Ah, yes magical thinking as a form of Government. Why does that seem familiar?
Capt
Brexit means restructuring the basis of UK trade relations developed over the past 40 years of EU membership. It was not something any government would do lightly because of the huge economic disruption it would cause as well as requiring a solution to the Irish border question.
It does however, make perfect sense from the perspective of the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party. There has been a long standing tension between the Atlanticist, Eurosceptic wing, who objected to what they saw as an unacceptable compromise to national sovereignty the EU membership requires. Contending with the leadership who that considered that the benefits of the Single Market and the participation in driving the EU agenda was worth the compromise.
Cameron knew the Eurosceptic faction, backed by some notable business magnates who like to play politics from the shadowns were going to come after him. They had similarly attacked other Conservative leaders, Thatcher and Major before him and his majority was thin. So he tried to head them off with the very blunt instrument of the Referendum. But he lost. The Labour party was no better, it has its own leftist Euro-sceptic wing. They regard the EU as a capitalist free markets club. Cameron lost the Referendum and paid the price.
While it is entertaining to watch Conservative politicians fighting like ferrets in a sack, this dysfunctional family argument became spread because of ambiguous constitutional status of the Referendum to become a political imperative by the leave campaign. Grandly proclaiming it ‘the democratic will of the people’.
The UK has a lot to learn from Ireland with respect to running referendums and doing them properly. It has a lot to learn from Scotland as well, the referendum on Scottish Independence was well run.
However, we are where we are. The Brexit faction led by Boris Johnson has taken over the Conservative Party and the subsequent General Election gave him a mandate to carry it out to an aggressive timescale.
We have ended up Withdrawal Agreement and an EU Trade deal that is little more than a damage limitation exercise on both sides. Many of the important issues have been put off, to be resolved by further negotiation.
Where to put the border between the UK and the EU with respect to Ireland being one of them. I expect Johnson will calm the anxiety of the Unionists in Northern Ireland by paying them off behind the scenes. There is going to be a lot of that going on to tie up some of the ‘loose ends’ and resolve some of the ‘teething problems’ that have become apparent after the negotiation of this rather insubstantial EU trade deal.
This will all come out over the next year as the UK tries to recover from the Covid crisis. This is a ‘Get out of Jail’ card for the Conservatives. There is little appetite in the EU for any sort of confrontation because the everyone is desperately trying to bail out the economy after the lockdown. Ireland in particular is very exposed to any issues that affect trade with the UK. It is not wise to deal with a constitutional crisis when trying to fend off an economic meltdown.
Sentiment in Northern Ireland will wax and wane depending on how attractive being part of Ireland, and hence the EU, is compared to the prospects of remaining in the UK. As far dealing with the Covid pandemic is concerned, the EU is not looking very clever at the moment. But we will see what the longer term economic impact is. It should be bourne in mind how fast and how hard the 2008 economic crisis hit the Irish economy, it was devastating, and many people voted with their feet. Many moved to the UK. Ireland and the UK are in the same free travel area and the systems are similar. That is not going to change because of the Brexit. There has also been a big increase in UK nationals applying for an Irish passports to regain the freedom of movement across the EU that they have lost.
One way or another, people will find a way around these political screw ups.
I am admittedly very biased, but personally I think it is fairer to apportion more blame to the way May’s government triggered Article 50 prematurely and then hamfistedly attempted and failed to force Brexit through, and less blame to those who voted in favour of Brexit on principle. They did not vote for successive governments to make a huge mess of it.
I do not blame anyone who voted for Brexit given the information they were given at the time. The electorate was woefully unprepared to understand the issues it raised and that ignorance was ruthlessly exploited, not least by Boris Johnson once he had decided to throw in his lot with the Conservative Eurosceptic faction and their backers.
Compare it to the year long civics course the Scots went through before the Scottish independence vote. Very few stones were left unturned. The Brexit referendum was instead run like a six week general election campaign high on rhetoric and emotion rather than a careful examination of a major policy change that would have huge economic implications. The result was 52/48, so barely conclusive. Nonetheless this was used to drive through this policy in an environment where the government had a very slender majority and barely enough votes to pass the necessary legislation. A complete mess that resulted in political paralysis until Theresa May resigned and Boris Johnson was able to capitalise on it by convincing the exasperated electorate that he was the man to ‘Get Brexit Done’. He then stuck to an impractically aggressive deadline that has left the UK with the thinnest of trade deals with the EU, its major trading partner. The consequences of which are becoming apparent at the very worst time for the UK: just as the country is desperate to restart a locked down economy. Cameron, May, Johnson. They are all culpable. They put their internal party politics before the national interests of the UK. That is not statesmanship, it is the height of irresponsibility! There is little wonder that the UK has become a laughing stock. With many other nations scratching their heads, asking why the British shooting themselves in the foot?
However…we are where we are. No choice except to try and restructure the entire basis of the UK’s trading relationships. With the EU and the rest of the world. And hope that the constitutional settlement from the Good Friday Agreement does not come apart in the process.
I don’t think there are many happy Brexit voters out there right now. But the UK government is about to go on spending spree to stimulate the economy. So I am sure there will be some crowd pleasing gestures.
I will be intrigued to learn how they intend to pacify the Northern Irish Unionists. A nice tunnel or a bridge, perhaps?
Watched part of the budget presentation to the House of Commons. There is an awful lot of spending and talk of “Free Ports” with little talk of new revenues other than a rise in Corporate Tax rates. I hope this all ends well but I just don’t see how.
Capt
I think it certainly helps that RoI has significantly improved economically, and become less conservative Catholic culturally in the last 25-30 years. Legalizing abortion I think was a big cultural signal.
As an outsider observer, I never liked the Brexit referendum, or the Scottish independence referendum. My personal view on such things, is there should be a firm majority vote in the elected legislative body of the country that supports a given outcome, before a referendum is begun. The reasons for this, is elected democracy exists and is the norm for a purpose versus direct democracy. It is crazy to me that a majority of the sitting Westminster Parliament in 2016 was formally on record as being anti-Brexit (it was the official position of both Labour and the Conservative party), we of course know lots of Conservative and even some Labour MPs likely were Brexiters in secret, but their public position was Remain. I think the whole concept of having a representative form of democracy really begs the question–if both of the major parties in the elected legislature were opposed to something, why hold a referendum on it? These elected MPs represent the collective will of the people, and the elected MP breakdown on leave vs remain wasn’t particularly close.
To me a referendum on something so significant should be the result of a firm political agreement in the legislature that a certain outcome is desired, then you put it to the people and if they sign off on it, you can proceed. Instead with Brexit you had something most elected MPs were opposed to put into a referendum, from what I could tell largely as an effort by David Cameron to win an intra-party squabble in his own party with UKIP types. He felt if the referendum was defeated he could say “there, we lot you vote on it, now shut up and let me run the party.” Of course what happened was a serious disinformation campaign, low voter turnout, and the thinnest of margins of victory for Brexit. The most recent parliamentary elections show that a significant portion of the British electorate, if not entirely pro-Brexit, were at least not anti-Brexit enough for it to cause them to repudiate the Conservatives, so in a sense there is the democratic legitimacy for it at this point. At the same time, I just think the way the referendum was done was poor governance, in many ways I think David Cameron should get a lot of blame for political malfeasance and spinelessness.
I understand he had significant issues with fighting for control of his own party, but still, he was Prime Minister and I felt had a responsibility to have acted better than he did.
I think this is just a cover story for “the EU is left of us”. They wouldn’t have given a shit about national sovereignty if the EU had been to the right of them.
I have never understood the opprobrium directed May’s way. Her politics are probably pretty much the antithesis of mine, and I’m certainly not suggesting she did some sort of outstanding job but I don’t really understand what it is that people think she did wrong.
“Poisoned Chalice” doesn’t even begin to describe the job she was given to do. I could be wrong and there may be details that I am missing but while I hear lots of people saying she “made a mess of it” I have never heard any detail about what she should have done. She was basically given the job of shooting the UK in the foot while being beholden to people who insisted (a) she had to pull the trigger but (b) not damage the UK’s foot. I thought UDS1 put it perfectly above when they said:
Johnson got to power with a strong mandate to force a bad deal through, because by then the UK public had become so sick of the situation that it had decided to just give someone the green light to do what had to be done, regardless of the damage - a fatalism which the UK public did not have, at the time May was trying to organise the same self-harm. And indeed my understanding is that the deal May was trying to get through would have been a better deal for the UK but she didn’t have parliamentary support at that time.
I admit I’m only basically watching the situation from the sidelines but I’d be interested in where the above analysis goes wrong.
To be fair to May, she was dealt an appalling hand to play. But, to be fair to her critics, she knew or should have known that when she put herself forward to play it (by seeking the party leadership), and she really had some responsibility to think about how she was going to play it before she put herself forward.
And, to continue being fair to May, when she did play it she played it astonishingly badly, commencing the Brexit process before giving any thought to how she would conduct it or what she would seek to achieve from it and then, when she did turn her mind to those issues, adopting a set of “red line” objectives which were internally contradictory (and therefore undeliverable) and committing the UK to a distinctly more harmful version of Brexit than was required by the referendum result.
Basically, every mistake that could be made, she made, and every opportunity that could be squandered, she squandered, with the result that I think history will judge David Cameron to have held the “worst UK prime minister of the modern era” crown only for a very short time.
Well I agree with you entirely that it was a massive personal mistake by May to throw her hat in the ring for the position of PM at the time. I suspect she wakes up kicking herself every morning. But that’s not a substantive issue; somebody was always going to be PM and that person was always going to have to deal with the situation.
Again your post is just the type of comment on this topic that I have seen so many times before but which I find unconvincing. You say that May should have thought about it more and so on but if she had, what solution would she have come up with?
You only give two specifics - you say she shouldn’t have used a “red line” strategy. Firstly, stating firm negotiating positions is Negotiation 101 and I’m not sure that doing so demonstrates any inherent incompetence. Secondly, did she have any real option given the Scylla and Charybdis of the parliamentary voting blocks she had to appease to try to get a deal through? My impression at the time was that if she gave ground in one direction she would get eaten by Scylla, and if she gave ground in another direction she would have been eaten by Charybdis. I may have missed it but at the time, all commentary I read was to the effect that her proposals were going to get blocked but that no one could come up with a proposal that would work.
Your second specific is that the referendum did not commit her to such a harmful version of Brexit. Did she have the numbers for a less harmful version? My recollection is not.
You may well be right that May is seen as “the worst UK PM of the modern era”. People see those associated with the disaster negatively, even if the disaster was nothing to do with them and I’m very wary of that tendency.
No, I’m just saying that she shouldn’t have used that red line strategy - one that involved inconsistent red lines. She thereby set domestic expectations that she couldn’t possibly meet, and set herself up so that whatever Brexit she could negotiate with the EU was going to be found wanting by reference to the criteria which she herself had established, thereby magnifying the problem that you point to of not having the numbers.
Plus, far from strengthening her negotiating position with the EU, the contradictory red lines she adopted made her position look unrealistic, hard to take seriously.
She didn’t have the numbers for any version of Brexit; that’s my point. That should have been the starting point of the process she went through before deciding the direction she would take. Since there was no version of Brexit that already commanded majority support, she needed to craft a version that, with a fair following wind, was capable of doing so. That wouldn’t ensure success, but it would at least make success possible.
What the referendum result showed was that (a) the UK was almost evenly divided over Brexit, and (b) given the diversity of all-things-to-all-men fantasy Brexits promoted by the “leave” campaign, no actual model of Brexit could command the support of all those who had voted “leave”. As soon as you put any kind of concrete shape on the Brexit you were proposing, at least some leave voters would say “that’s not the Brexit I voted for”, and you’d lose them. And with only 51% supporting Brexit in any form, you wouldn’t have to lose too many before you didn’t have majority support - or, probably, anything like it - for your Brexit.
So it seemed to me at the time (and I think events have borne me out) that what May should have set out to do was to craft a Brexit that was capable of securing losers’ consent from some of those who had voted to remain. She should have targetted remain voters who accepted that they had lost the referendum and that there was a democratic mandate to leave, and she should have sought to secure their assent by proposing a form of Brexit which sought to address their concerns about leaving, and avoid or ameliorate the harms they feared.
This isn’t rocket science, and it wasn’t a novel idea. Other European countries have been divided over the question of EU membership, and others have had to craft ways of dealing with this division that can secure a sufficiently broad assent. And they have all, without exception, made a better fist of this than the UK has. So it can be done.
May did exactly the opposite, hewing at an early stage to a hard Brexit which would magnify the fears of those who had voted to remain. She wasn’t constrained to do this by the referendum result; neither the question on the ballot nor the nature of the campaign had sought a mandate for any particular form of Brexit, so any course of action which resulted in the UK no longer appearing on the Wikipedia page “list of member states of the European Union” would have fulfilled the mandate conferred by the referendum. Of course, some leave supporters would have complained that an insufficiently hard Brexit was “Brexit in name only”, etc, etc. But, as already pointed out, she was always going to lose some leave supporters; as a result she always needed to secure the assent of a section of the remain vote, and that is what she should have been focussed on. In fact she did pretty much everything she could to repel remain supporters who might have been open to assenting to a Brexit that took some of their concerns on board.
That’s why I say that she played a bad hand badly. It’s not guaranteed that, if she had played it better, she would have achieved success. But, as she did choose to play it, she virtually guaranteed failure for herself and avoidable harm for her country.
Poisoned chalice it was, and some of this is with hindsight, but I don’t think there was any need to pull the trigger quite so quickly - it should have been possible to pacify the hardliners with the explanation that it will happen, but we need to properly prepare first. Instead the strategy was to try and bully the EU into submission via brinksmanship, which was a disaster. Then there was the further mis-step of the election that eliminated the small majority she previously had.
I’m not a fan of Johnson, but I think it’s possible to argue that the chalice he inherited was even more poisoned, in that it was much more difficult (though perhaps still possible) to step back from the brink by that point, politically, so he has pursued a course that does at least sweep everything under the rug for now. Of course problems are already evident and will likely get worse before they get better, and the EU have done him a big favour with their mis-steps over vaccines, but he has at least pleased some people where it would have been quite possible to annoy absolutely everyone (like May did, actually).
Apologies for the hijack - all this would be more suited for the Brexit thread, so I won’t continue further, here.
ETA: I see now the discussion has moved on since the post I was replying to, with much the same points.
Just to be pedantic for a moment—wouldn’t it be “smashed against Scylla” and “drowned in Charybdis”?
The correct choice for any governing party or their Prime Minister would have been to say “The referendum was non-binding, and the majority was very slim in favor of a radical change, and what that majority actually wanted was impossible for multiple reasons beyond the power of Parliament to fix, and therefore we are remaining in the EU until such time as an actual plan is developed to the contrary”. Every PM who didn’t have the guts to say that is culpable.
Public opinion polls are a poor guide to what the public actually thinks.
Often they have a poor grasp of major national and constitutional issues. Ask them what they think and it may well be that it depends on how the question is asked and how they are feeling today. Extraplolating that to any sort of deeply held commitment and a willingness to make sacrifices towards some fundamental political principle? That is a stretch.
A United Ireland is a concept that is attractive to Irish Republicans. Dealing with a lot of very angry Unionists with grudges to bear and a Northern Irish history of vicious sectarian violence between Republicans and Unionist/Loyalists. That is not such a romantic notion. It is a nightmare that no-one wants.
It is not an an issue that needs to be forced because the Good Friday Agreement contains a lot of provisions for cross border instituitions and border that hardly exists anymore. There is a high level of economic integration between the North and South that is providing prosperity for all concerned.
There is much to be gained by simply sitting and waiting for the political culture in the North to evolve and grow more outward looking as it has done in the South. Northern Irish politicians have a famously dogmatic and insular mindset. Like everyone they want peace and prosperity, but there are lots of carefully drawn red lines.
Boris Johnson and his EU Brexit trade agreement is crossing one of those red lines right now. The Good Friday Agreement between the UK, the Republic of Ireland and all the political parties of Northern Ireland was very hard won after forty years of low level civil war. It is all very well fudging trade deals with EU, but there is a serious risk that the more extreme voices on the Unionist/Loyalist side could revert to ‘politics by other means’.
Northern Ireland has consumed vast amounts of both money and political capital by several previous Prime Ministers to get where it is at the moment. It is not perfect, but it is at peace. If the cost of Brexit becomes an unstable security situation in Northern Ireland where customs posts have to be fortified. That would be a political disaster for which he will not be forgiven either by his party of the UK electorate.
I really cannot see an easy solution. He is now coming under pressure from the EU who suggest the UK has broken the Northern Irish protocols of EU-UK Brexit agreement. He really needs the help of the Irish Republic here. I am wondering how much inflence they have in the EU. At the moment the EU leadership seem to be forcing the issue in Northern Ireland. This is symptomatic of a deterioriating relationship with the EU, which seems itself to be in trouble with its own members because of its poor handling of the Covid vaccination rollout.
We will see what the summer brings and the Northern Ireland marching season in July. That is always a good indication of the political temperature. Irish republicans certainly do not want to be united with the political sentiments that go with that.
This seems self evident. I don’t see why the parties didn’t come to this easy to see conclusion.
Hah great minds think alike. I actually wondered about this and looked it up before posting and both would be kind of correct. If I’m reading it right, Scylla and Charybdis are physical hazards but personified as monsters. So you could put it either way.
Which, much as personally I think it would have been a good idea, would have been quite obnoxiously anti-Democratic.
Mmmm but aren’t you blurring the lines between the electorate and parliament here? It’s all very well to say that “the electorate would have accepted this or that” but that wouldn’t have helped May get a deal past hardliners in parliament.
Yes indeed.
And 48% of the voters agreed with you!
It’s endlessly astonishing to me how the political system just fell apart, and how both major political parties completely lost the ability to deal with a situation that seemed to have such a simple answer.
I always had a kind of (it seems unfounded) expectation that the British system was slightly more mature and sane and stable than ours, which is routinely subject to moral panics. But … I guess not. Of course, I have since learned that our own system is even less stable than I thought it was.