Brexit: Blame Theresa May, not John Bercow, for this new crisis

Placards by protesters placed outside government. Picture: AP.

Last week a bizarre election took place in Fall River, a small city in Massachusetts. Jasiel Correia, the 27-year-old mayor, who is facing fraud charges, was overwhelmingly rejected by voters in a recall ballot. More than 60 per cent of residents voted to remove him and only 4,911, or 38 per cent, supported him remaining as mayor. The result was clear but there was a strange twist. The poll also included a question about who should replace Mr Correia. Five people ran to fill the role, including the incumbent. On this second question, the mayor received almost exactly the same number of votes as in the first question, 4,808, but this time the rest of the votes were split between four candidates and so Mr Correia won.

As the New York Times columnist Max Fisher wrote: “Democracy can be a strange system sometimes.” He drew a parallel with the political deadlock over Brexit, which has also been caused by the clash between two votes: the direct democracy of the referendum and the representative democracy of a general election. “Politicians are bending over backward to find a public mandate for one plan or another when in fact none actually exists,” he said.

Theresa May has failed to unite MPs or the country. Picture: AP.

Theresa May hopes that, like the Fall River mayor, her deal will eventually get through because no one can agree on any alternative. The hard Brexiteers believe they can still get their preferred no-deal departure from the EU, even though it has been rejected by parliament, because this is the default outcome. Remainers are equally convinced that the impasse could result in another referendum or the revocation of Article 50. They can’t all be right, but what is clear — with just days to go before the scheduled leaving date — is that the prime minister has spectacularly failed to unite the Commons or the country.

Politics is the art of persuasion, but Mrs May has convinced neither Leavers nor Remainers of the merits of her deal. The withdrawal agreement has been rejected twice by massive majorities in the Commons, yet the Tory leader has shown no flexibility or imagination in responding to the defeats. Today’s ruling by John Bercow that the government cannot bring the meaningful vote back for a third time without substantive changes was a vivid illustration of the flaw in her strategy of trying to bludgeon her opponents into submission rather than attempting to win people round. Even before the Speaker’s extraordinary intervention, Downing Street was considering pulling the vote to avoid another defeat. According to a government source: “We were never bringing the deal this week if it couldn’t win, and it can’t.”

Although a few Tory Eurosceptics have said they will vote reluctantly for the deal if they get another chance, they have made clear that they are not doing so because they support it but because they fear losing Brexit. With the public also overwhelmingly opposed to her plan, Mrs May has converted very few people to her cause despite the unprecedented political and constitutional crisis.

Even if she does get her deal through, it will not be by convincing any of the factions of the positive benefits but because she has blackmailed the European Research Group, bribed the Democratic Unionist Party and bullied the pro-Europeans into backing it. Staving off defeat on such a monumentally important piece of legislation is not the same as winning the argument and would leave a toxic legacy in a country that remains deeply divided over Europe.

Whatever happens, nobody is going to come out of this process feeling happy about the result, especially after the government has so cynically run down the clock. As one cabinet minister says, the prime minister should never have just been trying to edge her Brexit deal “over the line”, she should have attempted to build a broad coalition in the Commons by seeking a consensus. Yet Mrs May has repeatedly refused to reach out across party lines, preferring to try to keep the Tories together by giving concessions to the hard Brexiteers who were never going to be satisfied. “Ironically in the search for unity the PM kept every option on the table until it split the party,” says one senior Conservative. “So many of the Brexiteers are now holding out because they want no deal, something that was never truly available but we pretended it was.”

Although the prime minister claims that the only way to draw a line under the arguments is to vote for her deal, the tensions will dominate the political debate for years because so much remains unresolved. There is still no agreed cabinet position on the future relationship with the EU, which is extraordinary.

The next Tory leadership contest will be fought through the prism of Brexit, with candidates including Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab already wooing the increasingly Eurosceptic membership. Once the ring is on the finger, the country will be dragged along behind the party, like the tin cans tied to a “just married” car.

The prime minister’s most important task after the 2016 referendum was to bring the nation together but she has never managed to craft a narrative for Brexit around which a majority can unite. In fact to shore up her position in Downing Street with the Tory Eurosceptics, she fuelled the tensions, both in parliament and beyond. She condemned pro-European “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere” while refusing to denounce headlines about “mutineers” or defend moderate MPs like Nick Boles, who has been forced out of his local party by hard Brexiteers. All along she has adopted a “winner takes all” attitude, setting red lines on free movement and the customs union that took no account of the 48 per cent who voted Remain. There was never an honest attempt to level with the voters about the trade-offs required to secure a deal to protect the nation’s economic interests. As a result, it has been much harder for either side to accept the need to compromise.

From the start, the Remainers felt abandoned, and now the Brexiteers also feel betrayed. MPs are deadlocked, parliament is at loggerheads with the executive, the different forms of democracy are straining against one another and hate crimes are on the rise as people define themselves against “the other”. Instead of bringing harmony, Mrs May has entrenched division. That is the greatest failure of her leadership.

The Times