Birmingham, England
Arriving in London by train from Gatwick Airport, you pass Battersea Power Station on your right. Derelict for more than 30 years, it is an iconic, vast, roofless, brick structure, with tall white smokestack towers. In the years since it last produced a watt of power, it has hosted raves, Dr. Who episodes, and James Bond movies. What it has not done is anything of enduring use.
But this time, as I trundled past, there were modular apartments going up around the power station, and cranes working on the inside. The next day, the reason for the activity was announced: The power station, renovated and reconstructed at no small expense, is to be Apple’s new U.K. headquarters, and a new center of retail and life besides. We were told that, after Brexit, no one would want to invest in Britain. Evidently someone forgot to tell Apple.
Events like this explain why this year’s Conservative Party Conference, being held in Birmingham, is quite the happiest such meeting I have attended. In 2014, the dominant mood was of concerned anticipation at an election that many Conservatives feared they might lose; in 2015, it was glee at an unexpected victory, coupled with anticipation of the coming battle over Europe. But in 2016, is is sheer satisfaction, coupled with a sense of genuine opportunity.
Part of the reason for this is, of course, that the other three main British political parties are doing very good imitations of chaps who don’t want to win an election ever again. More than 80 percent of Labour MPs are on record as opposing their own leader; the Liberal Democrats show only feeble signs of getting off the mat onto which they were pinned at the last election, and the U.K. Independence Party has had its clothes stolen by the Tories, who are now the party of Brexit.
It is, of course, possible to take too much cheer from this state of affairs: Just because Labour, in particular, almost seems to have given up on politics doesn’t mean that politics will inevitably give up on it. Even apart from Brexit, and the always-present possibility of a recession, the new British government led by Theresa May is going to face some vexing challenges in 2017 and beyond, and Labour might just be able to take advantage of these.
It’s largely for that reason that you can’t overstate the sense of relief at the conference stemming from the Brexit vote, and the way the government is approaching the question of how to implement it. Prime Minister May led off, unusually, by speaking on Sunday, the first day of the conference, by setting out the path by which Britain will regain its independence.
The government will trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which will start the two year clock ticking, by the end of March 2017. At the end of two years, regardless of whether an agreement is reached between Britain and the EU, Britain’s EU membership will end. The government will also put a Great Repeal Bill before Parliament that will terminate the 1972 European Communities Act, which provided the legal basis for the U.K.’s entry into the European Economic Community (as it then was), while converting EU rules into British law and thus making it possible to amend or eliminate them.
This is a canny approach. It satisfies the demand of the vast majority of Conservative party activists—I saw only a very few Remain lapel pins in Birmingham—and allows May to take responsibility (and the credit) for getting Britain out of Europe up front, while at the same time pushing the trickier questions of what to do in a raft of policy areas onto her cabinet colleagues for later resolution—a chore that will become ever more pressing the closer Britain gets to the next general election in 2020, when she would otherwise likely be at her weakest. It’s the right approach, and it also happens to be very shrewd politically.
One advantage of the Great Repeal Act is that, by involving Parliament, it undercuts the legal challenges—already afoot—based on the argument that Britain cannot leave the EU on the strength of the Brexit referendum alone. Regardless of the legal merits of that argument, the government will clearly be in a stronger political position if it acts with and through Parliament. The other advantage is that the model of incorporating EU legislation into British law is not new to the Anglo-American world: It is, for example, what the newly independent American states did with British common law at the onset of the American Revolution. It provides a legal basis for change, but also maintains continuity.
There is naturally—and rightly—much interest in whether the same kind of continuity can be found in trade between Britain and the EU. As John Redwood, a member of Parliament, put it in remarks at a conference side event, there are basically two options: Either Britain and the EU continue to have free trade, or they trade on a WTO basis. The latter would hurt the EU more than it would hurt Britain, especially since the post-referendum devaluation of the pound has helped British competitiveness by more than the value of the tariffs that the EU could impose on the U.K.
Important as U.K.-EU trade is, in many ways, the more interesting questions center on what Britain will do with trade and investment with the world outside the EU, and what it will do at home. I really do wonder why the legion of the good and the great who opposed Brexit and predicted disaster as an immediate result of the vote—a disaster that has utterly failed to materialize—don’t take more interest in the worldwide question.
It’s commonly supposed that free trade is under threat in the West as a whole. And here we have post-Brexit Britain, eager not only for free trade with the EU, but clearly wanting to negotiate free trade deals with as many nations as possible. Indeed, Britain is now clearly the major democratic nation that is the most enthusiastic about free trade. And yet somehow, Brexit was a vote for protectionism and isolationism. Rather like Apple’s new HQ, the whole thing doesn’t add up—unless, of course, you conclude that much opposition to Brexit was politicized tosh.
And then there is the question of what Britain is to do about itself. This is, so far, the least satisfactory part of the picture. It’s one thing to say that transposing EU rules into British law is the right place to start. It’s entirely another to stop there. That’s not to say that all EU rules are bad—many are unobjectionable, and some are even good. But some are less good, and some (such as the European Arrest Warrant, which May defended as home secretary) are very bad indeed.
The next step in the process needs to be figuring out a way to assess those EU rules. One suggestion, floated by Mark Littlewood, the director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, is that the Great Repeal Bill contain a sunset clause terminating all EU rules after five years unless they are affirmatively readopted by Parliament. A second approach, backed in a major paper by Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rory Broomfield of the U.K.’s Freedom Association, is that a Royal Commission be established to evaluate the vast body of formerly EU rules.
Both approaches have merit, and the answer may be to combine them: the sunset clause to force scrutiny, a Royal Commission to perform it. In any case, the job cannot be entrusted to the civil service (who will have every incentive to find nearly every rule essential) or simply left undone— for if it is not done, many of the most valuable potential benefits of Brexit will not be won.
If Brexit is to be a success, it needs to move Britain in a fundamentally liberal, open, and competitive direction. Some of the mood music at Birmingham—such as, for example, the conference slogan of a Britain “for everyone”—implies that the government feels the need to temper its free trading sentiments abroad with some social democracy at home. If Britain is basically heading the right way, that might be tolerable, if not desirable—and with Labour running for the left-wing hills as fast as its unbalanced legs can carry it, there is no question that it is good politics. But a little mood music goes a long way, and it would be a great pity to lose at home much of the value of what Britain won on June 23.
Moreover, Brexit, as vital as it is, is not the only tricky bit of business before the Tories. The government has already made the decision to bring back grammar schools—a kind of selective school largely abolished by Labour in a fit of misguided social egalitarianism in 1975. This was revealing not merely because it is a cause long-beloved of Middle England (and thus not fully in keeping with Birmingham’s mood music), but also because administrations since Margaret Thatcher’s have not thought the time for it was ripe. As with the Great Repeal Bill, the government is showing a desire to grasp nettles.
That is a good thing, for there are more of them to come. There is a similarly-delayed redrawing of Britain’s political constituencies to be completed, from which the Tories have much to gain, but which will also cause a number of Tory MPs to lose their seats. And there is the ever-lasting delay about whether, or how, to expand capacity at one or both of the major London airports, a decision repeatedly postponed on grounds of political inconvenience. Neither of these will topple the government on their own, but put them together with grammar schools and Brexit, and it makes a lot of long-delayed matters coming to a head at once.
But that is what Britain needs. As Dan Hannan, the clearest and most eloquent of all Brexit’s advocates, put it in a barn-storming speech on Monday, this is an unfrozen moment in British politics, a moment when the ice thins and change is possible. For years—for decades, even—the issue of Europe has too often paralyzed the Conservative party as a force for good. David Cameron tried to deal with that conflict by hiding the issue away. That didn’t work, and it has now been settled in the only way that can bring any permanence to it: by leaving the EU.
During the Brexit campaign, May, though nominally for Remain, was more or less silent, earning herself the nickname of “submarine.” But maybe that is the wrong vessel. Just perhaps, May isn’t a submarine. Perhaps she, and her colleagues, are an ice breaker.
Ted R. Bromund is senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
