Happy birthday, impossible three-year-old
Happy birthday, Brexit referendum. Have some cake. Cake first, then party games such as alternative arrangements. Managed no deals. Clean breaks. All the late classics of madness-in-a-hat Brexit make-believe in the ding-dong context of the Tory leadership contest and the rise of Brexit Party populism. More of that below, more staring the proverbial unicorn in the face; but first, reality. Since June 2016 reality has fought a courageous rearguard. It has made Brexit impossible until now. Which it should be. Brexit should be impossible in a sane world.
Say it again: Brexit should be impossible.
Not only in its “hard” form, either. As much as hard Brexit crashes on its basic illogic, its innate flaws, soft Brexit pratfalls, or misfires, wetly, because, awkwardly, it’s the diametric, polar opposite of what the people who most want Brexit actually want.
Zooming in for a closer look, and starting with hard Brexit, it isn’t hard to see why any serious attempt to diverge from the EU, to go at that with a purpose, has been pretty impossible; not just tricky, impossible. Framed in the simplest terms, geography, basic geo-political reality, could never allow the UK to be Canada or South Korea; much less pseudo-Singapore, undercutting, flirting with super-light touch regulation. Everything on earth, individuals, businesses, countries, everything has a context, has to operate within that context.
The UK cannot, ever, leave the EU orbit.
It will never rocket free from the mass gravitational pull of twenty-seven EU countries, four EEA/EFTA countries, half a billion people and their laws, standards, values.
The hard Brexit bubble bursts immediately on contact with high-stakes trade-offs. Instances of not, as a matter of fact, being able to secure desired outcomes without accepting their harmful logical corollary. On the one side, you’re saying you want to continue to have a car industry. On the flipside, you want to claw back control of customs and regulation; in other words, tick off an exhaustive itinerary of things that will create border friction, break supply chains, cripple your car industry.
Then hold on, because here it is.
It’s King Kong.
The true logical impasse.
With manufacturing and agriculture in the balance, entire communities at risk, there’s no mitigating disaster without a UK-EU trade deal; no deal without provision for an open north-south Irish border; no prospect of avoiding a hardening of the border within Ireland by creating one between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK; little or no near-term chance of managing the border with so-called “other agreed solutions”.
As such no open border without conceding EU stipulations on customs and regulation and legal oversight; no conceding without owning that you’re now on the road towards a destination wholly other than hard Brexit or take back control.
Soft Brexit, then: billed as a “compromise” by Nick Boles, Neil Kinnock, et. al., the softest Brexit has represented a road that could theoretically be passable. But do enough MPs want it, or enough of the public? Say fifty-two percent? Not when in the minds of full-blooded leavers it represents anything but a compromise. Is instead a charlatan asking Brexiters to give up everything they wanted. All the unicorns. An imposter serving wet lettuce laced with fudge — poison — when unicorn is absent from the menu.
So there it is, both soft Brexit and hard — both decisively boxed in until now. Then what we see when we fast forward to the present, to the referendum’s third birthday, is that rightfully Brexit should still be as impossible as ever.
Say it again: impossible.
A central fact in the current situation is this: the Conservative government is in checkmate. Catch-22. Or think of it as another birthday game, this time a fiendish, brain-teasing game that asks the new prime minister — let’s say Boris “Houdini” Johnson — to show how he can escape a room with four locked, bolted doors.
One, the existing EU exit deal isn’t an option. Not for a government with little or no working majority; not given that the DUP and the ERG hardcore will not vote for it, have emphatically slammed the door on it.
Two, there’s either no way or certainly no willingness among Conservatives to try to make the existing agreement an option. To do that by shaking up the parliamentary arithmetic. Risking a general election in the context of dire opinion poll numbers and nine percent vote share in the EU elections.
Three, Brussels has barricaded the door against any meaningful change to the agreement, and, four, leaving without a deal, if it’s even possible, destroys the Conservatives — the disruption, the damage, the backlash, the blame.
For “Houdini” Johnson, the only glimmer of a glancing chance might come with a superficially tweaked EU exit deal, if he could bring that back from Brussels in the Autumn then trick the DUP and the ERG with waffle and handwavium, squeak the agreement through parliament by way of a masking spell to cover over what will not have fundamentally changed — the backstop. But that’s for another day, and it all sounds like a lot of grubby work, so don’t so much as whisper it at a birthday party; don’t spoil a perfectly good Tory leadership contest.
For now there are the bigger, higher impossibilities. All the best Brexit games. The latest greatest hits that build their own fantasy language and logic as if from Lego bricks. More cake first, then we can do the “Brady amendment”. Then let’s see how really ever-so grown up and fair-minded we can seem while we’re explaining the “Malthouse compromise”. “Clean break” pretends the UK won’t have to pick up the pieces if it flips the chessboard over in a tantrum.
Meanwhile over in Labour HQ. Still playing at “jobs first” Brexit? Maybe not so much. Rather a change in mood, a fog of “morning after”. Jeremy C with his chin slumped in his palm. Suffering his own problem with doors — the kind that aren’t thick enough to keep out the sound of the Labour members and supporters who are done colluding with the Tories to bring up this three-year-old referendum that still hasn’t learned to walk and they never wanted anyway.
It’s gone. No shadow cabinet minister can go on the Today Programme and credibly defend the erstwhile — stale, defunct — leadership position. The words stick. It’s not tenable anymore to be saying what’s snuggly to hear — “bringing the country together” — instead of being honest; explaining to people that they can’t have what they want and why; admitting that what leavers voted for in June 2016 does not exist. Is impossible not least in the sense that it does not exist.
Does not exist since there is no EU exit that does not come at the price of either agony or humiliation: the agony of pouring grit into the world’s most evolved mechanism for the movement of goods, services, money and people, or the humiliation of staying in the mechanism but surrendering a grip on its levers.
That’s the reality that has fought Brexit into a stalemate. Has seen off Brexit Day, twice, in March and April of this year. And yet here we are, celebrating the referendum result’s third birthday, and every day the leave vote survives, fed and kept alive by games and fantasies, is another day playing with fire. Careless matchboxes, petrol cans. Birthday candles that in the worst case threaten to ignite the no deal that should be too unthinkable to be possible; which shouldn’t be possible because, please, does anyone really believe that fifty-plus percent of UK voters want a no deal Brexit?
It’s dicey. A coup occured: the Conservative Party taken over by a faction that is misappropriating 2016’s fifty-two percent leave vote as a mandate for no deal. At the same time, too many good buckets of cold water have been wasted, and while in June 2019 it’s still possible to see ways to stop a no deal, there’s also the chance of cock-up.
Brexit and cock-up wouldn’t exactly be strangers, would they?
James Buckley, June 23 2019
