Britain’s elite are no longer hiding their effort to overturn Brexit

Oh, dear. It now looks as if the kooks and the cranks were right. The British establishment, which is what the rest of the country generally means by “they,” is indeed seeking to overturn the result.

The people I had dismissed as the U.K. equivalent of “birthers” and “truthers,” people who might happen to march alongside us, but whose opinions should on no account be taken seriously — were on to something after all.

Thirty-one months ago, 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU, more Britons than had ever voted for anything else. Yet our rulers never seriously considered obeying their instruction. The only question in MPs’ minds was whether to overturn Brexit formally or whether to implement something that could technically be labeled “Brexit” but that would, in reality, leave the U.K. wholly subordinate to Brussels.

Initially, the second approach prevailed. In the aftermath of the vote, few MPs were brave enough to go on the record attacking democracy. So, official Britain set about designing a Brexit that was, in effect, simply a form of nonvoting EU membership. Britain would continue to follow almost all the EU’s rules, making it impossible to sign trade deals with third countries such as the United States. It would continue to pay into the Brussels budget. The only difference is that it would lose its representation in the EU institutions, meaning it could no longer veto harmful proposals.

Plenty of euroskeptics regarded these terms as worse than staying in, something that evidently surprised the europhile elites, who had assumed that “leavers,” being working-class oafs, would buy anything that had “Brexit” written on it in shiny, big letters.

So pro-“remain” MPs have now swerved to a policy of straight nullification. As a first step, they plan to take back Britain’s notice to quit, which is due to come into effect on March 29. To give that nullification some spurious legitimacy, they will then call a new referendum. This time, though, they won’t risk losing. At the very least, they want to rig the franchise, perhaps extending the vote to 16-year-olds (most of whom are innocent enough to believe in the EU as a force for good) or even to EU nationals living in Britain. More seriously, they want to rig the question, offering a choice between staying in or accepting withdrawal terms that most “leavers” see as worse than staying in.

You can imagine the impact this is having on the authority of Parliament. A ComRes poll published on Jan. 15 showed that 72 percent of people believed that Brexit “shows that politics needs a complete overhaul” and that 75 percent believe that “the current generation of politicians is not up to it.”

That second observation is especially true. Although they dearly want to, MPs may find that they are unable to get their act together in time to overturn the referendum result. As the law stands, Britain will leave the EU in two months, with or without agreed withdrawal terms. Most MPs are terrified of leaving without a deal. But the only way to prevent what they call a “no-deal Brexit” is to vote for a deal. And they can’t agree on what that deal should be. There is, therefore, a real prospect of a “no-deal Brexit” by accident.

What would happen then? We can, I think, assume whatever the EU does, Britain will not impose any new tariffs or trade barriers against its 27 former partners. This might create a technical problem with the World Trade Organization, because a country is not supposed to offer others better access to its markets than those laid down in its standard terms, except through a WTO-approved treaty. So the only way to comply with WTO rules would be for Britain also to drop its trade barriers vis-a-vis the rest of the world, too. Which is, of course, the right thing to do anyway.

Britain could, in other words, stumble into an optimum policy by mistake.

Then again, as any free-marketeer will tell you, the best things almost always happen by accident rather than by design.