Hardliners on both sides turn post-Brexit politics into cage fight

Armed police on duty outside the Palace of Westminster yesterday. Picture: AFP

No, it’s not a coup. “Coup” means a blow, a strike, something sudden. What is happening to parliament in post-referendum Britain is slower and worse: the gradual erosion of its foundations, not a burst of violence that topples it. And responsibility for this belongs to people on both sides of the Brexit divide.

The spectacle of an executive closing parliament to prevent elected representatives having a proper say on a policy of generational importance will strike many as grotesque. It may also be welcomed by populist or authoritarian regimes as further evidence that liberal democracy has had its day. But rather than just lambast the Prime Minister, let’s consider how we reached this point, in the hope of finding a route back.

For some, a referendum is inevitably incompatible with parliamentary democracy: either the people decide, or their representatives decide on their behalf. I’ve always hoped that our constitution and, more importantly, our political culture could bend to provide a middle way. In the referendum, the people decided we had to leave, so we have to leave. But they didn’t say how we should leave; deciding contested questions like that should be the job of parliament.

On February 1, 2017, 498 MPs voted to authorise Theresa May to activate article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and set Britain on a legal conveyor belt to exit. Many did so with little real idea of what they were doing. Many Brexiteers pulled the trigger assuming that the exit deal they’d promised voters would simply fall into their laps. Other MPs took the plunge only because they were scared of angry voters and angry headlines. Some of the 498 are now trying to stop the Brexit engine, yet rarely explain their own part in setting it in motion, or acknowledge the anger that their inconsistency (understandably) engenders.

May belatedly accepted but never properly explained to voters that the logic of the narrow referendum result, coupled with Britain’s true negotiating strength, was a compromise deal that would disappoint everyone.

Yet pro- and anti-Brexit MPs alike refused to behave like adults and instead demanded juvenile visions of perfection. Three times they rejected May’s withdrawal agreement, many of them voting against something they privately regarded as the least-bad option but which they lacked the grit to advocate in public. In a secret ballot, May’s deal would have passed the Commons easily.

Today’s travesty was made possible by both Remainers and Leavers who rejected the deal and in so doing killed the idea that parliament was the place where differences could be reconciled and compromises struck. The Brexiteer Spartans who voted against it three times are egregious wreckers but they were not alone: their Stop-Brexit Remainer counterparts are just as culpable. How many of those who condemn Brexiteers flouting democratic convention cheered John Bercow when he undermined the impartiality of the Speaker’s chair over the withdrawal agreement, and hope he will now take up arms against the Johnson government?

By refusing to accept anything less than complete victory for their cause, hardliners on both sides ensured that parliament ceased to be a place where opponents would grind out respectful low-score draws and instead became a battlefield where the winners take all and the losers weep.

MPs who rejected the May deal chose to change the Brexit game from Test cricket to cage-fighting. Yes, it’s more exciting and, for the bloodthirsty, more satisfying. But who respects the cage?

Emerging evidence, such as work by Mirko Draca of Warwick University, to be published next month at the Social Market Foundation, suggests that distrust of institutions is the common root of populism shaking politics across the West. Suspending parliament to drive through a divisive policy will take us one more step on the road to American-style partisanship but so too would parliament fighting back by blocking the policy altogether. I voted Remain and would do so again, but I accept that we must leave. Boris Johnson’s willingness to tear up the norms and conventions on which we depend would not justify the vandalism of stopping Brexit. Brexit has made politics a form of warfare. We need parliament to negotiate a peaceful settlement to that fight, not to take sides in it.

There is still — just — a path that Britain can follow back towards more normal politics, where opposing sides merely disagree instead of seeking to destroy each other, and where everyone agrees that some rules, especially the unwritten ones, must never again be broken. Yet that path is perilously narrow and dizzyingly steep.

It requires the EU to bend enough for Johnson to claim victory on the backstop. It requires Johnson to face down the Tory ultras and Nigel Farage to sell that deal. And it requires parliamentarians intent on stopping Brexit to accept that their dream is dead and that the referendum vote and the article 50 vote mean their only choice is between leaving with a deal and leaving without one.

The arms race between unbending Remainers and uncompromising Brexiteers has brought us to the brink. The only way back is for everyone to accept an outcome that leaves no one wholly satisfied. In the months of turmoil ahead, pray that no one gets what they want.

James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation