Every leader dreams of uniting the people, but Theresa May is the only postwar British prime minister to have pulled it off. It has taken time, hard work, toughness of character, mastery of detail, skin thick as tortoiseshell, and a willingness to do or say anything. Nevertheless, Theresa May persisted. Today, the British people are about as united as they can be.
No one likes her Brexit deal with the E.U. On November 28, a telephone poll found that only 16 percent of respondents support the draft deal that May announced in late November. The other 84 percent presumably prefer the subjugation of a return to the E.U. or the economic disorder of leaving the E.U. without a deal or to continue looking skywards for assistance while mumbling, “I don’t know.”
Admittedly, the anti-deal consensus still has 16 percentage points to go. But that sort of unanimity is only obtainable under a dictatorship or banana republic. Which might be exactly what May’s Brexit deal would create: a Parliament without legal sovereignty and elections without meaning.
The draft withdrawal agreement for Britain’s March 2019 departure from the E.U. betrays the voters who approved the 2016 Brexit referendum and puts the lie to May’s own policy statements and electoral promises. As Christopher Caldwell wrote last week in these pages, the deal would cast Britain into an open-ended “transition period” that means “all the taxation of being in the E.U. with none of the representation” along with ingesting into British law whatever legal delicacies strike the E.U.’s fancy.
The deal also commits Britain to maintaining regulatory alignment and open borders between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the E.U. In effect, the deal threatens to sunder Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom. The negotiators of the E.U., abetted by domestic grandstanding from Irish premier Leo Varadkar, have succeeded in extracting from Theresa May by trickery and threats what the IRA failed to obtain by murder.
Britain will not be able to escape its juridical limbo until the E.U. allows it. If Britain objects, it will have to appeal to the European Court of Justice, which is a Potemkin court for the furthering of E.U. policy.
The one question on which May does deliver is on freedom of movement. For the last two years, Remainers have accused Leavers of masking anti-immigrant sentiment with talk about sovereignty. May, a Remainer herself in 2016, seems to believe this. She reckons that if she gives the white plebs what they want on immigration, they’ll be too thick to notice the surrender of sovereignty.
So this is not a deal for withdrawal, but BRINO: Brexit in Name Only—which is to say, Remain, the option that lost in the 2016 referendum. It is a conditional surrender, and the conditions include the dismemberment of the United Kingdom. Nations defeated in war have obtained better terms from their conquerors.
Britain’s Conservative party is the oldest and most successful party in the history of Western democracy. How it managed that is beyond reckoning. The party’s great achievement of 1938, “Munich,” is now a byword for diplomatic treachery and self-delusion; Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sold out the Czechs, only to discover that Hitler’s promise of peace was a bouncing check. Its great achievement of 1956, “Suez,” is now a byword for the imperial folly of managing to shoot oneself in the foot while trying to punch above one’s weight. Prime Minister Anthony Eden was so busy mistaking Nasser for Mussolini that he forgot to ask for American permission before invading Egypt.
Since Munich and Suez, Conservatives have been in and out of office but have kept up their diplomatic batting average, contriving to club themselves on the back of the head every other decade. In 1975, it was Edward Heath, tricking the public into retroactively endorsing Britain’s entry into what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). Prime Minister Heath claimed that the EEC was just a customs union and that Britain’s laws and sovereignty were not at stake. Privately, Heath admitted the economic borders of the EEC were, like Bismarck’s Zollverein, destined to become political borders too.
That duly happened two decades later with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that birthed the European Union, beloved today by its subjects for its undemocratic deliberations, stagflating currency, and sub-Kantian delusions of legislative grandeur. In 1992, when John Major, erstwhile bank clerk, told the British that they couldn’t afford not to jump aboard the Eurotrain, he insisted that Britain’s sovereignty would be unimpaired by the Maastricht Treaty—despite the fact that Europhilic Conservatives had found it necessary to throw Margaret Thatcher overboard in order to make Britain’s appointment with Eurodestiny.
After another two decades of the E.U.’s insidious annexations of national sovereignty, Euroskepticism among Conservative backbenchers, party members, and voters forced Prime Minister David Cameron to attempt to recover some of it. In 2016, when the E.U. rebuffed him, Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the E.U. He expected to win, which is to say for Britain to continue losing its independence and for Britain’s leaders, especially the Conservative ones, to continue treating their voters like serfs. But by some freak of democracy, the referendum’s outcome represented the will of the British people. And thus it fell to Theresa May to push Britain’s foreign dealings back onto the traditional Conservative path of error and duplicity. She has failed beyond our wildest dreams.
May pretended not to notice the wave of ministerial resignations that followed the announcement of the draft withdrawal agreement. Instead, she did what all clever diplomats do and channeled Neville Chamberlain. By the end of that week, she had in her hand a piece of paper—actually, 13 pieces of double-sided, close-printed paper. This was a draft of the “political declaration” concerning post-Brexit relations between Britain and the E.U.
On Sunday, November 25, the leaders of the other 27 E.U. states took all of half an hour to agree to the withdrawal agreement and the nonbinding, nonspecific nonstarter that is the political declaration. This typifies how the E.U. stage-manages its deals and agreements and declarations. From its postwar origins to its current imperium, the E.U. has seen itself as a bulwark against popular sovereignty, just like the Holy Roman Empire or the Dual Monarchy. In Brussels, the fix is always in.
In London, however, the fix no longer is. As usual, a Conservative prime minister has promised security and stability while signing away sovereignty. But Brexit has squeezed the red, white, and blue toothpaste out of the tube. In the next two weeks, probably on December 11, May must bring her deal to the House of Commons. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have already said they will vote against it. The Ulster Unionists, on whose informal support May’s minority government depends, are against it. More than 80 Conservative MPs have said they will ignore the whips, and no more than 30 Labour MPs are thought to be willing to defy their own whips and vote for the deal.
May doesn’t have the numbers for a deal that hardens the borders to immigration but erases the legal and parliamentary borders entirely. So Brexit isn’t just about immigration or racism. It really is about democracy and sovereignty. Yet again, a Conservative prime minister has misread the public and misled the voters.
What happens next depends on the scale of May’s defeat in the Commons vote. If she can lose by only 20 or 30 votes, she could obtain some small and theatrical “concessions” from Brussels and then try to whip through a second vote. Her team is said to be hoping for a panic in the markets like the one that encouraged Congress to consent to an emergency financial bailout in the fall of 2008.
If May loses by more than 50 votes, she won’t have the credibility to push on to a second vote. Preparations for a “No Deal” exit will accelerate, and an extension past the March 2019 deadline may be sought. Conservative MPs will launch a party vote of no-confidence if only to forestall Labour from calling a parliamentary one, which would mean a general election that Labour could well win. The Conservative leadership contest would be a death match between Leavers and Remainers. If the Remainers were to win, the Conservatives would rally around a diluted version of May’s deal.
May could preempt both of these no-confidence votes by calling a general election first. Remainers have been calling for a second referendum, the People’s Vote—as opposed to the non-people who voted the wrong way in the 2016 referendum. May could present her general election as a referendum on her deal. That would mean her way or the highway of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. This is a choice between disaster in the long term and the short. May has an impeccable record for picking the worst option. A general election would present the two worst options. She may well find the combination irresistible.
Two personal observations about what might happen in the medium term: One is that since 2016, the markets have been betting on Brexit, despite the apocalyptic predictions of Remainers, the governor of the Bank of England among them. I’d take the serious money of the markets over the dishonest comedians of May’s government any day. The other is that if you want to find a true Brexiteer among Britain’s party leaders, look left.
Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong enemy of the European superstate. His Stalinoid grip on his party also makes him the only party leader capable of delivering a Commons vote for Brexit. The electoral cycle is against the Conservatives, too. In power since 2009, they can retain the premiership until 2022 but are unlikely to win a third election in a row. The price of a Corbyn Brexit would be economic collapse.
Conservatives still have a chance to deliver a market-friendly, democratically accountable Brexit, providing they ditch May as soon as possible. But then, the Conservatives are the party of Munich, Suez, and Maastricht.
