Like her predecessor, May took a gamble on a totally unnecessary vote and was left looking rather foolish, in Britain and in the whole of Europe. As soon as the full results were in, there was general consensus among commentators as to the reasons for the Conservatives’ poor performance. During the election campaign May had been reluctant to stray too far from her alliterative ‘strong and stable’ soundbite as she insisted that the key issue was her decisive leadership, but her refusal to take part in televised debates plus an embarrassing U-turn on her party’s manifesto proposal for funding residential care for the elderly (dubbed the ‘dementia tax’) made her look anything but a second iron maiden. Indeed, George Osborne, whom she had fired from the cabinet, coined the expression ‘weak and wobbly’, which was immediately seized upon by her opponents. In contrast, Labour switched the agenda to their popular manifesto and plans to improve NHS funding, build council houses and scrap university tuition fees, all proposals that appealed to millions who were weary of years of austerity. In addition, Jeremy Corbyn’s greatly increased TV exposure enabled the public to discover that he was not the three-eyed monster portrayed in the right-wing tabloids, while Momentum, a grassroots campaigning organization, mobilized thousands of volunteers who targeted marginal constituencies with a combination of old-fashioned door-to-door canvassing and very modern use of social media. Emma Rees (2017), Momentum’s national organizer, believes their work countered the political apathy that had taken root in many communities: ‘By running a nimble, creative campaign with a youthful staff we connected with those who were new to the Labour party, new to campaigning and often new to politics.’
But if Europe was not the word on everyone’s lips during the election campaign, it was always present as a subtext, and when it emerged that May, far from securing a convincing victory to strengthen her hand in talks with Brussels, had instead lost her overall majority in the Commons, the impact of the changed political landscape on Brexit negotiations was the subject of considerable speculation. On a turnout of 68.7 per cent, the Conservative Party lost thirteen seats to finish on 318, eight short of the number needed for an overall majority, while Labour gained thirty seats to end up with 262. Results for the other parties were SNP 35 (-21), Liberal Democrats 12 (+4), the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 10 (+2), Northern Irish Sinn Fein 7 (+3), the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru 4 (+1) and the Green Party retained its single seat. The new parliament was significantly different in ways other than the party allegiances of its members: of the 650 MPs, a record 208 (32 per cent) were women, 52 were from ethnic-minority backgrounds and 45 openly declared themselves to be LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender), a rise of 40 per cent compared with 2015 (Wilson 2017).
A fair number of Labour’s thirty gains involved constituencies where a year earlier a majority of voters had opted for Remain, which led Laurence Dodds (2017) for The Telegraph to ask, ‘Was this the revenge of the liberal metropolitan elite?’ Professor John Curtice, who achieved a degree of celebrity status literally overnight during the BBC’s coverage of the results as they came in, noted that in constituencies where more than 55 per cent had voted Remain in the referendum there was a seven-point swing to Labour, while in seats where 60+ per cent had voted Leave there was a 1 per cent swing to the Conservatives (Barford 2017). In 2016 Londoners had bucked the trend in most of England by voting Remain, and a year later they switched to Labour in considerable numbers; of the seventy-three constituencies in Greater London, forty-nine were won by Labour, including such unexpected gains as Hampstead and Kilburn after a 12 per cent swing, and Kensington by just twenty votes after three recounts.
Since Labour had supported the government’s decision to trigger article 50, for Remainers still hopeful of overturning the referendum result it would have been more logical to vote for more committed pro-EU parties like the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. For those for whom the priority was to unseat a Conservative MP, however, a vote for the second largest party was the sensible choice, while for people in multicultural London who had accepted that the referendum result could not be wished away, there was the consolation of knowing that negotiators chosen by Jeremy Corbyn would aim to achieve a soft Brexit that respected acquired residence rights. The Labour Party manifesto, For the many not the few (2017: 24), was bound to be more appealing to London’s multiethnic population than the Tories’ courting of UKIP voters.
We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union – which are essential for maintaining industries, jobs and businesses in Britain. Labour will always put jobs and the economy first.
A Labour government will immediately guarantee existing rights for all EU nationals living in Britain and secure reciprocal rights for UK citizens who have chosen to make their lives in EU countries. EU nationals do not just contribute to our society: they are part of our society. And they should not be used as bargaining chips.
It is shameful that the Prime Minister rejected repeated attempts by Labour to resolve this issue before Article 50 was triggered. As a result three million EU nationals have suffered unnecessary uncertainty, as have the 1.2 million UK citizens living in the EU.
In contrast, during the election campaign the Tories promised to reduce immigration and did not explicitly rule out expulsions, while Theresa May’s second-favourite soundbite – ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ – suggested that she would not be averse to a very hard Brexit indeed. Although it was Labour’s anti-austerity policies that most appealed to the younger voters responsible for the party’s revival, the generation that had not wanted Brexit also knew that Labour would not go into talks in Brussels with sleeves rolled up and wielding a broken bottle.
So Brexit, an issue of enormous importance for the future of Britain, disappeared off the radar in the weeks before the election, but as soon as the result was known immediately re-emerged as a hot topic as it seemed unthinkable that a weakened government could persevere with its declared approach to negotiations with Brussels, that is, driving a hard bargain and being ready to walk away if necessary. On the morning after the vote Andrew Grice (2017) saw the debacle of the early election as signifying the end of a hard Brexit negotiated by a handful of May loyalists without consulting Parliament or the other parties.
The Remainers have an unexpected spring in their step today. May has paid a very heavy price for ignoring the 48 per cent. The hard Brexiteers, who always feared the prize would somehow be snatched from them even after the referendum, are re-living their worst nightmare.
Brexit will still go ahead, since the Conservatives and Labour, who won more than 80 per cent of the votes between them, both promised that. But it could now be a very different Brexit, a much softer version than the one May wanted. Membership of the single market and customs union, ruled out by May, are now back on the agenda. She wanted to marginalise Parliament in the Brexit process; if she had won a majority, the House of Lords would not have blocked leaving the single market and customs union as this was in the Tory manifesto.
Instead, Parliament will now play a more important role. Pro-European Tory MPS may well link up with like-minded MPs in other parties to push for a soft Brexit. Some MPs and peers will argue that May’s plan for hard Brexit has been rejected.
Emily Allen (2017) for The Telegraph also felt that the result made a hard Brexit less probable and noted that to secure a majority in the Commons, Theresa May was expected to seek an agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which was pro-Brexit but was also anxious to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland and therefore wanted a soft Brexit.
Like Andrew Grice, John Rentoul (2017) focused on the difficulty the government was likely to have getting its Brexit terms through the House of Lords, a problem exacerbated by the failure to win a clear mandate for its election manifesto, but unlike Grice he did not see Brexit in one form or
another as inevitable: ‘I now wonder whether Britain really will leave the EU at midnight on 29 March 2019 after all.’
The only good news for the Conservatives from the election results was the party’s much improved performance in Scotland, something that was accredited to the communication skills of Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. With regard to Brexit, however, winning seats in pro-Remain Scotland piled more pressure upon May, for Davidson could speak from a position of strength when she urged her party to seek a deal that entailed staying in the EU single market and retaining freedom of movement. Other senior Tories who had never wanted Brexit also emerged from the shadows to press for a soft version. Beneath a headline in The Mail that wondered whether Brexit was ‘a giant stitch-up’, Sofia Petkar (2017) raised doubts as to whether the start of official negotiations, scheduled for Monday 19 June 2017, would actually begin on time. In the wake of the ‘shambolic general election’, there was something sinister about the Tory Remainers’ assertiveness.
It was the first concrete sign that Brexit is being deliberately delayed, or worse, as part of a broader political agenda. One senior EU official gleefully claimed that Theresa May has ‘lost control over her own government’, adding: ‘It’s like waiting for Godot.’
Petkar prefers implicature to unambiguous statements, flouting the maxims of quantity and manner with her brief and insufficiently defined allusions to ‘or worse’ and ‘broader political agenda’. That the unnamed EU official is reported as having spoken ‘gleefully’ is indicative of hard Brexiteers’ resentment of the fact that the UK’s self-inflicted disarray had generated amusement in some circles. The reference to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot implies that Petkar fears (where Rentoul hopes) that Brexit may never happen.
British politicians who shared Rentoul’s hope, wary of being accused of disregarding the will of the electorate, kept their views to themselves. When both the newly elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the German finance minister, Walter Schäuble, intimated that the door had been left ajar should Britain have second thoughts about leaving the EU, there was little response.
The Mail was more explicit in using the words ‘Cabinet Remainers plot with Labour to ‘soften’ Britain’s departure from the EU’ as part of its headline to an article about Ruth Davidson’s ‘newly-enhanced influence’ (Tapsfield et al. 2017), but also quoted the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, insisting that although official talks might not begin on Monday 19 June as scheduled, they would definitely start later that week. Furthermore, he did not budge from the position that ‘the UK would still have to leave the single market, customs union and jurisdiction of the European court’ (ibid.). Despite the widely held view that the election result indicated the electorate’s preference for a soft Brexit, the man charged with leading Brexit negotiations – presumably with his prime minister’s approval – showed little inclination to make a radical change in approach. Indeed, The Sun reported him refuting speculation that the government had softened its Brexit stance and insisting that he was still prepared to walk away without a deal if talks did not make satisfactory progress (Clark 2017). Theresa May also signalled that she had no intention of changing course when in her post-election cabinet reshuffle she recalled arch-Brexiteer Michael Gove.
Theresa May and David Davis could talk as tough as they liked but they could not deny the arithmetic of the post-election House of Commons; even with an agreement with the ten DUP MPs, it would not need much of a rebellion by Tory Remainers to defeat the government. Hamish McRae (2017) argued that the election had made the political situation more uncertain but, paradoxically, had actually clarified the economics of Brexit since, whatever May and Davis said days before the start of official talks, two facts had emerged.
One is that the option of walking away without a deal will be strongly and vigorously opposed by the business establishment – and the power of business to shape policy will be much greater than before. The other is that the Government will adopt some form of collegiate approach to the negotiations, with greater input from Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as from finance.
It is difficult to argue with these observations: if the CBI and the City insisted that a deal with Brussels had to be struck, the government would be most unlikely to abandon the negotiating table, and since preliminary talks with the DUP had already opened the door to one Northern Irish party, other parties from the six counties would insist upon equal treatment, which in turn would make it impossible to exclude Scotland. McRae, who understands the complex technicalities of Brexit better than most, also pointed out that something else that was obvious, and ‘screamingly so’, was that there wasn’t time to negotiate a definitive deal before March 2019, which meant that an interim agreement had to be reached to avoid the risk of crashing out of the EU without a deal. His proposal – the ‘off-the-shelf solution in the European Economic Area, the Norway relationship’ – is anathema to hard Brixiteers but McRae’s argument is that it could buy time to permit a permanent deal to be agreed upon.
He was not alone in believing that the government was underestimating the magnitude and the complexity of the forthcoming negotiations. Six days before the general election, when Mrs May was still saying that only she could be trusted to deliver the best Brexit deal for the country, Schona Jolly (2017) noted that with more than two months gone since the triggering of Article 50 the government had done next to nothing ‘to prepare us for the Herculean task that lies ahead’, was led by someone who ‘refuses resolutely to tell us how she envisions Britain after Brexit’, had sacrificed time it could ill afford to lose by calling an election, and seemed not to understand how difficult the whole process was going to be.
Lawyers have been warning since before the referendum of the unprecedented legal, constitutional and regulatory complexities that lie ahead. There is no sight of the government’s preparation for any of that. Unpicking 40-plus years of frameworks, even if possible, requires a level of skill and resource that simply hasn’t been made available to the civil service. This week, the Financial Times splashed on the 759 treaties that Britain will need to renegotiate after Brexit ‘just to stand still’, spanning 168 non-EU countries and covering almost every aspect of a modern economy including customs, trade, fisheries, transport and financial services.
Almost one year after the referendum, there is literally nothing to show in terms of preparations except for a unilateral decision by the PM to pull us out of the single market and customs union. The government refuses to produce a costing or analysis for this. Similarly, it refuses to set out, or even engage with, the disastrous impact of what leaving without a deal will mean. For all May’s talk of strength and clarity, her words and actions have revealed neither. Fighting rhetoric might win votes, but it is damaging and useless in real terms; when the horseplay is over, Britain deserves to know its politicians considered all the possible positions and adopted the most sage.
There is no hedging here, no use of epistemic might or could regarding the consequences of failed Brexit talks. On the contrary, Britain will need to renegotiate 759 treaties and leaving the European Union without a deal will mean a disastrous impact. Adverbs are used not to hedge but to reinforce (‘there is literally nothing to show’) or to underline the plain truth of her words (‘simply hasn’t been made available’). Schona Jolly does not think or believe that May and her government are incompetent; she knows this to be the case, as is immediately evinced from her headline: ‘The government has no clue how to deliver Brexit.’
An equally blunt headline – The Guardian view on Brexit Britain: a clown not a lion – introduced an unsigned editorial in The Guardian three days before talks were due to start, and the editorialist’s contempt was aimed not only at Theresa May (accused of ‘wooden-headedness’ and of refusing ‘to allow herself to be deflected by facts’), but also at her chief negotiator.
Next week David Davis, the Brexit secretary, will travel to Brussels to begin talks with the EU. Mr D
avis said last month he would be wrangling with Europe all summer over the sequencing of the talks. On Friday, with barely a whimper it emerged that he had accepted Brussels’s timetable. Britain will now settle the exit bill and discuss what to do with EU citizens before talking about a future trade deal. Mr Davis has roared like a lion, only to end up looking like a circus clown. It’s not just that we look ridiculous, it is that we act ridiculous. Britain is going into talks about how to enact one of the biggest geopolitical shifts this country has ever attempted with no government and no plan.
Returning to Hamish McRae (2017) and his proposal for an interim agreement along the lines of the Norwegian or Swiss models, he concedes that his suggestion presupposes a cooperative attitude on Europe’s part, something he believes would be forthcoming provided that Britain addressed its own attitude problem.
Of course, what really matters here is not so much what we want but Europe wants. Common sense suggests that an interim deal would make sense for Europe as well as the UK. A little less arrogance on our part – and given the mess of the past week I don’t think we have much cause to be arrogant – would lead to a more acceptable deal for all. Then the longer-term future of the relationship will be determined by economics and not by politics.
After rescheduling of the Queen’s Speech, which had originally been timetabled to coincide with the start of Brexit talks, David Davis was able to fly to Brussels on Monday 19 June to begin negotiations. He did so when talks with the Democratic Unionist Party had not yet produced a formal agreement, and the leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, was saying that a Conservative-DUP pact was in breach of the Good Friday agreement for Northern Ireland. The Queen’s Speech – which is read by the Queen but written by ministers, and sets out the government’s agenda at the formal State Opening of Parliament each year – had not yet been delivered, which meant that the government’s programme, including its Brexit strategy, had not been revealed to Parliament, discussed and voted upon. Within Davis’s party there was a seemingly irreconcilable rift between hard Brexiteers who would countenance no compromise and Remainers – notably the chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond – tempted to put country before political loyalty and make it clear to the government that the majority of MPs of all parties wanted a soft Brexit and were prepared to use their numerical strength. More mental pabulum for David Davis came from a poll commissioned by none other than the Mail on Sunday which showed that two-thirds of voters also favoured the soft option (Owen and Carlin 2017). Speculation was rife as to how long Theresa May could survive as prime minister, with some predicting the party conference in the autumn as the occasion to replace her and others saying that she could, and should, go much earlier. The Labour Party, which was expected to be humiliated on 8 June 2017, had instead been revitalized by its support among the young, and was chomping at the bit to get started on the next election campaign, while its supposedly unelectable leader was talking like a prime minister in waiting.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 19