Diagnosing the Brexit disaster
We need a forensic pathologist to sort out what just happened to “Brexit,” which Andrew Coyne rightly last weekend called a “hideous train wreck … the steaming pile of metal, flesh and bone Britain has made of its departure from the European Union.” Including whether Theresa May was perpetrator, victim, or both.
Certain sophisticates may scoff that “Brexit would have been an enormously destructive act even had its advocates given any serious thought to what they wanted to replace it with, or how to go about it. But of course they hadn’t, as was obvious even at the time.” (Like Coyne, who just scoffed it.)
I beg to differ. We proBrexit types had a very clear idea what should replace membership in a hyperbureaucratic, hypo-democratic European pseudosuperstate: British law and regulations made in Britain, and free trade treaties with willing partners. As Edward Coke said about the “Petition of Right” in Parliament in 1628, “We have a national law appropriate to this kingdom. If you tell me of other laws, you are gone. I will only speak of the laws of England.”
Getting there would have taken work. But the question our pathologist must explore is why, instead of doing that work, somebody wrecked the negotiations. In all the stories about May’s “deal” with the Eurocrats, have you read one explaining what in it pushed her cabinet and caucus to revolt, why it was included, and why they balked?
OK, one really major issue is Ireland. EU membership allowed the U.K. largely to erase the boundary between north and south without sectarian warfare. It will be problematic to divide them or, worse, separate Ulster from England. But what else?
Scottish secession from the U.K. to stay in the EU? Perhaps. But how can Scotland supposedly waltz out of a Union dating to 1707, while the U.K. can’t struggle free from something only lowered from the roof, finger twitching, in 1993?
To be sure, it would have been laborious even to tally up all the rules made in Brussels that would lapse on BDay, let alone replace those not better abolished. But in principle a single statute, or writ of Praemunire, would have cleared away all the weeds, leaving Parliament to cultivate its own garden.
Then there’s free movement of people, things, services and money. But again it should have been simple in principle to move from Eurocracy to trade treaties. Coyne claims “It was always clear, contrary to the airy assertions of the Brexiteers, that the EU would have by far the stronger hand in any negotiations…” But why?
Britain is not some helpless mendicant. This damp crowded island nation somewhere foggy off the French coast has the world’s fifthlargest economy. European nations need it more than it needs them. Think Germany wants to be left alone with France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc.? Besides, Singapore and Hong Kong have shown that unilaterally adopting sensible policies works no matter what size beast you are.
If asked for details on why exactly the Mother of Parliaments could not become again the sole legal authority in Britain, Theresa May’s people could bury me in thousands of pages of fine print. But such tactics call to mind Ronald Reagan’s 1980 warning that “The fetish of complexity, the trick of making hard decisions harder to make — the art, finally, of rationalizing the non-decision, have made a ruin of American foreign policy.” They are symptom, not cause, of a loss of nerve.
It’s a curious feature of modern populism, from Brexit to Trump and beyond, that the deplorables appear to have more faith in self-reliance and selfesteem than the elite that condescends to them. May isn’t exactly what you’d call a conviction politician. But she and her people never produced a clear, workable exit option because, like so many in the chattering classes, they could not imagine Britain as a sovereign nation.
So as soon as the votes were counted on June 24, 2016, they started contriving deceitfully complex ways Britain could stay in the EU in fact while leaving in name. And it’s the remains of that contraption you’ll find at the crash site.
Coyne admitted it would have been better for Britons in 1975 to vote against joining the Common Market that mutated into the EU. But now it’s a fait accompli and you know, you can’t turn back the clock. Why not? How did the EU become a fish weir? Is the British government no longer capable of making policy?
You might think not. Like our own government, unable to buy a ship or pay its employees, a British state that can’t even leave a bad arrangement might be suspected of utter, irremediable incompetence. But behind the loss of cerebral function was loss of nerve.
Therein I diagnose the cause of this train wreck.
(MAY) NEVER PRODUCED A CLEAR, WORKABLE EXIT OPTION. — ROBSON