Charles Moore:
Mrs May’s plans for a Remainer Brexit would leave us with less power than we currently have
Readers will probably remember the notorious Farage poster “Breaking Point” during the 2016 referendum campaign. It showed a winding queue of dark-skinned refugees/ immigrants. This week, the “People’s Vote” campaign (an organisation 100 per cent devoted to frustrating what the people voted for) produced an amusing parody. The words “Breaking Point” stay, but the faces at the front of the queue now consist of what the poster calls “the Brexit elites” who have “failed us all”: “The UK is being swamped by a tide of incompetents.”
Eager to discover who these “Brexit elites” might be, I identified, in the front rows, such luminaries as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-mogg (in a top hat) and Rupert Murdoch. The rows behind, however, contained several people whom I failed to recognise at all, although after a bit I realised that one of them was me. At the very back were some famous foreigners – Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Geert Wilders.
Even more surprising were two other front-row faces – Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, and Theresa May, the Prime Minister. Both of them are Remainers, and therefore in the wrong poster.
I could see the difficulty for the poster’s authors. There are no Brexit elites. Elites, by definition, hold power. We columnists (thank goodness) don’t. The only Brexiteers in the poster with any actual power are Liam Fox and Michael Gove, both of whom have allowed themselves to be neutralised; Chris Grayling and Andrea Leadsom, who are not key figures; and Mr Murdoch. None of the above – and no other Brexiteer – is in charge of the Brexit legislation or the negotiation of Mrs May’s deal. The deal to be voted on next week is entirely constructed by Remainers – the true tide of incompetents.
If you devised a version of the same poster to attack the Remain elites, there wouldn’t be room for one per cent of them. Once you had featured Mrs May, Philip Hammond, Greg Clark, Amber Rudd, David Lidington, David Gauke etc, from the Cabinet, added the Grieves, Letwins, Boleses etc, from the Tory benches, thrown in the Right-wing members of the shadow Cabinet, Sir Vince Cable, the Independent Group and the entire SNP, you would have to fit in the unelected ones – the governor of the Bank of England, a swathe of Whitehall mandarins, the CBI, the BBC, the university vice-chancellors, the TUC, the great majority of the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal, and even – nowadays – the Daily Mail.
On Tuesday, Mrs May will present a Remainer Brexit for the key parliamentary vote. It lets us “leave”, but makes us stay in the EU trading arrangements, with even less power than now and no opportunity to make our own deals. It ensures, through the backstop, that these vassal arrangements will be permanent. This walking (or rather, staggering) self-contradiction is essentially the same as what she presented at her ill-fated Chequers meeting last July. It is exactly the same as what she agreed with Brussels in November, and ducked a vote on until January this year. In that vote, she lost by 230 votes, the largest defeat for any British government measure ever.
(Over this weekend, Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, may suddenly produce a backstop rabbit from the Brussels hat. One suspects this from the way the Government is playing down the chances. But even if he does, one must remember that when a magician produces a rabbit, it is only a trick: nothing new is conjured into existence. M Barnier’s offer last night certainly came into the “nothing new” category.)
It is being widely asserted that MPS must now vote for what they previously scorned. When you boil it down, the only argument for this is that, if they don’t, in less than three weeks’ time we shall have left the European Union without a deal. The only word to describe this line is “insulting”. MPS have known for ages when we will leave, and they have also known for ages that if no deal were achieved, we would leave with no deal. They know this because they voted for it – 494 votes in favour of Article 50.
No one has known this better than Mrs May. She presided over the legislation and repeatedly declared that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. She then contradicted its spirit by not disciplining ministers – such as Hammond, Clark and Rudd – who publicly opposed the no-deal option. As a result, the EU knows it need concede nothing further, despite her pleading yesterday: she has abandoned her bottom line. So all she can do is go round in circles and come back with the same thing, hoping that her colleagues are now so terrorised that they will give in. The risks of no deal are greatly exaggerated, but she has stoked the fears by her brinkmanship. Yesterday in Grimsby, she warned that if her deal does not pass, “the only certainty will be ongoing uncertainty”. If that is so, it will be because of her tactics.
Some applaud Mrs May’s persistence. It would be nice to agree, because she is clearly working so hard. But one cannot. She is, in Churchill’s famous phrase, “adamant for drift”. She has set her heart on something not worth the winning.
And therefore not what 17.4 million people voted for. We voted to leave. She is offering something which locks us in. Even the EU has its Article 50 which (in theory at least) lets you depart. Mrs May’s deal has no equivalent. It is for ever, unless the EU later decides otherwise.
So those Members of Parliament who want to enact the referendum result and uphold the form of Brexit (no customs union, no single market), which both main parties offered in their manifestos at the 2017 general election, are now faced with the problem they have always expected. There aren’t enough of them in the House of Commons. What should they do?
If they vote down Mrs May’s deal, there will then be a vote to rule out the no-deal option, followed by a vote to seek from Brussels an extension of Article 50. It is expected that both these votes will be carried. The Brexiteers will then be accused of handing victory to the Remainers.
It is a serious problem – the wellknown danger of letting the best be the enemy of the good. But what about letting the best be the enemy of the dreadful? If loyal Brexiteers do not keep faith with the 17.4 million, what will be the aftermath? Who would be left to prevent the implosion of the Tory party – and perhaps the Labour Party – which would follow the betrayal? Who would speak for the newly disfranchised millions?
Besides, next week’s no-deal and Article 50 votes will be indicative only. Unless a new law is passed, or an extension graciously agreed by Brussels, we’ll be out on March 29. The chance of the full Brexit, though diminished, remains. Those who wish to prevent Brexit must be made to do so in the clear light of day, rather than hiding behind others.
There is one other interesting possibility which some are talking about. If Mrs May promised that she would leave as soon as her deal passed, she would quite likely get it through. Her “supreme sacrifice” would change the weather. A new leader with quite different ideas about the future relationship – yet to be negotiated – between Britain and the EU could be chosen. The cause of British independence might then live to fight another day.