Our kamikaze PM
Is there no betrayal May won’t countenance in order to push through her Remainer Brexit?
Has it really come to this? Are we really stuck with a Tory Prime Minister who believes Jeremy Corbyn to be the country’s last hope of salvation? Is this just a nightmare from which we are all about to awake, or is Theresa May actually for real?
Corbyn, for those who are now so afflicted with Brexit Derangement Syndrome that they need reminding, is the most dangerous leader in Labour’s history, a hard‑core socialist desperate to tax, nationalise and control, a man who has allowed his party to be infected by a posse of despicable anti‑semites and who is soft on national security. Preventing him from gaining power ought to be any self‑respecting Tory MP’S primary purpose: it is the reason we still have a Conservative Party.
Yet Mrs May clearly doesn’t care that her alliance is not just legitimising Corbyn but also risks robbing her party of its most powerful narrative: that Labour has been hijacked by extremist incompetents who cannot be allowed anywhere near No 10. If Labour can suddenly be trusted over Brexit, the greatest question of our day, then it surely must also be
credible on the economy, education, the police and the rest – or at least, that is what many voters will be thinking.
In fact, Mrs May’s argument is even more kamikaze, even more irresponsible than that: she is implying that Corbyn is more sensible on Brexit than many of her own MPS, let alone the DUP. They are the extremists; Corbyn isn’t. He, unlike them, might be willing to sign up to her deal, which she sees as the epitome of reasonableness, in return for allowing the EU to keep even more powers over our laws and government. As declarations of war against one’s own MPS, donors and members go, this one takes some beating.
It pains me to write this, but she evidently wasn’t telling the truth when she kept promising that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, except in a trite sense. She must have always been willing to sign up to almost anything, with ending free movement and technically leaving the EU her only real red lines. In practice, to her, any such deal was always going to be better than leaving without one. More fool those who took her repeated pledge, including in her manifesto, at face value.
Mrs May isn’t the only one to have taken leave not just of her senses but also of her moral bearings. Oliver Letwin, one of the co‑leaders of the parliamentary putsch that had so far failed to deliver an uber‑soft Brexit, says of Mr Corbyn that he is “someone we can do business with on Brexit”. For such an intelligent man, it was the latest in a very long line of terrible errors of judgment. His ultimate victory – keeping us in as much of the EU as possible – looms, but he will leave a wrecked constitution, a broken party and an empowered, strengthened neo‑marxist alternative.
Why do the Brexiteers care so much? Why are they so angry, so determined to fight the sell‑out? One answer can be found in a fascinating paper by Matthias Matthijs, Craig Parsons and Christina Toenshoff, published in Comparative European Politics. It confirms that the Eurosceptics were right: the EU is in some ways now more centralised than the United States.
This is already true of the EU’S two flagship policies – the single market and the eurozone – where national differentiation and experimentation are now all but illegal, unlike in the US, where states have far more autonomy. Federal constraints are more flexible even though, paradoxically, the US economy is far more integrated than the European one, proving that harmonisation isn’t necessary to promote cross‑border trade and mobility.
As the paper notes, US states face far less “central oversight over fiscal policy, current account rules, and structural reform than the eurozone”. A number of US federal agencies are responsible for the regulation and minimum standards of certain goods, such as toys, cars, food, alcohol, cigarettes, many chemicals and medical devices. But unlike in the EU, where all of these rules are also centralised, states can set higher standards if they choose to. California operates its own standards in 800 areas; the equivalent number for the UK is zero. On top of that, many US goods aren’t regulated by the federal government, so in those areas states have greater powers than EU members. Lifts are a case in point: different rules apply in different states.
As to services, the US is even more decentralised, with states imposing their own laws when it comes to everything from lawyers to architects. Last but not least, US states are freer when it comes to awarding public‑sector contracts: it’s the very opposite of the EU, where countries are bound strictly by common rules. The US system is too protectionist and anti‑competitive, and in need of drastic reforms, but the point is that the EU now operates more like a single country in many areas than even America. The extent of the centralisation has been extraordinary, and the process won’t end until all differences and all national self‑ government have been stamped out.
Mrs May doesn’t understand or care about any of this: as a technocrat in awe of officials, she sees Brexit as an absurd damage‑limitation exercise. There appears to be nothing she won’t sacrifice to stop a real Brexit, no principle she won’t give up, no solemn promise she won’t break, no betrayal that she won’t countenance. Does she not care that she is pushing the DUP and many of her MPS away, and that this will probably mean the collapse of her Government within weeks?
The events of the past few days confirm that as far as Mrs May is concerned anything, anything at all, is better than leaving without a deal, even consorting with an enemy hated and loathed by Tory voters, members and (almost all) MPS. She appears to be prepared to sacrifice not just trust in our political institutions but the very party she claims to have dedicated her life to. Her supposed sense of duty amounts to little more than a desperation to cling to office for a few days more, a stubborn attachment to her deal, a bizarre, ancien régime belief that l’état, c’est moi, that only she can deliver a workable Brexit. It’s an unforgivable, scorched‑earth strategy, and one that can but end in tears.