Brexit brings out the worst in Britain

Australia will return to normalcy if someone who is actually good at the job becomes PM. Britain will not.

An unflattering sculpture of Theresa May deposited by Remainers outside Westminster this week. Picture: AP

Most Australians are aware — thanks to our revolving door of prime ministers — we’ve acquired a reputation as the Italy of the South Seas. So let me tell you about Brexit Britain, which is in the process of breaking the big electric train set in the Palace of Westminster. Australia will return to normalcy if someone who is actually good at the job becomes PM. Britain, I fear, will not.

Since June 23, 2016, colossal fissures — hitherto obscured from view — have opened in the body politic. More Conservatives voted Leave than Labourites, but Labour represents the most passionately pro-Remain constituencies in the country and the most passionately pro-Leave ones. So both parties have taken to destroying themselves internally rather than dealing with the vote’s implications.

The Tories are more culpable, because they are in government. They have stuck with Theresa May, a leader who lacks every leadership quality apart from perseverance and who managed to lose a 20 per cent poll lead against an antediluvian Marxist after calling an unnecessary general election. Last year’s election produced a hung parliament and forced May’s Tories into a confidence and supply arrangement with the DUP, a Northern Irish outfit that is, to put it mildly, full of nutters.

Thanks in part to the immense distraction of that unnecessary election, May and her cabinet office hangers-on have made a complete hash of negotiating Brexit. They failed to appreciate that the EU — while slow and ponderous and beset with terrible problems of its own (Italy, Greece, Hungary, people in France attempting to re-run 1789, and so on) — simply has to defend itself on Brexit or risk being torn asunder. Much like Britain, in fact.

The deal debated in the Commons this week (and then withdrawn when it became clear it would suffer a catastrophic defeat) is widely — and accurately — seen as a national humiliation. Yes, it is true there is an important distinction between withdrawal and the UK’s future economic relationship with the EU, but the withdrawal agreement — although it is meant to be temporary — has been so incompetently constructed the UK may never reach the sunlit uplands of a future economic relationship.

The significance of including a customs arrangement in the “Irish backstop” is that it prejudices future trade negotiations. Why would the EU 27 agree to any other kind of relationship when their best alternative is what they already have? The inevitable result is that Britain will be forced into some form of permanent customs union. This is a bad idea on the merits, unless you’re a large manufacturer like Airbus, which uses the customs union to move parts between your plants in different EU countries.

In its proposed form this is more an excommunication than a divorce. You can’t take the sacraments but you’re still not allowed to sin. And once you’re sufficiently contrite the process can be reversed, but only on EU terms.

The backstop will also subject Northern Ireland to different regulations from the rest of the UK. Those regulations will emanate from a political entity of which the UK is not a part. An arrangement such as this is not compatible with Northern Ireland being a sovereign part of the UK.

And how has this come about? Because the EU has hard borders with what EU treaties call “third countries”, and after Brexit the UK will become a third country, the logical consequence is a hard border between Eire and Northern Ireland. Except a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is not possible, because of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Good Friday Agreement is based on referendums in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. It’s partly an international treaty, partly an agreement between the Northern Irish parties. It isn’t part of UK domestic law but it binds us in so many areas it may as well be. It guarantees Northern Ireland access to the European Court of Human Rights — a major reason David Cameron couldn’t repeal the Blair-era Human Rights Act. It was written on the understanding both Ireland and the UK were part of the EU so it doesn’t envisage what either country’s commitments could be in relation to the border in the event of either ­leaving.

The Good Friday Agreement also ended a period of history known as the Troubles. You may remember it. To quote Bernard Woolley of Yes Minister fame: “Ireland doesn’t make it any better; Ireland doesn’t make anything any better.” Nonetheless, the Ulster Plantation was a terrible and immoral mistake and the Irish border problem (and Northern Ireland generally) is our punishment for the sins of our ancestors. Northern Ireland has become the UK’s cat flap of doom, simply ­because the EU is (rightly) concerned that importers could use it as a backdoor into the customs union.

It was clear from at least the 2017 general election and probably before that the EU was wholly inflexible on this point. The UK could either keep Northern Ireland in a customs arrangement (and the single market) or leave with no withdrawal treaty.

This meant “no deal” was the only constitutionally viable option. Parliament had to take whatever actions it considered necessarily to flow from that. This could have included free trade negotiations with Commonwealth countries, and even taken in a border poll in Northern Ireland on the understanding of no deal. It should also have made other contingency plans — working out how to manage the electricity grid in Northern Ireland for example — had serious no-deal preparations started in mid-2017.

Jo Johnson, a Remain supporter, described this lack of preparation for no deal (coupled with May’s lacklustre withdrawal agreement) as “the greatest failure of British statecraft since the 1956 Suez Crisis”. His brother Boris agreed with him. Boris, as I think everyone knows, led the Leave campaign.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has had less opportunity to evince idiocy simply because it is the opposition, but that doesn’t let it off the hook. Corbyn himself is a lifelong Eurosceptic forced by the Blairite wing of his party to support Remain in 2016. He was frank that his socialist policies — extensive renationalisation, including the railways — could not be enacted while the UK was in the EU.

Since 2016, however, Labour’s Blairites have weakened, while Corbyn’s views on renationalisation have not changed. Nonetheless, his peace-hope-anti-austerity message resonated with a lot of passionate Remain supporters in 2017. Which means he is stuck walking a fine (and equivocating) line between his socialist Leavers and his neoliberal-with-a-dash-of-compassion Remainers, or he risks blowing up his party.

The effect of all this is that the Tories, the civil service and Labour are tripping over each other and falling down separate flights of stairs while the nation looks on in baffled consternation. We used to be good at running things. That was Britain’s super power. It’s how we won the empire. And yet we’ve somehow lost the knack. Why?

One of the reasons the 2016 EU referendum was so destructive of civil society is because Westminster is a system of representative democracy. We elect our MPs to make law, and it is their role to deliberate in parliament and make decisions on behalf of those they represent, but not at their behest. Over its long development, anything even vaguely populist was drained out of the UK’s constitutional architecture. Politicians are not supposed to keep picking at some electoral scab or another using direct democracy; 2016 was thus a horrible disruption of the constitutional order precisely because referendums are not how one does things in Blighty.

A referendum became necessary, though, as the UK has outsourced so many legislative competencies — most importantly trade and immigration — to the EU. Constitutionally, the electorate entrusts MPs with legislative power, but parliament had no authority to give that power to the EU. That authority required a mandate from the people. Britain’s greatest constitutional lawyer, Vernon Bogdanor, pointed out that a referendum should have been held in 1993 (before signing the Maastricht Treaty). His advice was ignored. Instead, Cameron, Bogdanor’s most famous student, was forced by circumstances to lance the national boil in 2016.

Bit late, mate.

UK politicians have legislated and governed within such a constrained field for so long they are now out of practice. Westminster is no more than a big electric train set. The concomitant loss of capacity among British civil servants and policy analysts is notable, especially to Australians used to competent government who land in these islands. It is difficult, for example, to imagine the Home Office replicating Australia’s points-based immigration system, even if it wanted to.

The vacuum on both sides of parliament has allowed a weak government to be captured on two fronts. The EU has led it in negotiations. It has been buffeted by pressure from incompetent civil servants. Yes, in the past fortnight parliament has demonstrated it ultimately has the power and is in control, which is how it should be. Parliament is however completely divided and has nothing like a clear majority to decide anything. Something, however, must be decided before March 29 next year. I don’t have the slightest clue what.

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