Sadly, another round of negotiation and a few further years of uncertainty are what everyone is offering. We will be in negotiations with the EU at least until Dec 2020 whether we leave with a deal or not. Johnson is trying to claim that he can “Just get Brexit done” but that’s not how it works. So the question is whether it’s worth Labour keeping Johnson in place long enough for it to become clear that “Just get Brexit done” is nonsense.
Ruling out no-deal can only be done by agreeing a deal or rescinding Article 50. Otherwise it is the default. This is, still, an excuse by Corbyn not to hold the election he has been calling for for months.
I agree, you’d be surprised about how many people think Labour not agreeing to the election is a sign of cowardice and not political shrewdness.
This is true but I think the concern now is that Johnson’s WAB has a poison pill clause that means even his deal could lead to No Deal.
Specifically, there’s a clause which says Parliament will only get a vote on the trade deal agreed in next round of negotiations if the government decide to put it to a vote. Unless that motion is brought, the outcome of the trade deal is solely in the hands of government. So the fear is that Parliament passes the WAB, Johnson gets his deal and then in 12 months time announces that the trade talks have reached an impasse, he won’t be asking for an extension and the UK’s relationship from the EU will henceforward be WTO-only. Certainly, this is what various ERG members have alleged they were promised to get them to vote for the deal.
The question with Johnson is always, “yes, but who’s he lying to?” but I can understand if people want that clause dealt with now rather than hoping Johnson is conning the ERG and not them.
That’s outrageous in anybody’s book. So much for “take back control” in the name of democracy.
And the opposition’s answer to this is… to keep Johnson as PM. They are also refusing to take back control, or allow the public to vote.
The risk is not that Boris will refuse to bring a trade deal to Parliament; the risk is that a trade deal won’t be ready–and given that major EU trade deals usually average more than 6 years for completion this is a high risk.
So, the EU agrees to an extension to Jan 31.
Does this work in Boris’ favour or not? On the one hand, there’s that ditch, short one occupant on Thursday. On the other hand, Corbyn’s just about run out of excuses for not having an election, hasn’t he (not that I think he needs one, realpolitik being excuse enough)?
Also, “flextension” is a stupid word.
So, Boris’s biggest vulnerability in an election comes from the right: the Brexit Party will try to be a home for those who don’t think the government is doing enough to make Brexit happen good and hard. Currently, this isn’t much of a threat - the Tories are polling about 35-40% and the BP aren’t really in the picture. But this is because Boris has been making a lot of noise about trying to get Brexit done by Oct 31st. Now this definitely won’t happen.
The question for Labour is, can they/the Brexit Party make the charge of “Boris backed down on Brexit” stick well enough that Leave votes split between Tories and BP? If so, this will be a huge boost for them electorally. However, the counter to this is the fairly obvious point that it was Labour/Remainers with their Benn Act that forced Boris to miss his date. “Parliament screwed you over; I’m the only one on your side” is the election Johnson wants to fight, and it’s looking like the election he’ll get. Labour will need to run the slightly more nuanced campaign of:
- Boris failed.
- OK, yes, because we stopped him.
- It’s good that we stopped him because his deal was terrible/led to No Deal.
- Please don’t give him the majority he needs to do that thing you wanted him to do.
In other words, if they can’t get point 3 to land, they’re toast. Which means explaining. And when you’re explaining…
It seems a fairly simple easy point for Boris to make doesn’t it? He can, quite accurately, point to all of the tactics employed by Labour and remainers of all stripes to ensure that it couldn’t happen on 31st October.
Ha! and actually just now as I’m typing in The Guardian, the leader of Plaid Cymru has said
She is outright admitting that Parliament “conspired” to make it impossible for Boris to carry out what he promised to do. That’s handing Johnson an election headline right there and I’m sure that although I’m using scare quote around conspired, Johnson won’t.
Yeah. I think it is possible to thread the needle somewhat and go for the line: Boris is full of bluster and talks a good game, but he’s weak, can’t plan and folds at the first sign of opposition. We made him fold, so we’re better at this game than he is.
But unless the various opposition parties can sell the (IMO accurate) idea that leaving with Boris’s deal on the 31st October was a really bad idea even in terms of getting Brexit done, and that no-one really wanted that bad idea to happen (IMO arguable) and that therefore they, the opposition, are on the side of the people – then that first para will only take them so far. But! it might land with the people the opposition need it to land with, which is hard Brexiters who will back Farage as the strong leader who can get the job done. Might being the word.
I think it works more for Boris for the reasons you suggest. Corbyn really has no excuses left for dodging an election that still stand up to scrutiny. If the FTPA vote doesn’t get the nod (this needs a two-thirds majority) and Labour vote against it, but then a Tory or Lib-Dem bill for an election passes with a simple majority (and Labour don’t vote for it) they look rather more foolish than they already do.
And I agree “flextension” is moronic, but I’m betting it won’t be the last or worst. I think that because this has gone on so long with no-one actually able to report any substantive news, the journalists are now mainly employed dreaming up ever more idiotic portmanteaus and labels for legislation.
No, it’s not. The Brexit process was moving along nicely until the vote to limit the debate to 3 days–which failed to pass. Boris could simply have agreed to a longer debate–and the House of Commons could have passed still have passed Brexit by October 31–but he instead paused the legislation. It still would need a short extension for the House of Lords and EU passage–which there wouldn’t have been any problem with. Thus I think his pausing the bill will have a significant negative effect on the “Get Brexit Done” believers.
The Brexit bill would probably have some damaging amendments from his point of view but if there was an immediate General Election and he came back with a large majority they could be removed after Parliament reconvened.
Well, Johnson’s pledge was to have exited by Oct 31st, not to have got a bill through the Commons.
That doesn’t really take away from your point that the biggest obstacle to hitting that date has been Johnson’s (and Cumming’s) oh so clever tactical maneouvering. The three-day debate limit, the pro-roguing that wasn’t, all the bluster about unsigned letters etc. - at best it wasted time, at worst it cemented opposition. If they’d been straightforward they could have got the deal passed, even if a few days into November. But they got obsessed with clever-clever tactics instead of actually winning round opponents and here we are.
However, just because Johnson has presided over a series of tactical and strategic fuck-ups that got in the way of his professed Oct 31 goal, doesn’t mean people will blame him for it. Going by the polls, they aren’t.
(And this generalises! Brexit was a Tory party cause celebre; the Referendum was explicitly intended to silence internal Tory arguments over it; the negotiations with the EU have been carried out by Tory governments. Those governments bent over backwards to get deals that would satisfy their own party rather than a cross-party majority in Parliament. Where we are now is where the Tory party got us. They are the ones in the position of responsibility for this mess; more than that, they actually are responsible for it. And yet they are not taking the massive reputational hit that you think would go along with running this shitshow. Weird, huh?)
So the opposition parties have again blocked an election. This is frankly a disgrace. They are not willing to allow the government to govern. not willing to hold the government accountable, nor are they willing to govern themselves. Their lies about not holding one until no deal is off the table are transparent, and are only giving more credibility to Johnson. At this rate, he is going to come out of this mess actually looking like a leader and a statesman, Parliament will look like a joke, and measures he might take in the future to prevent this sort of stalemate happening again will look reasonable.
Parliament may be supreme, but it has a duty to exercise that supremacy to govern, and they are failing dismally in that duty. The EU may have blinked this time (unfortunately, it just makes them look weak) but that won’t happen forever, eventually one country will get sick of it.
I don’t see this at all. Labour and others never promised to deliver Brexit by 31 October. The fetishisation of that date was entirely Boris’s choice, and nobody - particularly not the opposition parties - were under any obligation to support him or gratify his fetish for him.
What has happened is that Johnson made a promise that he couldn’t, and didn’t, deliver. Pointing to the reasons why he couldn’t and deliver doesn’t vindicate Johnson in any way; it just underlines his error in making the promise in the first place. And it highlights the fact that he never had a realistic prospect of delivering it. He couldn’t deliver Brexit with a deal on 31 October because, in order to get a deal with the EU, he had to accept terms that he knew would alienate support that he needed to get the deal approved in parliament. And he couldn’t deliver Brexit without a deal on 31 October because he goaded Parliament into legislating to prevent this.
I don’t see that any of this is going to be an electoral asset.
They are willing to allow the government to govern. They have voted to move on to consideration in detail of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill which the government has introduced, which is the usual legislative procedure. It’s the government that’s throwing its toys out of the pram - they want the Bill enacted without consideration in detail, and don’t want to proceed to consideration in detail. This is bizarre, frankly, and it’s pretty much the opposite of making Johnson look like a leader and a statesman. It’s very much of a piece with the arrogance and petulance that has characterised his administration from the start.
All EU member states are already sick of it, but there’s a limit to what they can do here to make the UK act like a grown-up country.
The EU is basically in a damage limitation exercise. Brexit with a deal is less harmful to the EU and its member states than a crash-out Brexit so, as long as the UK keeps asking for extensions, and as long as there’s any prospect of a deal being ratified during an extension, the EU will grant extensions.
Now that an extension to 31 January has been sought, offered and accepted, Johnson has two choices. He can allow Parliament to consider and possibly agree to the deal he has negotiated, in which case the UK can leave (before 31 January, if they finish the process in good time). Or he can try to build a coalition in support of an early election, in the hope that that will return a Parliament likely to approve the deal (though, presumably, the new Parliament will expect to consider the legislation in detail, as is usual, and it will be hard for Johnson to continue refusing. The only reason ever offered for passing the legislation without scrutiny, to gratify Johnson’s 31 October fetish, no longer has any traction.)
I don’t know what you mean by “fetishisation” but that date was set earlier in the year and not by Johnson. It was an E.U. deadline. If that date doesn’t mean anything then what date ever will? Are we now committed to defintely leave by 31st Jan? or is that date meaningless?
The overwhelming impression I get from those around me is that people want an end to it. Johnson, whatever his numerous faults actually did commit to, and tried to bring about and end on the 31st Oct. Parliament very obviously and demonstrably ensured that couldn’t happen. It is very easy to present a case that Parliament, not Boris, was the cause of not leaving on 31st Oct.
Well I don’t know about an “asset” but I don’t see how the actual failure to leave on the 31st can be pinned anywhere but with Parliament in general. I say that not as a supporter of Boris nor as a fan of Brexit. I may think that Parliament ensuring we didn’t leave is a good thing but the clear fact is that Parliament was the reason.
It’s not meaningless, but the meaning is not that you are committed to leave definitely by that date.
The only way the UK can commit definitely to leave by any particular date is (a) to ratify a deal which provides for the UK to leave by that date, or (b) to make an affirmative decision to leave with no deal by that date, and not to seek any further extension.
Yes, Johnson committed to ending this by 31 October, but other people might reasonably think that it’s more important to end this well than to end it on any particular date, and other people are not obliged to deliver Johnson’s commitment for him.
And Johnson’s own choices and actions made it difficult or impossible for him to deliver on his commitment. He reduced his government to a minority of 43. He went out of his way to alienate a parliament whose trust he needed in order to deliver Brexit. He pivoted dramatically a short number of days before his deadline, and then demanded parliament instantly ratify his pivot, without takin the time to consider its effect and implications. Seriously, what did he expect Parliament to do in these circumstances?
Whether you take the view that all this is because he never wanted to leave on 31 October but only sought the appearance of wanting that, or because he simply lacked the political skill and judgment which might enable him to deliver on his commitment, is maybe not important. Neither is a good look coming into an election.
I think that’s too simplistic; it suggests that Johnson is in no way responsible for how people react to his choices, decisions and actions. If Johnson wanted to leave on 31 October, he needed to make very different choices from the choices he did in fact make. If he couldn’t see his way to making those choices, he shouldn’t have committed to a 31 October Brexit that he had no realistic plan to deliver. He can’t blame parliament for the choices he made.
That’s like a woman saying she’s tired of being pregnant and wants to get the birth over so she can relax and take back control of her life.
What most people don’t seem to understand is that Brexit is only the beginning, not the end. It will be the start of years, maybe decades, of fraught and difficult negotiations with the EU and others, and intense political and parliamentary conflicts. It will be the start of all kinds of problems with imported and exported goods, problems with medicines, increased prices across the board due to tariffs, more paperwork and bureaucracy to travel to EU countries, problems for UK residents in the EU and EU residents in the UK, a field day for banksters, hedge fund managers and tax dodgers, less money for the NHS and welfare, lower food and environment standards.
If you think the UK has Brexit problems now, just wait until Brexit actually happens. It will make the current conflicts over Brexit seem like a walk in the park.