It may be down to the last 5 per cent but where’s the vision, the dream?
Theresa May insists that her version of Brexit is the only one that will work. That simply isn’t true
Never forget: we are living through Theresa May’s Brexit. She defined what the referendum was about, she set the red lines, she decided what kind of deal Britain should pursue. So when she told the House yesterday that she’s within 5 per cent of doing a deal, beware. It’s not what the country needs, it’s what she thinks she can get – and what we’ll end up with is a Brexit shaped by both this woman’s remarkable strength of will and her catastrophic lack of political vision.
Don’t let her tell you there was no alternative. My preference was for the Norway option: tell the EU we’re leaving, apply to join the European Economic Area, buy Britain time to negotiate a free-trade deal in the future. Alternatively, we could have offered the EU a free-trade deal asap – take it or leave it – and while they thought it over, prepared for a no-deal by putting in place the necessary infrastructure and lining up some juicy tax breaks. The money we’d save on the divorce bill – £39 billion – could help launch a lot of new businesses back home.
These models assumed that it was best to avoid lengthy negotiations with Brussels (ie let the EU set the terms of engagement) as Britain would get right royally screwed over – because the EU is clever and it doesn’t want Brexit to succeed. Instead, lo and behold, Britain did sit down with the EU, did run with a complicated European game plan and it did get screwed.
The fault for this lies directly with the Prime Minister. As a Remainer, she just didn’t get it: Mrs May assumed that Brexit was about immigration, so she put controlling free movement at the heart of her agenda and failed to seize the moral high ground by guaranteeing citizenship rights straight away.
More important, however, are the deficiencies that come with being the supreme technocrat. She sees life as a series of challenges to be overcome in order and by careful steps. Mrs May followed the EU’S route to Brexit, which seemed reasonable enough: first we talk money, then citizenship, then Northern Ireland, then trade.
But the EU set a trap – the Irish border – and Mrs May walked straight into it when, last December, she signed up to a customs arrangement backstop for Northern Ireland. This was not only unnecessary but, if she’d understood the referendum she would have known instinctively that it was counter to the spirit of Brexit. Brexit is about sovereignty and self-government; there’s nothing less sovereign than letting the EU split up the UK.
Even this need not have been a killer moment if Mrs May had reined in her bureaucratic desire for control. The Cabinet was not consulted on her chosen solution; her Chequers template deal was presented to them as inevitable, with the warning that if they rejected it, they’d not only be sacked but lose their ministerial cars and have to walk home.
When Mrs May says that she’s delivering what the people want – as she reiterated in the House – then by any standard of our democratic tradition she is lying. No one voted for Chequers; no one voted for either an all-uk indefinite backstop customs union (since “indefinite” is what all backstops by definition are) or for an extended transition period. No one voted for the UK to leave, only to continue to abide by rules over which Britain would cease to have any influence.
Of course, compromise to get what you want in the end can be fine: never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There is, for example, nothing inherently wrong with a few extra months of transition – if you can tell the public what they are buying time for and what we’ll get at the end. The greatest tragedy of Mrs May’s leadership is that she has squeezed the vision out of Brexit.
During the referendum it was my side – the Leavers – who were starry-eyed and idealistic. They won not on detail (the experts had a monopoly on that, and 52 per cent of us ignored what they said) but on the simple premise of national selfdetermination. A vote for Brexit was a vote of confidence in your country. Remain, by contrast, was the party of pragmatism, no less patriotic, just realistic. “We don’t love the EU,” they said, “no one does! But, on balance, we’re better off in than out.”
Now the roles are reversed. Watching the People’s Vote march for a second referendum at the weekend was eye-opening: why didn’t these people tell us they loved the EU so much two years ago? Today they drape themselves in the EU flag; they talk of human rights and solidarity. They have become the ideologues at the same time that, thanks to Mrs May, Leavers have been sunk into a sea of practical detail that it requires a PHD in constitutional law to understand.
In Mrs May’s hands, Brexit has become boring – and the odd thing is that this has done nothing to reassure those who still worry it could be apocalyptic. Rather than her leadership generating a sense of calm, it has spread panic, because she never tells us where everything will end up. What will Brexit Britain look like? Low tax? Fewer regulations? Free trade? Who knows? It ought to come with a day of celebration: a pop concert and commemorative mugs. Instead, it looms in the calendar like a dentist appointment, and the best Mrs May can offer is a Festival of Britain, which, knowing her, will focus on modernday slavery and the gender pay gap.
Beyond that, we are assured that Brexit might not be all that bad, although – and she’s absolutely clear about this – it is tricky. Thank goodness she wasn’t behind the Apollo Moon mission. “I’m not sure we should be going or how we’ll get there, but the good news is the rocket is 95 per cent completed.” That’s one spaceship I would not get into.
The remaining argument in her defence is perhaps she is a bad pilot but she is the only one we’ve got, and you’ve got to admire her for trying. For thinking this, we are being far too British. It’s a damning indictment of her colleagues for not having the courage to dump her – and of Mrs May, too, for not grasping her own limitations. Prime ministers set the tone, even if they can’t lead, and her style has convinced too many that there are indeed no alternatives to this tortured process, and so we must endure it. That is not so. Brexit can be beautiful, but we need a leader who, when they close their eyes, can see it for the opportunity it might yet be.