And so this humiliating Brexit omnishambles goes on

Nothing can disguise the abject failure of British politics in relation to Brexit. Theresa May has lost the basic authority of government.

A pro-Brexit activist demonstrates outside of the Houses of Parliament in London as inside, the parties are split on the issue. Picture: AFP

This was the week that British politics and democracy broke. Theresa May suffered a series of catastrophic parliamentary defeats. By the end of the week, her cabinet ministers felt free to vote against her wishes and instructions, against government policies, and yet not resign. Both the governing Conservatives and the Labour opposition are internally split over how, when and if Britain should leave the EU.

As of right now, every outcome remains possible. At the end of the week, May won her one substantial parliamentary victory, and it was a characteristic May victory: parliament agreed that she could ask the EU for a delay to the scheduled departure on March 29.

Delay — it’s the one thing May is really good at.

But nothing can disguise the abject failure of British politics in relation to Brexit. It is nearly three years since the British voted, 52 per cent to 48, to leave the EU. It was the biggest vote for anything in British history.

It is nearly two years since May triggered the Article 50 process to leave the EU. And it is nearly two years since a general election in which both the Conservatives and Labour pledged to honour the referendum result — that is, to leave the EU — and on that basis won 80 per cent of the national vote.

Yet at the end of that process Britain — proverbially the land of common sense and compromise, of restraint and politeness, of good process and good governance, of the culture of great institutions buttressed by conventions of ­respect — has a prime minister with neither authority nor credibility, a governing party bitterly at war with itself, an opposition man­ifestly unfit to govern and absolutely no clarity at all about how, when or if it will leave the EU.

It is an omnishambles, a cluster mess of the ages, an epic fail by a political class that once determined the strategic direction of much of the world.

It is humiliating. And it is by no means over.

Not only Britain but every friend of Britain is hurt and diminished by this mess. Britain is the second most important nation in the Western alliance (with competition offered only by Japan). The UK is Washington’s closest strategic ally. It is the world’s fifth biggest economy. It is in a significant measure the birthplace of the traditions of Western democracy and the rule of law. It is an independent nuclear weapons state. It is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the right of veto. It has the second largest military budget among US allies. It possesses ­immense soft power and cultural influence.

And it is, at the moment, an unravelling mess of growing internal hostilities and indecipherable policy options. US President ­Donald Trump expressed exasperation and said he was “surprised at how badly” the British have conducted negotiations with the EU.

The schadenfreude of the EU bureaucrats is barely disguised. Britain is on the rack.

The EU folks are aware that they could yet overplay their hand to their own disadvantage, but their ­refusal to offer reasonable terms to Britain has been, as a narrow negotiating tactic and in terms of ruthless hard power political force, vindicated.

It is arguable that May inherited a weak hand, but she has played it with a kind of exquisite incompetence that has produced this worst of all results — that is, no ­result, no certainty, no end.

The enemies of any Brexit say that Britain leaving the EU will be damaging to the British economy under any circumstances. And they can cite the slowdown in the British economy, with forecast growth dropping from 1.6 per cent to 1.2, as evidence of this. Yet Italy, without any Brexit but certainly with the cost of EU regulation and macro-economic policy paralysis, is the big European economy in recession. And Germany is on the very brink of recession.

The Remain campaign predicted that if Britain voted to leave the EU there would straight away be a huge recession, emergency austerity measures and the near immediate loss of half a million jobs and more. These insane predictions, none of which remotely came true, had the backing of British government institutions that had been misused and politicised during the referendum campaign.

The economic damage to the British economy right now seems to be coming from the continuing uncertainty of the Brexit process. If May has not contrived a hellish outcome for her country, she has contrived a very extended stay in purgatory. There is a kind of ­Brexit twilight that has gone on now for nearly three years and shows every sign of going on for years into the ­future.

The House of Commons this week voted for the second time to reject May’s withdrawal agreement. In January, the first time she put her deal to the Commons, it was defeated by 230 votes, the ­biggest losing parliamentary ­margin ever for a serving government. This week, May’s deal was rejected by a margin of 149, the fourth largest losing margin of any government.

They were right to reject the deal, which is little understood by any sane person who doesn’t have the time to follow it all in minute detail. But May’s agreement ­essentially only covers a transition period of two years in which there would be very little actual change. During that two years Britain and the EU still have to work out the terms and nature of their long-term relationship. If they cannot agree on terms for this, then the so-called backstop agreement comes into force. This commits Britain to staying inside the EU customs union until the EU agrees that it can leave.

Ask yourself this question: if the EU has not been willing to agree to any British proposal of substance over the past two years, when Britain had the credible threat of leaving with no deal and liberalising its economy to attract investment away from the EU, and before Britain had paid its staggering, indeed ridiculous, divorce bill of £39 billion, why would it ever do so after Britain no longer had that leverage?

Britain would either remain ­indefinitely a hostage inside the EU customs union or it would have to agree to a deal so one-sided that it would mean Britain effectively ceased to be a self-governing democracy, with all its economic rules and many of its ­social rules decided in Brussels and no real input into them from Britain.

Of course, that may not happen. No one can predict what might happen. After two years of negotiation, May has got nowhere on the substance of a long-term agreement. It is covered only by a vague and waffly statement of political intent from the EU and Britain, a statement with no binding force, no detail and almost no specifics. Not only is May’s deal a bad deal in itself, it would solve nothing but continue the debilitating uncertainty because everyone in Britain would continue trying to campaign over what the final deal, which might take a decade or three to reach, should look like, while the EU laughed all the way to the European Central Bank.

But the House of Commons did a lot of other things this week — almost all of them bad. It ­declared in a motion that it would not countenance leaving the EU without a deal. This motion as yet has no legal force and the default legal position of both Britain and the EU is that if no extension is agreed and no deal worked out, then Britain leaves on March 29 with no deal. That would mean trading with the EU on World Trade Organisation rules.

That was the explicit intent of the legislation passed two years ago authorising withdrawal. If Britain and the EU could not reach a deal, the legislation provided that Britain would leave anyway. May encapsulated this famously in her line: “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

If you remove no deal, then the encounter between Britain and the EU is not a negotiation but a plea for mercy. It’s like buying a house. You want to buy the house and you negotiate over price. If the price is too high you walk away. But the House of Commons has told the EU that, literally, no price is too high, it will never walk away.

The EU is like Kerry Packer meeting Britain’s Alan Bond. The seller just keeps raising the price until he judges the physical ­capacity of the buyer is exhausted.

As a tactic, ruling out a no deal Brexit only really makes sense if your underlying intention is to ­reverse the referendum result ­altogether. The House of Commons also passed a motion rejecting the idea of a second ref­erendum, but Labour officially abstained from this vote. Some 17 Labour politicians rebelled by voting against a second referendum and some 24 rebelled by voting in favour of a referendum. But Labour can easily embrace this option in the future, presumably with the support of a few committed Conservative Remainers.

The way the Commons voted to kill the no-deal option was powerfully telling. May supported a version of the motion that ­included the recognition that no deal still remained the default legal position. Her version was ­defeated. Several of her cabinet voted against her on this and none resigned or was sacked.

This is a prime minister who has lost the basic authority of government.

This is also borne out in her one big win — the vote to seek an ­extension from the EU. Some 188 Conservative MPs, a big ­majority of Conservatives in parliament, including two dozen-odd frontbenchers, voted against her. The utter insanity of this week is evident in Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay dutifully speaking in favour of the government’s ­motion, finishing the debate, then voting against it.

Where to from here?

May will submit her deal to the House of Commons for a third time next week. The idea is that those Conservatives who want a real Brexit will abandon their ­opposition to her deal on two grounds. One, there is an increasing chance of no Brexit at all. I think Britain would be much better off staying in the EU than ­embracing May’s terrible deal. But many Conservative politicians feel their supporters, who overwhelmingly favour Brexit, will never forgive them if they don’t deliver some kind of Brexit, no matter how flawed.

Second, every responsible figure in Britain must now be looking at ways to calm the situation down. The shocking events in New Zealand should remind all politicians, all social media activists, everybody, of the extreme danger of exaggerated rhetoric.

May hopes that with enough of those kinds of Tories changing their minds, and with some support from some Labour politicians similarly concerned, she might just sneak the deal across the line.

Who knows? Anything’s ­possible.

If her deal is passed, she will ask the EU for a short extension to get relevant legislation passed. The EU would agree to that. If her deal is again voted down, she will ask the EU for a longer extension, perhaps of two years.

The EU would probably agree but perhaps with extreme or even humiliating conditions. If it says no, then Britain would either leave with no deal after all or May might get her agreement passed at one minute to midnight.

A longer delay is intensely dangerous for May. There would be time for her party to get rid of her. But while she has been a poor prime minister, a leadership change does not solve the Conservatives’ problems or fix their numbers in parliament.

As a minority government, even a handful of Tories, either ardent Remainers or strong Brexiteers, can frustrate any specific government action.

Jeremy Corbyn’s notional preferred position, of Britain staying in the customs union permanently, would, as in most things with Brexit, be harder to negotiate than it looks and would involve Britain permanently accepting that it lives under EU rule but has no say in EU decision-making.

A long delay also gives those forces in favour of a second referendum more time to organise.

Only one prediction is certain: the Brexit mess, which has already exhausted the patience of the British public, has a long way to run.