Brexit is an endless mess that can only be untangled with a final public vote

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

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So it has come to this. On the very day the country is supposed to leave the European Union and celebrate its first day of “freedom” as “Global Britain”, the Commons is starting again, and the government is trying to revive a deal that has been universally certified dead.

The latest wheeze is to chop the prime minister’s deal in half. It is a novel approach to resuscitation, chopping the cadaver in half, and a minor monument to the ingenuity of the government’s business managers. Speaker John Bercow should reject this knavish little trick to evade parliamentary conventions and rules. In any case, the deal does not deserve to pass, and it won’t succeed. It is beyond desperate; a symbolic defeat on what has become a historic day, 29 March 2019 – for all the wrong reasons.

This is not the glad confident morning some wished for. There are many versions of “the Brexit we voted for” in June 2016, all peddled with varying degrees of plausibility – an end to free movement of workers and the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union; blue passports rather than burgundy ones.

No one, however, could have dreamed in their strangest nightmares that MPs would still be arguing about Brexit from first principles a matter of hours before we were supposed to quit, nor that the government had made plans to retreat to a nuclear bunker under Whitehall, evacuate the Queen to Windsor and stockpile body bags. Such horrors were not plastered on the side of any coaches.

May, as her Eurosceptic colleagues delight in reminding her, promised on some 108 separate occasions that the United Kingdom was exiting the EU on 29 March. For her part, she liked to think that this would create an atmosphere of confident expectation and, more crucially, encouraged the idea that the alternative to her deal was a no-deal Brexit. This was always a bluff; everyone knew it to be a bluff; and after parliament showed it was the one thing it could unite to rule out, it was a useless bluff. She has now been forced to abandon it.

We are, then, left in roughly the same place as when the prime minister returned from the November EU summit with her deal, only to find it meeting a hostile reception from her own side as well as the opposition parties. We have wasted the past four months going around a very well-worn circular track. It has culminated in a prime minister inverting the usual threat issued from a defiant occupant of No 10: “Back my policy or I quit” has been replaced by “Back my policy or I stay”.

Logically it makes little sense; May’s resignation will not alter a single word, footnote or punctuation mark in the withdrawal agreement or the political declaration on the future trade and security relationship. All it did was to make the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson twitch their snouts at the prospect of a change in leadership. She failed to understand that the leadership of the British Conservative Party is of marginal significance to the DUP on whom she relies for support; nor that her own “ultras” will not appease a deal they see as just as bad as staying in the EU – the “vassal state” Rees-Mogg used to drone on about in his antique way.

With hindsight, we can see many moments when things were mishandled. The UK agreed to the “sequencing” of talks that put the divorce deal before the trade deal; we wasted so much time on the Irish backstop that there was no possibility of a proper draft trade deal being considered alongside the divorce agreement – “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” was a wise motto eventually forgotten.

Perhaps the Europeans would have pushed the British into such a corner in any event. But there was a lofty, complacent assumption – based on nothing much – that the EU “always does deals at the last moment”. Labour failed woefully to form a determined opposition and credible alternative.

Above all, May made the unforced error of running a disastrous early election campaign in 2017 – wasting yet more precious weeks and destroying her own small majority. So far from winning a mandate for her brand of Brexit, she invited the “revenge of the Remainers”. Her failure then to consult MPs and craft a parliamentary majority to carry her Brexit deal was also a grievous error. It has left Brexit broken.

Soon, the myth of “Brexit betrayal” will start to gain traction. As a reluctant Remainer in 2016, turned Leaver by accident, May was suspected as unsound by Brexiteers. Too many of her efforts were about “damage limitation”, not buccaneering for the new Britain. She didn’t inspire anyone.

Johnson blithely claims that the British negotiating team “bottled it” – despite his position during much of the talks as foreign secretary – and implies his sub-Churchillian posing would have worked better then and in the future. May made her mistakes, but it is not all her fault. The disparity of power between the UK and the EU left the UK with relatively little leverage.

Other phantasmagoric Brexit betrayers will soon be blamed for the failure of Brexit – a shadowy supposed British pro-Brexit “Establishment”, including a “Remain parliament”, the BBC, the “enemies of the people” judges, the “mainstream media” more widely, Jeremy Corbyn’s vacillations, Philip Hammond, Mark Carney... The list of scapegoats is a long one.

The truth, though, is that we are a medium-sized European power that cannot have its cake and eat it. On Europe, we are evenly divided, where the gap between the two halves is exceptionally wide and deep, and parliament’s stalemates are merely a reflection of those pressures.

The crisis that stems from that popular vote in June 2016, can only be resolved by a further popular referendum today. We cannot go around in ever decreasing circles forever, whoever is supposed to be in charge.