Theresa May’s Brexit plan isn’t quite dead, it seems
The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’ mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities. They thereby leapt into a quagmire of negotiations with an EU determined to make separation sufficiently painful to discourage other nations from considering it.
On Tuesday, Parliament emphatically rejected the terms of separation that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the EU. So, there is no majority, in Parliament or the country, for anything other than, perhaps, a second referendum, which might be impossible to organize before the March 29 deadline for leaving the EU — although the EU might extend the deadline, hoping for a British reversal.
Britain’s 2016 referendum came hard on the heels of the 2015 surge of asylum-seekers into Europe. Much more than the margin of Brexit victory probably was provided by anxiety about Britain’s and Europe’s social cohesion. Since then, however, the immigration issue has cooled: Those identifying it as “the most important issue confronting Britain” plummeted from 48 percent in June 2016 to 17 percent in October 2018.
Of the four nations that comprise the U.K., Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain, Wales and England voted Leave. Many Remainers disparage many Leavers as “English nationalists.”
Diminishment and loss of control have been recurring British anxieties since the nation emerged depleted from World War II. In the Brexit debate, references to Suez have rekindled painful memories of the 1956 British-French-Israeli invasion intended to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The invasion was halted by a furious President Eisenhower using the leverage of Britain’s financial weakness. Brexit is an attempt to revive national control and stature. It is subtracting from both.
Brexiteers believe that the fact that leaving the EU has proven to be so difficult validates Euroskepticism. They ask: how calamitous can Brexit be? Very, respond Remainers, with increasing plausibility as the prospect of a “hard Brexit” — divorce with no new U.K.-EU legal and commercial relationships in place — becomes more probable.
Economic globalization, with the increasing importance of just-intime inventory management of complex supply chains, raises the stakes for Britain, whose trade with the EU far exceeds its trade with either America or China. Steep tariffs and other controls could snap into place March 29, and The Wall Street Journal reports that officials at the Port of Dover “estimate that for every two minutes of delay trucks experience before embarking (on cross-Channel ferries), a 17-mile traffic backup will be created on the M20 highway heading to the port.”
May’s stolid pursuit of other people’s goal — in the referendum she voted Remain — has evoked the criticism that “stamina is not a strategy.” Actually, it might be: As the March 29 deadline for leaving the EU draws near, her agreement might seem marginally less unpalatable than, and the only alternative to, a hard Brexit, which could be “into chaos leaping.”