Brexit mess will benefit Ireland a little, but not a lot
But the UK election outcome is bad for Northern Ireland and makes Brexit messier and riskier for the entire island, writes Dan O’Brien
POLITICAL out- comes that almost nobody predicted have become more common in western countries. And Britain has been particularly unpredictable.
An overall majority for David Cameron in the UK’s general election 25 months ago is one example. The absence of debate on Brexit during the campaign just ended is another. Last week’s failure by Theresa May to convert the advantage the Conservatives consistently held over Labour, from the time Jeremy Corbyn became leader until a mere few weeks ago, is yet another.
Developments in Britain’s politics and economy affect the lives of everyone on this island. Who rules the UK and the policy choices they make have always mattered on this side of the Irish Sea.
That remains the case despite Ireland’s internationalisation. While Ireland’s ties with continental Europe and the US have made Britain relatively less important in recent decades, on these islands west-east and south-north connections have grown in absolute terms. Disrupting those connections would be costly.
Brexit will do exactly that. It changes almost everything for this country’s relationship with its nearest neighbour and, at the very least, complicates north-south relationships. Last Thursday’s election has further changed the dynamics, both for the politics of Northern Ireland and for Brexit.
For the DUP, which will prop up the new UK administration, to have such sway over one of the signatory governments to the Good Friday Agreement can only weaken the deal’s already fragile superstructure.
Just as having Sinn Fein in government in this republic would erode the trust nonSinn Fein voters in the North have in Dublin to act as an honest broker, non-DUP voters now have every reason to fear that May’s new administration will not act impartially in Northern Irish affairs.
At a time when so much else is in flux on these islands, adding this new element of uncertainty and instability into the mix is a hugely negative consequence for Ireland emerging from the UK election.
It can only deepen divisions between the two communities in Northern Ireland, particularly as the centre ground of the UUP and SDLP continues to shrink. Pressure for a border poll will surely build.
If May had a disastrous election, Corbyn did better than polls had suggested over the period since he became leader. That said, he becomes the seventh of the last eight leaders of the British Labour party never to win a general election. With the Scottish nationalists’ loss of more than 20 seats almost offsetting Labour gains, it is very hard to see how Corbyn could make up the numbers to govern at any point during the current parliament.
But he will remain Labour leader and that is not good for Ireland. Corbyn has been an ineffective leader of the opposition and has shown little interest in softening the Brexit course charted by May, something that is very much in Ireland’s interests. There is little reason to think that this will change as the terms of Brexit are negotiated over the next 18 months.
The biggest change coming out of last Thursday’s election is how it has weakened May. None of the plausible outcomes of the election augured well for Ireland, in so far as both big parties are committed to Brexit. But the least bad outcome was probably a big majority for the Conservatives, on the basis that May, who has never been a Eurosceptic, would have had a personal mandate and a large enough majority so as not to be at the mercy of the Brexit extremists in her own party.
By losing the majority she inherited, by becoming dependent on the DUP and by failing to stand up to scrutiny during the campaign, her political lifespan has been shortened. The prospect of a challenge to her leadership emerging in the near term, and during the Brexit negotiations, is now a real possibility.
Among the factors that have shown how damaged May’s authority has been is the near complete absence of focus on Brexit during the campaign. She put it front and centre at the beginning of the long election campaign. It was her reason for calling the election. But nobody paid much attention.
British political blogger Ian Dunt observed last week that when historians look back on the campaigns that culminated in last Thursday’s election, “they will marvel at how an advanced democracy could hold a general election without addressing the issue which was about to change it forever”.
That, however curious it may seem to political anoraks, reflects public opinion.
In the decades since the UK joined the EU, there has never been an election in which opinion surveys showed European matters to be among the most salient issues for voters.
Hard Brexiteers and passionate pro-Europeans make up small minorities. Most British people do not view Europe as being particularly important, one way or the other.
If anything, Europe was even less salient for voters this time than in past elections. The UKIP vote collapsed and the only all-Britain parties committed to holding a second referendum — the Lib Dems and the Greens — made no gains on the 2015 election, winning less than 9pc of the vote combined. That the overwhelming majority of the 48pc of those who voted to stay in the EU a year ago did not back parties opposing Brexit shows how low the salience of the issue is for most Remainers.
If there is any positive to come out of the campaign and its outcome from an Irish perspective, it is that the notion of turning the UK into “Singapore-on-Thames” is now as dead as a dodo.
For many advocates of Brexit, leaving the EU offered not only the prospect of enacting all legislation implemented in the UK in Britain exclusively, but that legislative powers could be exercised with a view to making Britain ultra-competitive for business, both British and foreign.
The route to ultra-competitiveness, in the view of this group, was to cut regulation on business and shrink the size of the state so that taxes could be slashed. Had this route been taken, a threat would have been posed to Ireland’s economic model, which is so heavily centred on foreign companies.
But that is emphatically not the direction Britain is now going. It is safe to assume that those who voted for the most left-wing Labour party in living memory did not want a radical shift to the free market right. More importantly, the party in power has moved towards bigger, not smaller, government.
The Conservative manifesto was peppered with left-leaning commitments and favoured a greater role for the state, rather than a Singapore-style one.
The manifesto included a cap on energy prices. That was a Labour idea from the 2015 campaign which the Tories then labelled Marxist. While not hugely significant in and of itself, it does give a sense of how much the economic policy direction of the party has changed under May’s leadership.
The manifesto didn’t say much about tax either way, but as much of it favours greater state intervention, it is easier to see taxes going up rather than down over the coming years.
There are also a number of the policy positions proposed in the manifesto that business would not embrace. Shifting the balance of rights towards employees and away from employers is one. Another is putting up barriers to foreign capital, in the form of making mergers and acquisitions more difficult. Yet another is the high priority given to cutting immigration, which will make hiring foreign talent harder.
None of this is to say that Ireland has nothing to worry about — if Britain does not have to comply with EU state-aid rules after it leaves, it could offer companies based in Ireland big grants to lure them across the water.
But the double whammy of being outside the EU’s single market and having a less than pro-business government makes Britain a much less appealing place for investment than it was in the past. Political instability and uncertainty will not make it any more appealing.
If the election has clarified Britain’s economic policy direction, it has made Brexit even messier than it was before. The weakness of the new administration has also increased the risk of Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement with the bloc.
That would be the worst possible outcome for everyone on these islands.
‘Non-DUP voters now have every reason to fear that May’s new administration will not act impartially...’