SO WHAT NOW?
Tomorrow the European Council is expected to sign off on a Brexit deal between the EU and Theresa May. But as things stand, it looks like Britain’s MPs will reject the plan when it comes to a vote. Where will that leave us... and the UK? Could it lead to No Deal? Or, by killing off this deal, could the DUP and the Brexiteers in fact be ushering in a United Ireland?
EVERYWHERE I’ve been over the last week, people have been telling me how impressed they are with Theresa May. One after another, people who are generally appalled by everything to do with Brexit are queueing up to talk about her dignity, her resilience and her calm under fire.
And that’s the irony of politics: you can go from zero to hero just as fast as you make the opposite journey. In 2015, David Cameron won an unwinnable election and destroyed Ukip by promising a Brexit referendum: but by losing that popular vote – thanks largely to the worst political campaign I’ve seen in my lifetime – he is now to political leadership what Homer Simpson is to nuclear safety. More recently, our own Peter Casey went from being The Voice Of The Silent Majority to being The Voice The Majority Would Like To See Silenced. And now Mrs May has taken the opposite trajectory… from disaster to triumph.
Her nadir, let’s not forget, was less than 18 months ago. While still having two years to run as prime minister, she called an election in order to increase her majority – and lost it. She was such a hopeless campaigner that she boycotted her own election debates, sending a deputy to speak for her on TV instead. She had managed to achieve a contortionist’s world record: simultaneously cutting off her nose to spite her face while also backing herself into a corner, dropping the ball, shooting herself in the foot (yes, the one she’d just put in her mouth) and hoisting herself by her own petard. Not even Phineas T Barnum could have dreamt up that one.
And yet there she is now, showing astonishing reserves of dignity, composure and inner steel as she fights for her Brexit deal, having seen off the rebels in her own party with dismissive ease.
Yet all that may still not save her.
THE problem is not her: it’s the Brexit deal – and the politics of Westminster. The deal itself is completely unacceptable to somewhere between 30 and 50 Conservative MPs, and deeply disquieting to another 50 or so (as we saw from Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab on Thursday). That means up to 100 Tories could vote against it when it comes before the House of Commons next month. Now in a Parliament of 650 MPs, that shouldn’t make a difference: you only need 326 MPs to back the deal and it’ll succeed. And we all assume, surely the other 550 will vote in what we perceive to be the UK’s national interest. Aha! The truth is, of course, that they will vote in their party’s best political interests.
So as things stand, 250-odd Labour MPs will almost certainly vote against the deal: not because they object to it in principle (in fact it’s probably almost exactly the same deal as they would do in power), but because if they can torpedo it, that might cause a crash general election – which is their best hope of beating the Tories. And to Labour MPs there is nothing – nothing! more important in the world than beating the Tories. Would they sacrifice the British national interest to do that? In a heartbeat! They’d sacrifice their own mothers to beat the Tories (and probably children too). It’s not just in their DNA: it IS their DNA.
(Even the few moderate Labour MPs left in Parliament are being told by their own hero, Tony Blair, to vote against this package – in the hope of sparking a second referendum. So there seems little likelihood of them rebelling against the Labour line either.)
Besides, if they let this deal pass, Mrs May will have another four years in power: she’ll be able to present herself as the Iron Lady Nua, the pragmatic leader who delivered a deal that everyone said was impossible. That’s a pretty powerful image for her to put before the British electorate. And the Labour party would have facilitated it…
Equally, the SNP’s 35 MPs seem set to vote against the deal for the same reasons: it might help get the Tories out, whereas supporting the deal would keep them in. Besides, anything that destabilises Brexit will be seen as helping them towards their ultimate goal of independence. The same with Plaid Cymru. The LibDems will vote against the deal because they oppose Brexit. The Independents will vote against it because they’re independent. And we know all about the DUP…
This bizarre but broad antideal alliance gives the ‘No’ vote at least 360, possibly more than 400 – far more than the 325 votes needed to block it. So unless something absolutely extraordinary happens, there seems no way this deal can get through the UK parliament. Indeed, Ms May’s own advisers are already planning around that eventuality: they’re qui-
etly working away on some kind of second proposition to put to Parliament once the deal itself is voted down. For now, all their energy – and that of the UK business community – is desperately being brought to bear on trying to get Tory Brexiteer MPs to change their minds.
That campaign has been helped by the clownish incompetence of the ‘coup’ led by Jacob Rees-Mogg: but persuading the core of ardent Eurosceptics to vote for this plan remains a very big ask.
So if Mrs May does lose the vote, what happens then? Possibly, nothing: it’s not a confidence vote, so technically, Mrs May could soldier on. But where can she go? She’s said this is the best deal that can be got: and given the EU is saying there’s no room for renegotiation, it’s hard to see her improving it. Could she really guide Britain to a No Deal exit? Probably not: and if she tried, enough Remain MPs from her own side would vote with the opposition to bring her down.
A strong possibility, then, is a general election: and given the lack of appetite for a leadership change now, Ms May would probably go into that election as Tory leader.
Indeed she could use such an election to try to seek a popular mandate for her deal – much as the pro-Treaty side in 1922 claimed that general election here as a mandate for the Anglo-Irish Treaty. (Bear in mind that for all this Tory acrimony, they’re still level in the polls with Labour: Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters may idolise him, but the majority of the British public actually don’t want a 1970s-style Trotskyite running their country. The 1970s in Britain were pretty awful – and the country hasn’t elected a genuine leftwing prime minister since.)
If Labour were to win, though, it could herald something utterly seismic for Ireland. Both Mr Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell are Brexiteers – they despise the EU and want to take Britain out of it. But they’re also ardent Irish Republicans who want to unite this island. And a Corbyn government with a reasonable majority could do both.
Labour could insist on taking Britain out of the EU, on much the same terms as the current Brexit deal: a pledge to follow EU rules and customs levels in order to facilitate free(ish) trade. The big difference, though, is that they would happily agree to Northern Ireland staying in the single market and customs union.
They would sell this as being solely in the name of avoiding a hard border: in truth, they’d be hoping to advance the cause of uniting Ireland. The North would be subject to the same rules, regulations and taxes as Dublin and there would be no border across the island: by contrast, there would have to be a customs border in the Irish Sea (and quite possibly a security border too).
Mr McDonnell said only a few months ago that he ‘longs for’ a United Ireland. And while he added a caveat about this needing to be the democratic will of the people of the North, doing a special Brexit deal for the North would not break that commitment. The key point is that officially, Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK: it would just be subject to a different set of customs and regulatory ar-rangements.
SUPPORTERS would argue that Scotland, for example, has the power to set different in-come tax rates than England, while still being part of the UK: this deal would work on the same lines. Besides, Northern Ireland has different rules on gay marriage, abortion, licensing and shopping from mainland Britain: this arrangement would, in their eyes, simply be an extension of that principle.
The DUP would bitterly resent it – but they are committed to accepting the rule of the UK parliament: if that’s what the majority of MPs at Westminster were to vote for, they would have no choice but to accept it.
It would not legally change the constitutional position of Northern Ireland as regards the UK – certainly not to the point of requiring a border poll. Also, Messrs Corbyn and Co. could point out that the North voted against Brexit: this decision would therefore be presented as respecting the will of the people. In reality, of course, it would be a major stagingpost towards a united Ireland – indeed, possibly the most profound change in that regard since the Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified in 1922.
And so we stare into the unknown. Standing back from it all, it’s not hard to see why so many Tories are against Mrs May’s deal. Ultimately, it commits the UK to accepting all future rules and regulations of the EU without having any say in making them. (That concept might sound familiar to students of Irish or American history). Unlike most treaties, it is an arrangement they could never leave. They could well argue that it is not what 17.4million people voted for back in 2016. And it does unquestionably create differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK – something many of them simply cannot accept.
And yet, in a political story replete with more ironies than Alanis Morrisette’s failure to understand the word ‘ironic’, we could be about to witness the greatest political irony of our times. By killing off this deal for undermining the Union, the DUP and their supporters could actually end up ushering in a United Ireland. Now that would give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Taking Back Control’…