Parliamentary deadlock means it may be necessary to go back to the people
Britain
SINCE the vote to leave the European Union in June 2016, the more optimistic among those on the losing side have been lobbying for a rematch. Some argue for a re-run on the basis that Brexiteers lied during the campaign and broke election law (on July 17th the Electoral Commission fined the official Vote Leave campaign £61,000, or $80,000, for deliberately exceeding spending limits). Others say the public deserves a chance to vote on the final deal, which will bear little resemblance to the glittering one they were promised. Yet the idea of a second vote has never taken off. Polls have shifted only slightly in favour of remaining, and there is no great enthusiasm for another plebiscite, which would be the fourth nationwide vote in as many years.
But the idea of revisiting the referendum is back in play. By law, Theresa May’s government cannot sign a Brexit deal without MPs’ approval. And in the past couple of weeks it has begun to look as if Parliament will reject any deal. The Labour opposition has set six tests for the agreement, which look designed to be unpassable. The Conservative Party, meanwhile, is in a rebellious mood. This week hardline Tory Brexiteers forced the government to toughen its approach to customs, before a faction of Tory Remainers forced it to soften its policy on medical regulation. More defeats were avoided by as few as three votes. It is hard to imagine MPs agreeing to the unappealing deal that Mrs May is likely to bring back from Brussels later this year. And if they don’t, Britain could crash out of the EU on March 29th with no deal at all.
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Many in Westminster therefore wonder if the only way to break the deadlock may be to send the matter back to the people. One way would be with yet another election. Tory whips reportedly told their MPs that the government would call one over the summer if they defied it on key parts of its Brexit plan. But would Mrs May, election-flunker extraordinaire, risk it? Polls put Labour narrowly ahead of the Tories. In any case, a narrow victory for either party could leave Parliament in the same stalemate, since Labour is also divided over the best approach to Brexit.
So a second referendum is being proposed as a way to get a clear answer. On July 16th Justine Greening, one of Mrs May’s former cabinet ministers, proposed a vote with three options: stay in the EU; accept the deal that Mrs May agrees on with Brussels; or leave with no deal.
There are formidable obstacles to such a vote. Parliament would have to legislate for the referendum, which might be tricky if that same Parliament is against the Brexit deal that would be its subject. Labour says a referendum is “not its policy” and that MPs should sort out the mess. But it has left the door ajar: “To take [a second referendum] off the table completely, when there might be a set of circumstances where Parliament cannot deliver a meaningful vote, would be a mistake,” Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, said on July 15th. The Scottish Nationalists would not oppose a second referendum; the Liberal Democrats would vote for one (provided they remembered to show up, as their leader failed to do at a vital Brexit vote this week). Mrs May has ruled out the idea—but of course, two years ago, she ruled out a snap election.
There would be little time to organise a new plebiscite. It took seven months to pass the bill for the original referendum. That process could be speeded up, especially now that Britain has a “here’s one I made earlier” template for such a vote, argues Eloise Todd of Best for Britain, which wants a second referendum. But it would almost certainly be necessary for Britain to ask the EU for more time. It would probably agree, believes Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, though it would hope to resolve matters before elections to the European Parliament at the end of May.
If all this could be done in time, what would be the question on the ballot? Britain has never had a multiple-choice referendum of the sort that Ms Greening suggests, though they are not unknown internationally. Finns were asked in 1931 if they wanted to scrap prohibition, maintain it, or remove it only for weak drinks (they overwhelmingly chose to abolish it). In 1977 Australians opted for “Advance Australia Fair” as their national song, from a line-up of four.
The difficulty is deciding how to pick a winner. Peter Kellner, a polling expert and Prospect columnist, notes that the same set of results could produce three possible winners, via first-past-the-post (picking the option with most first-preference votes), alternative vote (adding the second preferences of the bottom-ranked option to the tallies of the top two) or the Condorcet system (picking the overall winner of the three possible head-to-head contests). A poll last month for The Economist by YouGov, asking voters to rank hard Brexit, soft Brexit and Remain, returned exactly such a result (see table). With a second referendum, “there is already potential for a crisis of democratic legitimacy,” notes Akash Paun of the Institute for Government, a think-tank. A complex vote with multiple interpretations would not help.
Such a referendum would also introduce dangers that might make Remainers think twice. One is that the EU would have less incentive to offer a good deal if a referendum was on the cards—indeed, it might have an incentive to offer a bad one, in the hope that Britain would therefore choose to remain, as most Eurocrats would prefer.
It would also be fantastically risky to put “no deal” on the ballot, giving voters an option that no one except the loopiest Brexiteers supports. Ms Greening calls such an option a “clean break”, a phrase which Malcolm Barr of J.P. Morgan, a bank, describes as “a big misrepresentation”. Trading with the EU on World Trade Organisation terms is one thing. Leaving with no agreement on anything from aviation to citizens’ rights and radioactive materials would be dramatically worse, and not a “clean” break at all.
As the Brussels talks enter their closing phase, Remainers may be excited by the faint prospect of annulling Brexit. Yet the price of this is a corresponding rise in the probability of crashing out of the EU with no agreement. Mrs May has foolishly spent the past two years repeating the bluff, aimed at Brussels, that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. There is a terrible risk that the British public take her at her word.
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WITHIN hours of the Brexit referendum last summer David Cameron had resigned, and within three weeks Theresa May had succeeded him as prime minister. The speed of her ascent to power, on July 13th 2016, without a general election or a full-blown Tory leadership contest, meant that Mayism was never spelt out in any manifesto or endorsed by the electorate. Yet the new prime minister soon made clear the scale of her ambitions for Britain. Not only would she make a success of Brexit, she would also set in motion a sea-change in social mobility to correct the “burning injustices” faced by the downtrodden, and reshape “the forces of liberalism and globalisation which have held sway...across the Western world.” Her allies talked of an epochal moment, comparable to Margaret Thatcher’s break with the past in 1979. The feeble condition of the Labour opposition gave Mrs May control of a one-party state. As for her mandate, she cited the referendum: a “quiet revolution” by people “not prepared to be ignored any more”.
Yet after half a year in office there is strikingly little to show for this May revolution (see Briefing). The strategy for Brexit, which is due to be triggered in less than three months, remains undefined in any but the vaguest terms, and seems increasingly chaotic. At home, the grand talk about transforming society and taming capitalism has yielded only timid proposals, many of which have already been scaled down or withdrawn. The growing suspicion is that the Sphinx-like prime minister is guarded about her plans chiefly because she is still struggling to draw them up.
The emperor’s new trousers
Mrs May built a reputation for dogged competence during six years at the Home Office, a tricky beat that has wrecked many political careers. She skilfully survived the Brexit referendum despite backing the losing side. In the abbreviated Conservative leadership race she stood out as the only grown-up; few Tories regret plumping for her over the unprepared and unserious other contenders. In negotiating Brexit, the hardest task for any prime minister since the second world war, she faces a powerful drain on political capital and governmental capacity. Half the country is against the idea and the rest may sour once its drawbacks materialise. Most of the civil servants implementing Brexit think it a mistake. If Britain’s next few years will be about avoiding traps, then the wary tenacity of Mrs May could be just what the country needs.
Yet caution has started to look like indecision. Her most senior official in Brussels has just resigned, saying that the government does not have a clear Brexit plan (see article). After six months it is hard to name a single signature policy, and easy to cite U-turns. Some are welcome: a silly promise to put workers on company boards, for instance, was abandoned; a dreadful plan to make firms list their foreign employees lasted less than a week; and hints at curbing the Bank of England’s independence were quietly forgotten. Selective “grammar” schools will be resurrected—but only on a small scale, and perhaps not at all, given how many Tory MPs oppose the idea. Other reversals smack of dithering. The construction of a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point was put in doubt, then given the go-ahead; a new runway at Heathrow airport was all but agreed on, then deferred until a parliamentary vote next year. “Just-about-managing” households were the prime minister’s lodestar for a week or so, then dropped. So were suggestions that Britain would seek a transitional deal with the EU after Brexit—until they were recirculated a few weeks later when Mrs May apparently changed her mind once again.
The cause of this disarray could be that Mayism itself is muddled. While vowing to make Britain “the strongest global advocate for free markets”, the prime minister has also talked of reviving a “proper industrial strategy”. This is not about “propping up failing industries or picking winners”, she insists. Yet unspecified “support and assurances” to Nissan to persuade the carmaker to stay in Sunderland after Brexit amount to more or less that. Her enthusiasm for trade often sits uncomfortably with her scepticism of migration. Consider the recent trip to India, where her unwillingness to give way on immigration blocked progress on a free-trade agreement.
A citizen of nowhere
There is one lesson in the overdone comparison of Mrs May to Thatcher. The woman who really did transform Britain had a shambolic first term; privatisation and union reform, with which she is now associated, did not really get going until after 1983. Angela Merkel also made a shaky start as Germany’s chancellor. Mrs May could yet find her feet—and given the state of Labour, she will have time to do so, if Brexit does not provide her own party with a reason to oust her.
Yet Mrs May could turn out to resemble another, less obvious predecessor: Gordon Brown. He, too, was thin-skinned. Like her, he moved into Downing Street without an election, in 2007. He also started with a fearsome reputation and big promises. And when it became clear he had little idea what to do with the job he had so coveted, he flopped. The financial crisis paralysed his government because of his desire to micromanage every decision.
There is more than a little of this in Mrs May. One person can just about run the Home Office single-handed. But being prime minister requires delegation—especially when Brexit looms so large. Care for the elderly is fraying. The National Health Service is running out of money. A housing shortage is worsening. Scotland and Northern Ireland are raising awkward constitutional questions. As long as every proposal has to be pored over by the prime minister, radical decisions of the sort needed to solve these problems will not be taken. To get a grip on Britain, Mrs May must learn to loosen hers.
For this, she must decide what the grand promises of her government actually amount to. The need for every policy to be agonised over in Downing Street, the secrecy over Brexit and the silence on the government’s broader plans for Britain all point to the same problem: Theresa Maybe does not really know what she wants.
