Juliet SAMUEL
If Parliament fails to pass this deal, or mires it in delays, it’s clear MPS won’t accept Brexit in any form
He’s done it. Against the odds, the Prime Minister has found a Brexit withdrawal deal that enough of the country can live with. He looked at the trade-offs Theresa May had made, between rigid unionism and freedom from the Brussels yoke, and he made a different choice. And then he added a few EU concessions on top.
From the strong support in polling so far, and from the extraordinary sight of three wildly different MPS (Tory Remain, Tory Brexit and Labour Left) all backing the deal on
Newsnight, it’s clear that it is the closest we can get to a consensus. Yet it could still fail to pass Parliament today or get delayed yet again by Oliver Letwin’s amendment.
If that happens, we could be trapped in limbo. Our MPS will have shown they won’t accept Brexit in any form. Nor do they want an election. They are scared to let the public choose. So delay is their only recourse. They will try to hang on by their fingertips, waiting, hoping, praying for something to come up.
The parliamentary alliance against Mr Johnson is a motley one. Perhaps the only opponents of his deal to emerge with any honour are the DUP, who have correctly judged that unionism is the real casualty of our withdrawal. In order to free Great Britain from EU control, Mr Johnson has had to leave Northern Ireland behind. He has added in a mechanism to ensure ongoing Northern Irish consent for this arrangement, but the DUP has decided this isn’t enough. They might reflect that, had they backed Mrs May’s deal, the union might be rather better protected. Still, theirs is a principled, if self-defeating, position.
Then there are the others. All that can be said for the Liberal Democrats and the SNP is that they are at least honest about their goal. They hold voters in contempt, they want to stop Brexit and they don’t give a damn about the consequences. They and today’s anti-brexit marchers are full-blown anti-democrats who will use any means – legal ruses, foreign intervention, smears – to achieve their end. Their attempt to claim the mantle of “the people” campaigning for “a People’s Vote” fools no one.
The most interesting collection of dissenters, however, are the Labour MPS. Why, you might ask, would Labour not push this over the line and move the national debate on to territory more comfortable for their MPS, like public services? Why, if it is serious about any of its promises to honour the referendum result and serious about avoiding no deal, is it voting against all types of Brexit deal – soft, hard or parboiled? What sort of Brexit deal would the party endorse?
In a way, the answer is obvious. The party is terrified of going into an election against a triumphant Boris Johnson and a united Conservative Party that has delivered Brexit (even if this withdrawal deal is really only the start). Labour knows its position on Brexit is incoherent and its leader a liability.
In electoral terms, its position could actually be a miscalculation. If the deal passed, it’s possible the public would decide Mr Johnson were no longer needed and focus on Labour’s agenda instead. This would take the heat off Labour’s nonsensical Brexit policy and once again divide the Tories over their plan for the trade negotiations. Still, it’s impossible for Jeremy Corbyn not to oppose, because even if he is a not-so-secret Brexiteer, his party members would immediately decapitate him for delivering Brexit.
This is not the reason Labour gives for opposing the deal, of course. When asked, its MPS like to talk about how, although they most definitely aren’t opposed to the referendum result itself, they object strenuously to a “damaging Tory Brexit” or even a “Tory Trump Brexit”. A “Tory” Brexit withdrawal deal that gives the British government negotiating flexibility will, they argue, irreparably damage “workers’ rights”. Some Labour MPS use this line because they think it resonates (when in fact it makes people roll their eyes). Others truly seem to believe it.
On BBC Radio 4 yesterday, shadow chancellor John Mcdonnell rolled out this line again, imploring fellow Labour MPS with phoney humility not to destroy workers’ rights: “Please do not give this power to Boris Johnson.” For the first time, though, he was finally asked why exactly the British Prime Minister would inevitably loosen our labour laws.
His answer, in essence, was: “Boris Johnson”. In other words, he doesn’t back his own party to win an election to replace Mr Johnson and he doesn’t want to go to the effort of persuading the public to vote for his policies. He would outsource all decisions on labour policy to a foreign bureaucracy in which the UK has no representation rather than place his faith in British voters.
This is all the more jarring when you consider that Mr Mcdonnell touts his policies as “the biggest transfer of power” from “the few” to “the many” in modern British history. “Labour wants you to share in the running of your workplace, your community and your environment,” he declared to his party conference in Brighton last month. But it only wants you to share in that power if you agree with exactly what Mr Mcdonnell thinks you should do. If you don’t, it would rather a bunch of mandarins in Brussels wielded the power instead.
The truth, though, is that Labour’s radical agenda isn’t actually possible within the EU. The party says it wants to replace the markets with democracy, handing shares and power over corporate decisions to trade unions or the state. It wants to nationalise swathes of the economy, from travel agents to drug-making, and subsidise them. EU human rights, state aid and competition laws would ensnare these policies in a legal quagmire. That is precisely why old Eurosceptic socialists like Ronnie Campbell always wanted to leave and the reason why he will back Mr Johnson’s withdrawal agreement. Mr Corbyn and Mr Mcdonnell, in their more honest days, agreed with him. But now, they are afraid of the democracy they claim to champion, in case it doesn’t vote for them.
Parliament has tried its hardest to wrest control from the Government. It has nothing to show for its efforts. It rejected no-deal. It rejected the softer Brexit available under Mrs May. If it now rejects the harder one on offer from Boris Johnson on the grounds that it gives Britain too much freedom, if it then refuses to have an election until that freedom is taken permanently off the table, it will be clear that the mother of all Parliaments has the mother of all God complexes.
Parliament tried its hardest to wrest control from the Government. It has nothing to show for its efforts