Europe’s leaders feeling the effects of Brexit malaise

Britain’s parliamentary paralysis on Brexit continues and the confusion has spread.

Anti-Brexit activists display the Union and EU flags as they demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, this week. Picture: AFP.

On Monday evening, the British parliament filched the order paper from under the government’s nose to answer the EU’s burning question: tell me what you want, what you really really want. Having done so, on Wednesday evening it undertook the painstaking job of ruling out all the restaurants on Deliveroo, and will now be forced to stand outside in the rain as the local chippie shuts down for the night.

In short, the problem I identified in this newspaper in December remains on foot: parliament is completely divided. There are maj­orities against everything but no majority for anything on offer. Wednesday night’s exercise gave parliament a chance — by taking Brexit out of the government’s hands — to find a way forward. The Commons voted on alternative policies, secure in the knowledge that none would yet have the force of law. The options took in everything from no deal to a second referendum to revoking Article 50 to joining the European Economic Area. Unfortunately, it simply put precise numbers on the analysis paralysis present not only among MPs but across the country.

There are some devils in the detail, though. Support for a simple, Turkish-style Customs union failed by only eight votes. It did better than Labour’s actual “official” policy, which is essentially a Customs union with bells and whistles. Allowing for the fact that Theresa May instructed her cabinet ministers to abstain and Labour whipped in its favour, this suggests an awareness — however dim — that the UK has lost too much institutional capacity to run an independent trade policy and should therefore outsource it to the EU.

A Customs union would, however, return control over immigration policy to the UK by ending free movement. I’m not sure whether this much confidence in the Home Office is warranted — it’s difficult, for example, to imagine it replicating Australia’s points-based immigration system, even if it wanted to — but that seems to be where parliament has landed. The various single-market options, meanwhile, all failed badly. Membership of the European single market — in contrast to a Customs union — requires an independent trade policy but outsources immigration to the EU.

A second referendum also looks superficially popular, but the numbers supporting it are ultim­ately less revealing than the support for a Customs union. The referendum voted on is confirmatory, to be held only after parliament has chosen a particular Brexit model. It is not a “people’s vote”, for which 400,000 people marched through London on Sunday. The model the “people’s vote” campaign prefers has not yet taken its final form but it’s clear most of those who support such a vote want a binary choice along the same lines as that offered in 2016.

In many ways, Wednesday’s exercise resembles Australia’s republic referendum in 1999, when John Howard cleverly divided the republican vote by proposing a model only some republicans wanted. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and his advisers are responsible for the confirmatory referendum idea, basing it on the procedure that trailed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In that case, both Northern Ireland and Eire held referendums to ensure the GFA enjoyed widespread public support. In a truly perverse numerical joke, the indicative vote on Corbyn’s confirmatory referendum plan produced the following result: no 52 per cent, yes 48 per cent. I regret to inform readers that, yes, mathematics is now trolling us.

The indicative votes process is likely to get even more complicated on Monday because Wednesday’s paper ballots will become preferential paper ballots — that is, MPs will have to rank the four or five most popular options the way Australians rank candidates at election time. So far, so easy, except unlike Australians, Britons have centuries of experience putting a single cross in a box and leaving all the other boxes blank. “Single transferable vote” or “instant run-off” or “the alternative vote” (the various names Brits have for preferential voting) is a mystery to them.

I was in the country in 2011 when Britain held a referendum on introducing optional preferential ballots for general elections. It soon became clear that no one, on either side, had the faintest clue what they were voting for (or against). People are particularly unfamiliar with the process whereby something that is a lot of people’s second choice leapfrogs some people’s first choice — what is known as a “Condorcet winner” (a proposal that a majority can live with even when it’s only a minority’s preferred option).

Given this catlike sweeping of all available options off the table, you would think May’s thrice-defeated withdrawal agreement could climb, zombie-like, back on to the table. And if you think that, you would be right. Except Speaker John Bercow stood in its path armed with a cricket bat like the lead character in Shaun of the Dead.

On Monday Bercow scuppered a further “meaningful vote” on May’s deal on the basis that it breached a 1604 standing order stating that one cannot keep presenting the same bill to the Commons once it has been rejected. The purpose of that provision is to prevent the executive bullying the legislature; it’s an affirmation that the government’s control over parliamentary business is ultim­ately in the gift of MPs. He reiterated this point on Wednesday while ruling out a so-called “paving motion”, which I think is mistaken. Paving motions — Australian legislatures have them too — mean parliament can overrule the Speaker to debate what it wants to debate.

The decision took Bercow outside the sphere of protecting house rights, which is his job, and made the situation about him and his personal control over the sequence of events.

This has all become more acute since May offered to resign if her withdrawal agreement was passed. In this context, it’s important to remember there is a sharp distinction between the process of withdrawal and Britain’s future economic relationship with the EU. If the future relationship is negotiated by, say, Michael Gove or Boris Johnson and steered by a Dominic Cummings-led Cabinet Office, the dreaded Northern Irish backstop will almost certainly never come into effect. Cummings, recall, not only ran the successful Vote Leave campaign in 2016 but systematically broke and sidelined Britain’s catastrophically incompetent civil service when he worked for Gove. Gove’s reforms of secondary education were among the few bright spots in David Cameron’s term as prime minister.

It is fair to say May has been a dreadful prime minister: she lacks every leadership quality apart from perseverance and managed to lose a 20 per cent poll lead against an antediluvian Marxist after calling a completely unnecessary general election. She has made a complete hash of negotiating Brexit thus far and has succeeded in alienating the whole country, Leave and Remain alike.

Nonetheless, her offer to fall on her sword was made with great dignity and in the best traditions of British constitutionalism — it really is the grandest of gestures any leader can make. Minutes after she made it, Conservative Brexiteers such as Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg started coming on board, bringing most of the European Research Group with them. Boris, of course, is on manoeuvres and notoriously has more loose threads than an octopus’s knitting: he once wrote a detailed piece arguing for Remain, only to follow it up shortly thereafter with a detailed piece arguing for Leave.

May and her cabinet then engaged in scrambling and scrabbling jiggery-pokery to get around Bercow’s ruling and have another vote on Friday (last night AEDT). This involved splitting the political declaration off from the withdrawal agreement itself. The latter is a bona fide international treaty already inked by the EU27. They can’t change it, even if leading negotiators like Jean-Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier wanted to. Only one member state has to peel off and the whole thing implodes. The political declaration, by contrast — which sets out the basis for the UK’s future relationship with the EU — can be amended. Indeed, that is the point of all the indicative votes; they’re an attempt to find a future relationship sufficient numbers of MPs are willing to accept.

In the end, the standalone withdrawal agreement was defeated 344 to 286, a relatively narrow defeat of 58— but still far, far larger than the eight vote customs union defeat. Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party was author of May’s loss, refusing to join the ERG in supporting May. The DUP view has long been that while May’s deal may deliver Brexit, it does not protect the Union, and their raison d’être — like Abraham Lincoln’s in the context of the US Civil War — is the preservation of the Union. Asked to decide between Brexit and the Union, the DUP chose the Union.

All of this palaver has created what the EU has started to describe as “contagion” or “infection”. Procedurally adept but strategically myopic, the EU’s negotiators backed May into a bureaucratic corner but the entity itself is being eaten alive from within by just the sort of national populists who won the 2016 referendum for Leave. This is why, now her deal has been defeated, a no-deal Brexit has only been postponed to April 12.

Among EU leaders, Poland’s Donald Tusk has alone spoken positively of the sort of long Article 50 extension that would lead to UK participation in May’s European Parliament elections. In response to Friday’s loss, he immediately called a European Council meeting. Partly this is because he is intensely pro-British, but it’s also because he has genuine experience of dealing with populists in his own country: they don’t scare him. Germany and France — bedevilled respectively by Alternative für Deutschland and les gilets jaunes — are far less sanguine. And Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel do have a point, to be fair.

When Tusk’s interventions earlier in the week made it seem a long Article 50 extension was likely, UK Independence Party activist Tommy Robinson and YouTube star Carl Benjamin (aka “Sargon of Akkad”) announced they would run for the European Parliament. Given the proportional way the EP is elected, both men almost certainly would win seats. And they’d join a gaggle of populists from across the EU with their hearts set on blowing up the euro if not the EU itself.

It’s for this reason political historian Stephen Davies argues that, at some point during the next five or 10 years, “the EU will no longer exist in its current form”.

The EU quite simply does not want what is already going to be a problem to become an even bigger problem. It also wants to avoid a disorderly exit. Some EU leaders and negotiators are also increasingly alarmed by the prospect of Article 50 being revoked. This would leave an angry, disgruntled and disruptive UK within the EU, quite possibly with a Brexiteer as prime minister. Not the beginning of the end, perhaps, but certainly the end of the beginning.

Helen Dale won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, studied law at Oxford and was senior adviser to senator David Leyonhjelm. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, has just been published. She lives in London.