No winners in Britain’s Brexit crisis
Failed by both its major parties, betrayed Britain lurches towards the abyss, writes Andrew Rawnsley.
THE seesaw is smashed. The pendulum is stuck. The tides are frozen. All the trusty images that used to help explain British politics have been scrambled by Brexit.
Back in simpler times, a bad week for one politician or party translated into a good one for a rival. Seesaws went up and down. Pendulums swung. It is one of the unique characteristics of the Brexit crisis that it makes winners of none and losers of all. The past seven days have demonstrated that this is a wind so ill that it blows noone any good.
The most deserved losers are the Brexit ultras. They finally launched their leadership coup and failed miserably. Without a plausible plan or a credible leader, these are the men who put the ass into assassin. After all their prating about ‘‘taking back control’’, they couldn’t even organise the removal of a mortally wounded prime minister.
The Brexit fanatics have always been a minority of a minority and now noone can be in any doubt about that. And this same gang claim they could negotiate a superior agreement with the EU or handle a nodeal Brexit in 100 days that are left? Oh, please. Yet there was no humility in defeat from the ultras. It was with a poisonous lack of grace that they continued to demand May’s resignation even after she had prevailed in the confidence vote they forced upon their party.
Alas for her, the defeat of her tormentors did not amount to a victory for the prime minister. To keep her job for now, she had to pledge to give it up before the next election. May purchased her survival in the currency of humiliation.
For her, it is always crisis and never catharsis. The Brexit fanatics will still not vote for her deal. These political arsonists would rather torch their party and their country’s economy than compromise. May remains imprisoned by the parliamentary maths, her past mistakes and her lack of dexterity.
After all the to and fro between Westminster and European capitals, pinging from one side of the Channel to the other like a battered shuttlecock, there is no better prospect of her deal passing the Commons than there was when she swerved the vote. European leaders have little inclination to make substantial concessions to help her and they have no incentive without a guarantee that she can get the agreement through Parliament, a promise she cannot give.
Insomuch as May has an idea about what to do next, it is to delay the moment of reckoning until we are hard against the deadline. If she is allowed to get away with postponing the vote until the second half of January, there will be a sharp escalation in the risk of Britain hurtling over the cliff edge.
Several of her senior ministers regard this doordie strategy as sensationally reckless. One faction of the Cabinet is headed by Jeremy Hunt, a man with such an impeccable sense of timing that he declared himself a bornagain Brexiter just when the full magnitude of its horrors were revealing themselves. This groupuscule wants to prepare for what it likes to call a ‘‘managed no deal’’. That euphemism is designed to veil what a dreadful outcome it would be.
A second grouping, the most vocal of whom has been Amber Rudd, suggest pushing towards some iteration of ‘‘Norway’’ in the hope this would attract sufficient support from opposition MPs to be viable.
A third and overlapping element of the Cabinet, which includes David Liddington, the de facto deputy prime minister, is shuffling towards the lifeboat called ‘‘another referendum’’ as the only escape that may be left when every other option has been exhausted.
The executive is flailing, but unfortunately this has not meant that Parliament has taken the opportunity to assert itself. After more than 160 MPs had spoken in the five days of debate on May’s deal, the Commons could not stop the Prime Minister running away from the vote. The Speaker huffed, MPs puffed, but all their outrage was wasted breath.
It is clear what ought to happen now. Before the clock runs down, the sensible MPs who care about their country need to take the initiative and establish a mechanism to determine which, if any, of the possible resolutions to the Brexit nightmare might command majority support. Yet most MPs are still too trapped in partisan tribalisms and the pursuit of shortterm tactical advantage to initiate the crossparty pursuit of a solution that is urgently required.
Were the traditional seesaw of politics still functioning, we would expect such a terrible week for the governing party to produce at least one clear winner: the official opposition. The last time that British politics went through anything comparable to this was during the Tory party’s savage struggles over the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. That extended bout of Tory fratricide, which now looks like an epoch of peace and goodwill in comparison with the demons unleashed by Brexit, helped to propel Labour into a doubledigit poll lead. This was a harbinger of a landslide victory at the subsequent election.
In this respect, history is not repeating itself at all. Our Opinium poll indicates Labour is deriving no benefit whatsoever. In the midst of the worst period for the Conservative Party since the ERM crisis, the poll tax, Suez, the Corn Laws etc, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has become less popular and the leader’s personal ratings are even more negative than those of the Prime Minister. Labour is getting a similar warning from the private polling that the party commissions.
There may be all sorts of complicated explanations for Labour’s failure, but the root cause is pretty simple. The party’s leadership has been rumbled. Labour’s own version of fantasy Brexit has been to pretend that it could negotiate a deal that gave Britain the benefits of EU membership from the outside. The voters aren’t buying this bogus prospectus. Despite it all, the public trusts Corbyn with Brexit even less than it trusts May. People can see the Labour leadership obsesses about Brexit process questions because it doesn’t want to grip the issues of principle. The endless ducking and diving about when they might call a noconfidence vote against the Government makes Labour look like opportunists hoping to luck into office on the back of Brexit turmoil rather than a party with the national interest at heart. At the heart of it is Labour’s continuing refusal to come clean about whether it will or will not support another referendum. What has always smelled of unprincipled tactical prevarication now reeks of a refusal to be honest with the electorate.
Failed by both its major parties, the biggest loser of all is Brexitbroken Britain. Our country is careening towards disaster. All of its political institutions know this. None of them seem capable of arresting it. They continue to play their games of charades as we lurch towards the abyss.