If Theresa May had a moment of pleasure, or at least relief, at the conclusion of the withdrawal agreement between London and Brussels, it did not last long. Within hours, two cabinet members resigned, including her Brexit secretary; enough MPs indicated hostility to her deal to block it in Britain’s Parliament; and the first post-agreement survey of public opinion shows that opposition to Brexit, far from shrinking as she would have hoped, is in fact growing.
Before we address the two big questions—Can May win over enough MPs to keep her deal alive? And what happens if she can’t?—let us survey the battleground as it stands in the immediate aftermath of this week’s deal.
The parliamentary arithmetic is daunting. May leads a minority government. 318 Conservative MPs are outnumbered by 325 non-Conservatives. She is able to govern at all because ten Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs from Northern Ireland have agreed to support her on the major decisions.
However, the DUP is furious that the withdrawal agreement weakens the United Kingdom by setting out a different system of regulation for Northern Ireland. (This is a consequence of the need, which almost everyone accepts in principle, for the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic—the only land border between the UK and the rest of the European Union—to remain completely open.) If the DUP cannot be won round, then the government cannot win with Conservative votes alone—even if every single one of them backs the deal.
In reality, May’s plight is worse than this. She is under fire from two opposite wings of her own party. At least 40 strongly pro-Brexit MPs think the government has buckled in the negotiations over the past two years and is not pulling the UK away from the EU’s orbit far or fast enough. A further dozen MPs support the UK remaining in the EU: their complaint is that the withdrawal agreement would create the worst of both worlds, with the UK no longer a member of the EU and therefore with no say over rules that could affect the UK for years, possibly decades, to come.
If these two groups keep their present positions, then May will lose the key vote in the House of Commons by more than 100—even if a handful of pro-Brexit Labour MPs line up with the Government.
Could the prime minister grasp victory in Parliament from the jaws of defeat? It looks unlikely, even if some of the rebels on her own benches in the end rediscover their sense of loyalty. Suppose the number of pro-Brexit rebels halves to 20, while the pro-Remain rebels are reduced to just six. This would still leave May facing defeat by around 50.
One thing she is doing to swell her ranks is to woo Labour MPs who represent Leave-voting areas. Few of them have faith in their party’s own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and could be open to the argument that the withdrawal agreement is the best way to protect the jobs of their own local voters. However, there will not be enough pro-deal Labour MPs to close a gap that wide.
The real prize would be for May to persuade the DUP to switch sides and back the deal. This would not only improve the parliamentary arithmetic; it would also help to minimize the number of rebellious Conservative backbench MPs, many of whom have worked closely with the DUP in recent months.
In that case, the vote would be very close. It could go either way. But without a U-turn by the DUP, the chances of a government victory are remote in the extreme. And the first survey since the deal, by YouGov, finds that opposition to the government’s Brexit strategy is growing. Three in four voters think that “what is now proposed won’t be anything like what was promised two years ago,” and a two-to-one majority think that “Brexit is turning into a disaster for our businesses, our public services and the future of young people.” So the prime minister cannot claim public backing; and the resignation of her Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, increases the likelihood that the deal will die a death, possibly within days or even hours.
It is not even clear that May herself will be around to preside over the deal’s funeral. The prospects are rising of a challenge from her fellow Conservative MPs to her leadership of the party. She would probably win a vote of confidence from a majority the 318 MPs with a say in the matter; but if, say, 100 MPs vote for her to go, she might feel that her appetite to stay on has gone. It is yet another possible cause of turbulence in the days to come.
What if the withdrawal agreement is blocked in London, whether or not May stays on? The YouGov poll suggests one way out. It tested support for a new referendum, should the deal fall by the wayside. The public supports a vote in those circumstances by almost two-to-one. And when people are asked how they would vote if such a referendum were held, the response is 56 percent to stay in the EU, and 44 percent to leave.
Plainly, the public mood is likely to shift as events unfold. But this week, the chances of a new referendum sometime next year are growing—as is the possibility that the UK will not, in the end, leave the EU at all.
Comments(4)
Is the British government facing Brexit still a governable institution?
A spectre is haunting the Western world—the spectre of disunity. Sometimes around 1848, Europe, core of the Western world, engaged on a path of limited democracy (the US, separate history, until the 1914 suicide, somehow disconnected, including the Monroe doctrine space). This limited democracy slowly evolved into a less limited democracy, with an acceptable social contract, and after WWII, under the US watchful eye, into today’s EU. The EU is the opposite of perfect, but combined with NATO, spared a couple of European generations of dying storming machine guns on land, dying at sea, dying in the air, dying in space, dying in cyberspace. It wasn’t and isn’t easy, it took the courage of Petrov (Soviet Air Defense, 1983) and Jackson (British Army, Pristina airport, 1999) to avoid WWIII. Disunity might end the EU, as well as the Western world. Brexit is bad enough, but the wild gyrations triggered in the UK political life are worse. Where are Farage, the willing architect unhappy with his Romanian neighbors, and Cameron the unwilling architect? At least Bannon is sticking around, with his “Il Movimento”, getting laughs at Munk’s in Toronto and applauses in Switzerland. Farage has started an age of disunity in Europe, a spark that triggered a wildfire, on the drought laid by the 2008 financial crisis. This is the last thing the Western world needs (the US midterm polarization reinforces this view), stuck in the belief that it is still the navel of the world. Always remember that the Western preeminence was an accident, and the Rest is rising. The statue of the Iron Sardar is now “… an answer to all those who question India’s power and might” (Modi). Vallabhbhai Patel’s statue is four times taller that the Statue of Liberty and celebrates National Unity Day (since 2014). Mahbubani, Brahmos hypersonic missiles, nuclear triad, and “Make in India” campaign reinforce the message. China’s buildup of non-INF complaint missiles, while paving the world and South China Sea, the quantum radar, the largest everything (radio-telescope, soon particle accelerator, best PISA scores), another strong message. Worse, Gaia is starting to react to the economics Milton Friedman, the astute entertainer, made palatable to asleep Keynesians. Guedes might advise cutting the Amazon forest for lumber (why Brazil should provide free carbon sequestration and oxygen to the world, that is a different story, she shouldn’t). Best response: a 1000 ft Juncker statue (with matching shoes!) and EU Unity.
Many of us are campaigning for a further referendum. The options being the UK's negotiated withdrawl agreement or to remain in the EU. After all those that want to remain in the EU are united in that single goal. Those that want to leave have never had a single clear vision of anything achievable. After parliament votes on the deal, and as seems likely turns it down, Theresa May will be able to say she has taken the difficult negotiation as far as it can go. The best deal was not good enough and now we take the vote back to the people. If this happens I think Farage and other anti EU supporters will be diminished to a small and noisy group, but without credibility or significant power. Hope so anyway!
I again assert that the oligarchs who control the EU governments will not allow change which will disrupt their economic and therefore political positions. They do not want Brexit and therefore we continue to see an ever-growing opposition to it, and indeed media drumming about another referendum--one which will keep the oligarchs happy. There is no way that Brexit would have been "hard," because the oligarchs would only tolerate minor changes to their system of control. This was obvious from the beginning. Peoples' revolts do not prevail. All revolution is from the top, and really it is "evolution," not revolution anyway. Did no one read any of the material I read in college? Why does the media ignore Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology and Economics when they attempt to do "journalism?" Is nothing ever learned anymore except how to make money?
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