Auspol is a mess, but at least we’re not the UK

The UK’s Brexit debacle is a massive failure of leadership that makes Australia’s instability seem not so bad, writes Peta Credlin.

IF you think we’ve had a torrid time when it comes to our political life over the past 10 years, spare a thought for Britain over the past two; the modern birthplace of democracy and home to the mother of parliaments is now the poster child for leadership failure on an epic scale.

The country whose polity has inspired so many and been copied so often is now effectively directionless with a lame duck in Downing Street and the British people more demoralised than when the bombs rained down on the East End.

In last week’s latest chapter on calamity, more than 100 MPs voted no confidence in their leader, yet Theresa May is still PM; with a Brexit plan the parliament will only pass if the alternative is chaos, because it would leave Britain still subject to the European Union’s rules but with no say in how they’re made. Plus, a transition period that is set to run on indefinitely, until EU (and only the EU) says it is over. What an absolute shambles! All brought about by a political class that’s better at surviving than governing, and by leaders that can’t lead.

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British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives for an EU summit in Brussels, Friday, Dec. 14, 2018. European Union leaders have offered Theresa May sympathy but no promises, as the British prime minister seeks a lifeline that could help her sell her Brexit divorce deal to a hostile U.K. Parliament. Picture: Alastair Grant, AP

This has now gone well beyond the usual drama at Westminster and has started to assume the elements of a national crisis.

Does the UK establishment accept, or reject, the democratic vote of the British people to leave the EU; is Britain a country that can, or can’t, manage itself; and is the system capable, or incapable, of working out a credible way forward? This whole mess shows what happens when the people in charge don’t believe in what they are supposedly trying to do.

Because Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy, the West’s second strongest military power, and the United States’ principal global ally (as well as the second largest investor in Australia and, still, the birthplace of the majority of our migrants) chaos there impacts here, and demoralises the wider world.

The British people voted — in a 52 to 48 per cent result — to leave the European Union because they didn’t like the euro-crats in Brussels calling the shots over trade, immigration, culture and regulation. And quite rightly, they expected that their politicians would then work out a credible plan for a Britain that was, once more, fully self-governing and fully free to work out its own place, in the wider world.

The basic problem is that no serious person in the British government, or in the British parliament, has put up a credible vision for what a free Britain would look like. It shouldn’t have been that hard. With Britain entirely in charge of everything, all it had to do was to decide the kind of future relationship that it wanted with the EU, and offer it to them on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, given that Europe has always needed Britain far more than Britain needed Europe — as the French (and Germans) should have realised from two world wars.

It really should have been pretty straightforward, given that all trade between Britain and Europe is fully free of tariffs and quotas. On rule-making, a simple option would be to leave rules as they are, but all new ones must come from UK legal system only. And so-called divorce payments? None, except for shared costs with ongoing joint projects. With Britain unilaterally proposing free movement of goods with Europe there would be no need for a hard border with Ireland, unless the EU tried to make the Irish have one — and that would be a problem for the Irish to resolve, not Britain.

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British newspaper coverage of May’s narrow retention of the leadership. Picture: Daniel Sorabji/AFP

Back in January last year, British PM Teresa May famously stated that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. If only she had subsequently lived up to that solemn declaration. The problem is that a bad deal — a very bad deal — has been the only one that the EU has been prepared to offer. And May, along with much of the UK establishment, has been so terrified of leaving without-a-deal that she’s been prepared to swallow this humiliation.

May is now hoping that the prospect of chaotic exit will force MPs to accept a rotten deal as the least bad option. Why trading with Europe on the basis of the WTO rules (which, after all, is how Australia trades with Europe) should so terrify British officialdom has always been a mystery. And a short period of confusion at the border while it gets sorted out is hardly worse than becoming an economic colony of the EU. But the really monumental failure of leadership, and of character, has been May putting a gun to the head of her party, and her country, and forcing them to make such an unpalatable choice. And with the talk again coming back to a second referendum, it just smacks of an establishment who didn’t get the outcome they wanted back in 2016 setting up another vote, and another if needed, to get the decision they want and to hell with the views of the ordinary voter sick to their back-teeth with the ‘Europe experiment.’

The only thing worse would be if all this tumult makes Jeremy Corbyn electable.