Forget Dancing Queen, May is facing her own Brexit Waterloo
Chair of Wales for Europe Geraint Talfan Davies looks back at the party conference season and predicts a stormy autumn ahead for Theresa May
IHAD always thought optics were things that dispensed whisky and gin in pubs. But these days it is the jargon word for the appearance rather than the substance of events – what things look and feel like to the public.
Thus, the content of a Boris Johnson or Theresa May speech may be less important than the impression of confidence conveyed by a Prime Minister jigging across a stage or the impression of popular clamour conveyed by a former Foreign Secretary being pushed through a jostling scrum of cameramen into a packed hall.
But beware. Optics of both kinds are short measures. Neither kind lasts long. In the end, substance and solid argument must and should win.
Besides, negotiators in Brussels and our current partners in Dublin are not going to be taken in by conference theatre. They will also turn a deaf ear to the ritualised abuse of opposing parties and yawn like the rest of us at the thesaurus of platitudes that pad out leaders’ speeches.
Conference organisers – both Labour and Tory – may this week have been complimenting themselves on getting through their respective events without blood on the floor, but that is a long way from the unity that is always called for at such events.
On Europe, there is a still a gulf between Labour’s passionately proEurope membership and its eggshell-treading senior leadership, though nothing like the yawning chasm that exists between wings of the Tory Party.
With conferences over, the battle returns to Westminster and this is where differing interpretations of the national interest will test party unity on both sides of the House, possibly to destruction.
Can any proposal on Europe in the coming weeks bridge these divides? Chequers 2.0, Norway, Canada, Canada-plus-plus-plus, Boris Johnson’s Super-Canada or any other permutation that is currently bewildering the public.
Will it be a bespoke deal – good? Or a cherrypicking deal – bad? And how will we tell the two apart? Of one thing only can you be certain, autumn 2018 will a season for the history books.
In some quarters there is optimistic talk that a deal may be possible in the next two weeks, but it is almost impossible to foresee one that would simultaneously buy off arch-Brexiters like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, DUP leader Arlene Foster and Brexit rebels such as Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry, let alone satisfying President Varadkar of Ireland, who has so much to lose, and France’s President Macron, who has been setting himself up as the carrier of the European torch. All this before we even get to Keir Starmer and Labour’s six tests.
And, of course, Mrs May emphatically rejects the idea of putting the question back to the people, although in language that does not bear a minute’s scrutiny.
She says that a new referendum would be not a People’s Vote but a “politicians’ vote”. Er, no. Politicians on both sides would campaign, but it is the people who would vote and with far more knowledge at their disposal than in 2016, including knowing the broad shape of any deal.
She said that if politicians tried to overturn the 2016 decision it would damage faith in our democracy.
Er, no. If the decision were to be overturned, it would be done by the people in an exercise of informed democracy. Since when was democracy the enemy of democracy?
She said “the people we serve are not interested in debates about the theory of Brexit – their livelihoods depend on making a success of it in practice”. At one level she is right. But Brexit is not a theoretical exercise. It is all too real. And like most things in life, it has a downside.
Most worryingly, none of the arguments coming from the Brexit camp point to a measurable rather than magical upside.
And yet, on the downside, we have mountains of government reports acknowledging the disastrous implications of a no-deal scenario, that, even if they do nothing else, demonstrate in enormous detail just how intricately interwoven we have become with the rest of the Europe over the past four decades.
Instead Mrs May had to rely instead on airy exhortation, as when she called on the conference to “back business”.
Nothing wrong with backing business, but the issue that is vexing many in this country is the very nature of big business, and how it can be changed to be more socially responsible and less short-termist.
Even the former Tory minister and Goldman Sachs alumnus, economist Jim O’Neill, now claims that these are issues on which “this Government has lost all sense of the public mood.”
He lists the issues as “the failures of the market, in so far as they affect such things as productivity, wages, geographic inequality, intergenerational inequality, house prices and the overall purpose of business”. That is one hell of a list.
Mrs May’s speech included a predictable call for unity – when would a politician ever expressly call for disunity? – but what kind of unity can there be in a country where inequality abounds, where classes and whole regions are left behind, and where bogus festivals are conjured up at great expense to paper over the cracks.
Imagine, if you will, the context for her proposed Festival of Britain in 2022. If we adhere to our fixed parliamentary terms, it would be the year of a general election that would be bitterly fought.
If Brexit proceeds, that 2022 election would also be fought out in difficult economic circumstances, with Britain still early in a period of difficult adjustment.
It’s possible we might still be in an extended post-Brexit “transition period”.
At worst, we could be toadying to Trump in search of some way of mitigating the damage done by Brexit.
The Scottish and Welsh parliaments could still be arguing with Westminster about the transfer of powers repatriated from Europe, as we would still be within the sevenyear period in which Westminster can hold on to those powers.
This will not be a benign climate in which to dragoon people – Scotland, Wales and the north of England especially – into an artificial celebration of our isolation.
How much better to think of ways of celebrating our solidarity with our own continent – such as calling the whole Brexit thing off.