and wages on to immigrants rather than their own policies. Whereas the gilet jaunes had to organise themselves using social media, Brexit and to some extent Trump had sections of the conventional media to do that job. While many gilet jaunes want to overturn the government, Brexit supporters succeeded because they had the help of politicians and the media.

Underlying causes in all three cases include geographical and financial inequality, and a feeling of being ignored by conventional politics. In the UK, looking mainly at the first decade of the century, a NEF report found that nearly all of the 20 fastest growing constituencies were in cities. Often the prosperity of towns depends on the success or otherwise of a nearby city. Those in the periphery see money going to projects like crossrail or HS2 while local bus services are cut.

People look at others to measure their own prosperity but they also look at their own past. In the UK real wages are still below levels before the financial crisis, and in the last year the disparity between the incomes of most people and those at the top of the income distribution has started to increase again. (It is one reason why the Chancellor is getting more tax receipts than he expected.) In the US most of the proceeds of growth have for some time been going to the top of the income distribution.

We can see the same thing, although to a lesser degree, in France. Here is a revealing graph from a study by Thomas Piketty and colleagues. It shows how average annual growth rates of pre-tax income has varied by where people are in the income distribution over three time periods. To the right we have the richer income deciles, including at the end the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% respectively. In the two periods before the 1980s incomes at the top grew less rapidly than all other groups. From 1983 to 2014 the opposite has been true: growth rates of top incomes have been up to three times those of everyone else. In addition the growth rate of incomes of the non-rich have been historically low.

Low average growth in most incomes together with much faster growth in incomes at the top is provocative, particularly if you are in parts of the country that are stagnating with few prospects. I do not think it is any coincidence that a week ago we saw the gilet jaunes targeting the exclusive shops and restaurants of the Champs-Élysées.

Inequality based on incomes or geography is not enough to get the gilet jaunes on to the streets, to get UK voters to want to take back control, or Trump voters to vote for the worst President in a century. This also requires a feeling that your voice is not heard in the political process. In the UK a feeling of powerlessness was hijacked by politicians and the press who pretended it was a result of the EU, or in the US by Trump who pretended to speak for ‘real America’.

Speaking up for those left behind should naturally be something parties on the left do. Yet in the UK, as the NEF report shows, Labour have been increasing their vote share in dynamic cities and the Conservatives from areas in decline. This may be part of a longer term trend in both the UK, US and France, where the left party that once represented the less educated now is the party of the educated. The chart below taken from another study by Piketty shows this trend, which he calls it the emergence of the “Brahmin Left”.

Yet I think this alone is an incomplete explanation. To explain recent developments we should add the adoption by traditional left parties of a neoliberal framework which discouraged regional, industrial and redisributive policies that might have transferred more of the benefits of city dynamism to the periphery. That created a left behind that went beyond areas of deindustrialisation, that felt unrepresented and deprived, and which in the UK and US was open to capture by a populist right.

Labour’s Brexit stance is a tragedy for Labour but the current Brexit mess is an entirely Tory failure.

Before deciding that I’m writing about Labour when I should be writing about the disaster that is Theresa May, please read to the end.

As it becomes obvious (sort of) that there is no majority among MPs for a People’s Vote (something that has actually been clear for some time), the argument has been made that this justifies Labour’s failure to support a People’s vote and instead to seek a compromise, a softer Brexit. I have talked about the wisdom of compromise over Brexit before, but I want to make a different point here, about the stance that Labour has taken over Brexit.

In 2015 Labour lost a General Election where the strong card, perhaps the only strong card, of the Conservatives was their handling of the economy: in other words austerity. It would therefore not be ridiculous to claim that the vote was a verdict on austerity. Some Labour MPs did just that, and argued that if Labour were to win the next election it had to match George Osborne’s policy.

Thankfully on that occasion a new Labour leadership did not take their advice. There were three compelling reasons to continue to argue against austerity - indeed to argue against it much more strongly than Balls and Miliband had done. First and most importantly, it was a policy that made pretty well everyone worse off, and almost certainly led to premature deaths. Second, austerity was a policy that was very unpopular among party members. Third, there were good reasons to believe that the popularity of austerity among the public at large would fade away over time.

I think all these points apply to Brexit as well. Does the fact that 2016 was a referendum while 2015 was a General Election make a difference? Here we have to talk about the nature of the 2016 referendum result. It was not, and could never be, an unconditional instruction to leave under any circumstances. As the form of leaving was unspecified, and the conditions under which we would leave were strongly disputed (with the winning side proving to be completely wrong), it should only have been a request for the government to investigate how we might leave.

It was also won narrowly, with the winning side spending significantly more than was legal. That alone casts a question of legitimacy over the result. I find it extremely odd that some on the left say otherwise, and suggest Remainers have to prove that the additional spending made the difference, something that it is almost impossible to do. Do they realise the precedent they are setting? The right always has more money for obvious reasons, and if the only consequence of overspending by the right is a fine then that is an open invitation to try and buy elections.

Labour’s early approach to Brexit was successful in avoiding the 2017 election being a rerun of the referendum, but there were other ways of doing that. A reasonable strategy that would have achieved the same end was to accept the vote (obviously), but to reserve judgement while the government was negotiating. It would make sense to put down markers about being extremely skeptical that Brexit promises could be met and, crucially, whether a deal that was beneficial could be found.

As the outlines of the government’s deal became clear, Labour should have done what was right and what its members wanted, and campaigned for a second referendum. Once Labour had to put its cards on the table, triangulation ran out of road. The case for a vote on the final deal became unassailable once it was clear Leave promises about what the EU would do were worthless, that there were alternative ways of leaving each of which had some public support, and the public were not getting behind Brexit but were still deeply divided about whether to Leave and how to Leave. 

The Labour leadership’s arguments against doing that were of exactly the same form of those who wanted to adopt Osborne austerity after 2015: the policy that members wanted was seen as a vote loser. Even if they are right about backing a second referendum being a vote loser (and I strongly suspect they are wrong), the only argument I can see for treating austerity and Brexit differently is a belief that one matters much more than the other, and such a belief is very misguided.

What about the argument that there are not enough MPs in parliament to support a second referendum? In my view that is an entirely separate point. In general opposition parties cannot get their way, but that does not mean they stop campaigning for what they think is right. It may well be that parliament will never vote for a second referendum, and some compromise - a softer Brexit - is all that can be achieved. I hope that is not the case, but it could well be. But that does not mean a party should start off campaigning for the compromise you may be forced to reach, rather than campaigning for what is right.

Some people argue that we have to support Brexit to show solidarity with those left behind who support it. That ignores those left behind who voted against it, but even so it is not a good way to proceed. You could say exactly the same about immigration, which many of those left behind blame for their situation. It would be quite wrong for Labour to adopt an anti-immigration policy they did not believe in just to show solidarity with those who wanted it. The same is true of Brexit.

But I have to make one final, and critical, point. I think Labour’s Brexit policy is tragic because it has, directly or indirectly, diminished support for Labour and its leadership among many people who might vote Labour. By triggering Article 50 Labour bear some responsibility for Brexit, and I have suggested before that the successors to the current leadership should come from those who voted otherwise. However I cannot say with any certainty at all that Labour’s policy has had any effect on the Brexit process as such. It is not at all clear that if Labour had adopted the stance I suggest above it could have stopped Brexit, This Brexit mess is entirely Tory affair. To quote Alison McGovern, “This is a Tory problem, a Tory solution and a Tory obsession.” It is Tory disunity and madness that has delayed Brexit. It is a terrible Tory Prime Minister that has made democracy in the UK become a laughing stock among the rest of the world. Those who claim the Tories and Labour are equally to blame or equally responsible for Brexit are wrong. 

May's speech to the public on Wednesday night was Trumpesque, and extremely dangerous. She blamed MPs for delaying Brexit when she had delayed one vote for no good reason, and then basically said its my deal or no deal. She pretended she was acting for the people while parliament was frustrating the people’s will, when in reality less than 40% of voters support her deal and parliament is reflecting that. She seems on the point of taking us over the cliff edge and it is only Tory MPs that can stop her. To make such an authoritarian, populist speech without realising what she was doing tells you all you need to know about her character and political ability.

Her proposal to the EU only made sense if she was prepared to leave with No Deal, which in turn signals to the ERG that they should not vote for her deal. The EU is much too sensible to agree with that, and has in effect given parliament three weeks to work out an alternative to May’s deal. That requires Tory MPs to cooperate with the Labour leadership, something they have not yet been prepared to do [1]. To the many who suggest that somehow the Labour leadership could have prevented the mess we are in I say show me how you can be sure of that, because to me this looks like all the Tories own work from David Cameron to today.

[1] If Tory MPs do finally have serious discussions with the Labour leadership, the Single Market is critical. If all the leadership does is demand to stay in a Customs Union (something inevitable with May's deal given the backstop), it will be equally responsible for the damage caused by leaving the Single Market. Phrases about 'access to' or 'staying close to' the Single Market bind the government to nothing. 

Brexiters are stopping Brexit because they need to believe in the fantasy of Global Britain

It now looks like May will not get a chance to put her deal to parliament for a third time today, thanks to a ruling from Speaker Bercow. Yet while some compare Theresa May’s relentless and humiliating quest to get her deal passed by parliament to the Black Knight from Monty Python’s the Holy Grail, and Bercow believes the deal has to change for it to be voted on again, there would have been a critical difference this time.

Previously rejection has meant nothing except that we get closer to leaving without a deal. No deal is what economists might call the ‘bliss point’ of many Brexiters. The outcome most Brexiters want is what they call a ‘clean break’ with the EU. Before parliament agreed to delay rather than crash out, it was obvious the Brexiters would vote against May’s Withdrawal Agreement.

If the Withdrawal Agreement had been voted on today (and May could well have pulled it herself anyway because she believed she would lose again), rejecting it would have almost certainly meant a long delay to Brexit rather than crashing out. That may be a crucial difference for many Brexiters, including the DUP. A few have already said that they would have supported May’s deal this time, and others appear to be looking for ways to change their minds. So the vote would have been closer than last time it it had been held.

Given this, I have never understood why May kept No Deal on the table for so long. It was obvious that most Brexiters preferred No Deal and would therefore inflict embarrassing defeats on the Prime Minister. In contrast the threat of No Deal does not seem to have kept the few MPs on the opposite wing on board. All I can assume is that she really believed the David Davis mantra that the EU would cave at the last minute for fear of the impact of no deal. If so that was a huge misjudgement, to be added to the already long list of huge misjudgements she has made over Brexit.

Now she has finally said a long delay is the alternative to her deal passing, the Brexiters would have a real dilemma if the deal was voted on again. A long Brexit delay does not take No Deal completely off the table, but it makes it much less likely than before. It also increases the possibility of a second referendum. To understand the dilemma the Brexiters would have if May were allowed to and had put her deal to parliament for a third time, we have to enter the make-believe world of ‘Global Britain’. Of course Global Britain appeals to the English nostalgia for empire that runs deep within Brexit, but to most Brexiters it is much more than that.

Conventional economic analysis tells us that leaving the EU’s Customs Union and Single Market will reduce the amount of trade the UK does with the rest of the world. The reasons are obvious, and I think are privately accepted by most Brexiters. Their main line of defence during the referendum was that the EU would give us all the benefits without the costs, which we now know conclusively is not true. While some Lexiters might be attracted by the idea of a less global UK (because they blame globalisation for deindustrialisation), Brexiters do not want less trade. Their idea of Global Britain was to do more trade with non-EU countries to offset, in the longer term at least, the loss of trade with the EU.

The Irish backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) effectively rules out Global Britain. Most trade deals involve tariff reductions, and if the UK is in the EU’s Customs Union it cannot unilaterally reduce its tariffs to make new trade deals. Theresa May and Liam Fox may pretend otherwise, but most Brexiters know this to be the case. The more May moves to appease the DUP by promising that EU rules in Northern Ireland will also be adopted by the rest of the UK, she restricts yet further the scope of independent (from the EU) UK trade deals. Without tariff reducing trade deals with emerging countries and the US, Brexiters believe there will be a decline in the amount of trade the UK does with the rest of the world, and that will be harmful to the UK economy.

That is why some Brexiters insist that May’s deal is worse than staying in the EU. But others will point out that the WA does allow the UK to move away from many of the rules of the Single Market, which in their eyes is an important part of Brexit. A few may pretend to themselves that the backstop can still somehow be subverted once we have left, or even that No Deal can still be achieved after approving the Withdrawal Agreement by rejecting enabling legislation. They may say that it would be extremely ironic and embarrassing if Brexiters by their own actions stopped Brexit happening. Those still opposed to May’s deal will respond that those who vote for it own it, and if trade and the economy subsequently decline voters will blame those who voted for May’s deal.

Behind all this is the influence of Conservative members. The departure of Nick Boles, who left his Conservative Association before he was pushed, reflects a new mood of militancy among the Tory grass roots. Boles had voted for May’s deal, and his crime in the eyes of party members was that he also campaigned against no deal. With some of the Brexiters hoping to succeed May, their decision is all about pandering to this electorate.

In truth this debate is upside down compared to the real world. I describe Global Britain as make-believe because all reputable studies suggest new trade deals cannot come close to offsetting lost EU trade. A key reason is what economists call gravity. Gravity is the observation that countries trade more with their neighbours than those far away, a robust finding that appears to hold despite falling transportation costs. That means that even if the UK after Brexit could get lots of tariff reduction deals with countries outside the EU (a big if), this would not come close to making up for the lost trade with the EU. The government’s own analysis comes to the same conclusion. By keeping us in the Customs Union, May’s deal actually helps the economy, although as I outlined last week leaving the Single Market is still very costly.

Brexiters always refer to how much faster countries outside the EU are growing. But this is like giving up your solid 40 hour a week day job to work just one hour a week for a rapidly expanding firm for the same hourly pay. Because the firm is rapidly expanding you could be working 2 hours a week within 10 years! This is something few in their right minds would do in real life, so why should we do the equivalent as a country?

Brexiters prefer to ignore the analysis of the overwhelming majority of economists, and instead look to the tiny group of Economist for Free Trade (EFFT). But as Chris Giles has recently shown, if you look at how the GDP forecasts of various groups just after the referendum have been doing recently, those of EFFT have been wildly optimistic compared to others. As the chart shows, EFFT (then Economists for Brexit) did well in the first few quarters after the referendum because many consumers dipped into their savings, but by the end of 2018 EFFT were doing much worse than the OBR, Bank of England and the consensus of private sector forecasters. Giles sums this up by saying “The lesson is simple: listen to economists, but not to those peddling a political line.”

So the only economists who really believe in Global Britain have already been shown to be far too optimistic about the impact of Brexit. No doubt they would say that is because May’s deal prevents Global Britain, but it is clear from movements in sterling that the foreign exchange markets fear No Deal most of all because of the impact this would have on trade. The Brexiters have a wonderful way of avoiding these facts. As the consensus among economists is that trade will suffer if we leave the EU, economists overwhelmingly favour staying in the EU. The Brexiters then conclude that if they favour Remain they therefore must be biased. Ergo only the predictions of economists who believe in Global Britain can be trusted!

There would be a certain horrible symmetry if May’s Brexit deal had passed this week. It would have been a narrow victory, just as the EU referendum result was narrow. It would be a victory tainted with public money used to bribe Labour MPs and the DUP, while the referendum vote was won by the Leave side spending much more private money than the rules allowed. Both victories would have been won against a weak and divided opposition: Cameron unable to talk about the virtues of immigration and Corbyn unable to campaign against Brexit. Both May’s deal and the referendum victory are based on lies designed only to get them across the line. Both are blind, with no clear idea of the kind of Brexit that will follow. Both therefore fail basic notions of legitimacy.

If Bercow prevents May putting her deal before parliament again in the near future, or if she decides herself she would not win anyway, then her failure to pass her deal on 12^th March involves a delicious irony. Brexit failed to happen because of the actions of Brexiters themselves, because they actually believed one of their own lies: the make-believe of Global Britain.

Triangulation or bipartisanship does not work when one side goes off the scale

Brad DeLong describes himself as a Rubin Democrat, which he defines as “largely neoliberal, market-oriented, and market-regulation and tuning aimed at social democratic ends.” It is a natural position for an economist to be: it is generally more efficient to tweek markets than destroy them. But he thinks the time has come for this kind of Democrat to pass the baton over to the left. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

That is an unusual thing to say, on either side of the Atlantic. In the UK the left under Corbyn is in the lead, but you see few of the people who used to run the Labour party saying anything similar. Instead some have conducted a relentless campaign to undermine him. Not only is DeLong unusual, I also think he is probably right, so I want to examine the reasons he gives.

The key point he makes is that the political right has torn up the normal rules of the game, by both moving further to the right and becoming totally partisan. This was very clear in the Obama years. Obama pursued Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

There is much less bipartisan cooperation in the UK compared to the US, but I think there is a clear analogy with triangulation. The lesson Brown and Blair drew from the defeats of the 1980s was that Labour needed to win the middle class, and that meant moving policy to the centre ground. There was little attempt to reverse the neoliberalism of Thatcher, but instead to mitigate its social effects.

But the problem is that the political right in both countries were not playing by the same rules. They had a quite different strategy, which was to shift policy on issues like taxation and the size of the state to the right, and instead try and win elections by pushing a socially conservative agenda. (Here is a formalisation.) There is no triangulation here, but instead an attempt to hide a right wing agenda by starting a culture war. [1] As the right has control over a section of the media, they can also misrepresent their own and their opponents position. That control, together with ineffective scrutiny by the non-partisan media, allows politicians to lie to an extent that would have been thought inconceivable a couple of decades earlier.

When the right adopts this strategy (what I have called elsewhere neoliberal overreach), attempts by the left to get bipartisan agreement or triangulate policies moves what most political commentators call the centre ground of policy to the right. This has two effects. The first is that policies that would be popular among a majority of the population don’t happen. It is often noted that Corbyn’s policies are popular, and the same seems to be true in the US. Second, those supporting the left wing party become dissatisfied with it, and try and move it back to where it once was.

A vivid illustration from the UK of how triangulation fails is immigration. The Conservatives, together with their allies in the media, decided to use immigration as a major weapon against the Labour government. Gradually the increase in the number of stories about immigrants living on welfare and ‘taking our jobs’ began to move immigration up the list of issues voters were concerned about. Immigration numbers were increasing because the government knew this was good for both the economy and public services, but newspapers used words like “mass”, “vast”, “large scale”, “floods”,“waves”“army”, or “hordes”. With a few exceptions it was not voters in areas where migration was increasing that were reacting, and the best predictor of voter concern was which newspapers voters read.

Eventually Labour decided they had to try and triangulate, by talking tough on immigration. The case for immigration was no longer made. The false belief that immigrants made access to public services worse became ingrained. This allowed the Conservative government to deflect a lot of anger over austerity on to immigrants, and it eventually led to Brexit. The strategy of triangulation was a disaster. It is interesting that since the negative impact of reduced immigration on the economy has become clear with Brexit, views on immigration in the UK have shifted to become positive rather than negative.

Another consequence of the right not playing by the old rules is a lack of proportionality. I remember reading Paul Krugman during the Clinton vs Sanders primaries. I think Paul mainly favoured Clinton because Sanders was too populist, which naturally grates for someone who knows and cares about the detail and the difficulties involved in populist policies. But I also remember him writing that the Republicans might be hard on Clinton but that would be nothing compared to what the right would do if Sanders was the Democratic candidate. I’m not sure that was correct, because the right were not playing by the old rules where you had to stick to facts.

As a result, Clinton was accused of all kinds of imagined crimes by Trump, and the non-partisan media played along by obsessing about her email server. Much the same happened in the UK if we look at the 2015 and 2017 elections. The right wing press relentlessly attacked Corbyn in 2017 with wild charges about what he would do as PM, but what they did to centre-left Ed Miliband (‘red Ed’) in 2015 was not that different. Their attacks were not proportionate to how left wing their opponent was.

I think you need to add in one additional point here, and that is a public that is looking for radical solutions, by which I means solutions that move away from the status quo. The reason for this is not hard to understand: the worst recession since WWII following the financial crisis, stagnant and declining real wages, and geographical areas (rural, towns) that seem to be falling behind more dynamic cities.

The lesson of Brexit and Trump is if you fight a culture war and lies with just well researched and targeted policy proposals, you lose. It is better to fight a culture war with an alternative vision and popular policy proposals, and a bit of class war too. I am not suggesting that you don’t have well researched and targeted policy proposals behind that: as DeLong says “we are still here”. But this is the time for radicals on both sides. I suspect Sanders would have been more effective than Clinton at taking on Trump, just as Corbyn was very effective at taking on Theresa May.

You might have noticed that I have said very little about policy divisions between the left and centre-left, and that is because in practice I don’t think they are very important. In both countries the left cannot implement much that the centre-left disagrees with, and much of what the left want to do the centre-left are prepared to accept. [2] (Maybe not rich Democrat or Labour donors, but crowdfunding means that is unfortunate rather than fatal.) The key question is whether the centre-left allows the left to lead when it needs to lead, or instead fights against the left and keeps the right in power.

Let me end with Brad again.

“Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side.”

Some in the UK may feel that statement just does not apply here, but they need to ask whether DeLong is right and it is the left’s time to lead, because what he says about the political right in the US applies equally to the UK.

[1] Cameron talked the talk of centre triangulation, but that did not happen in practice (with the exception of one or two issues like Gay marriage and the aid budget). With austerity he pursued an attempt to shrink the state that Thatcher could only dream of, and the degree to which the Tories wanted to shift policy to the right was masked by the Coalition’s other partner.

[2] One of the problems we have in the UK is supporters of the left who do not understand this, and act as if the centre-left is the enemy and it can win without them. But the centre-left also needs to recognise that on some big issues like financialisation they have been wrong and the left has been right. Some discussion on US issues here from Paul Krugman.