The Brexit road to Britain’s collapse
The gradual journey to withdrawal has become a sudden leap for clarity and conclusion
How did you go bankrupt, asks a character in the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises. Two ways, comes the reply: “Gradually, and then suddenly.” Gradually and suddenly is the story of Brexit. The 2016 vote to quit the EU has drained Britain of energy, purpose and international influence. It happened gradually. Many people have not noticed. Now, suddenly, the end is in view. It may well turn out to be something worse than bankruptcy.
Across Whitehall, committees of civil servants are hurriedly preparing contingency plans against a national emergency. The National Health Service warns it could run out of drugs. Aircraft may be grounded, bank trading rooms shut down. The port of Dover, the vital entry point for food imports, could grind to a halt. Supermarkets say their shelves would empty within days. These are just a sample of the costs were Britain to crash out of the EU without a deal.
Across the road at Westminster, politics seems oblivious. Hardline Conservative MPs have been collecting signatures to force a vote of confidence in their own prime minister. The EU departure deal negotiated by Theresa May, these Kamikaze Brexiters declare, would imprison Britain as “a vassal state”. Better, they conclude, to try to put one of their own in No 10, wave two fingers at Brussels and crash out of the union when the Article 50 clock stops at the end of March 2019. Britain, they say, has stood alone before.
Albeit from a different vantage point, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn shares the loathing for the European project. Mr Corbyn, more interested in fighting the international fight against US-led western imperialism than in what is happening in Britain, holds the EU to be a capitalist conspiracy against the workers. Really. The Brexiters are trapped in their nostalgia for empire; Mr Corbyn in his 1970s revolutionary socialism.
If all this were not so deadly serious it would be laughably absurd. In truth, the big danger is of the absurdity obscuring the seriousness. Britain is dismantling an economic and political relationship with its own continent that has been more than 40 years in the making. EU membership is woven into the fabric of the nation. It has been a vital pillar of foreign policy. Brexit means Brexit, Mrs May said a while ago. Her own party has yet to agree on what she meant.
There have been other peacetime crises. The Tory prime minister Edward Heath’s fight with the trade unions forced industry to operate a three-day week during the early 1970s. Ministers exhorted voters to clean their teeth in the dark to save energy. A few years later, the country faced bankruptcy as the Labour prime minister James Callaghan battled with his cabinet about an IMF austerity programme. A winter of industrial strife later mapped the path to Margaret Thatcher’s election victory and the 1980s economic revolution.
Now, suddenly, the end is in view. It may well turn out to be something worse than bankruptcy
Brexit is of an altogether different order. The referendum divided the nations of the UK union and the communities within them. It has breathed life into an ugly English nationalism and handed a new grievance to Scottish separatists. The young voted overwhelmingly to remain. So did Scotland, Northern Ireland, London, the other big English cities and affluent professionals. The elderly and the less well-off in small cities and provincial towns — amounting to a majority in England and Wales — stood on the leave side. The bitterness has not subsided. Parliamentary democracy has been bent out of shape. A majority of MPs backed Remain. Now they are asked to back a deal they believe inimical to the national interest.
Mrs May’s answer is the Brexit package she hopes to finalise at the coming weekend summit with the EU27. In truth, the deal is a bad one. Not, as Brexit fundamentalists would have it, because it ties Britain too closely to the EU. Nor because of the “backstop” to guarantee an open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Rather, the accord sacrifices the big advantages of EU membership in a vain attempt to “take back control”. If it means anything, “control” is a capacity to advance the national interest. That will be weakened by Brexit.
The agreement settles only temporarily the economic arrangements. Within a year or two another cliff-edge will loom. And yet . . . As she seeks the support of the House of Commons, Mrs May has one powerful ally. That threat of “suddenly” — of looming chaos at the ports and airports, shortages in the shops, and an economic downturn. You may not like it — you may actually hate it — the prime minister is saying, but the only alternative is a disorderly Brexit. Fudge or chaos? Big business has already rallied to Mrs May’s banner.
The choice, of course, is a false one. Parliament could vote to seek an extension of Article 50 talks and insist the government explore other options. My sense of the politics, though, is that we are indeed approaching a moment of clarification. If they reject Mrs May’s deal, MPs will also put an end to the search for a middle-way, muddle-through Brexit. It will be all or nothing — the status quo or a complete rupture.
In 2016 the UK voted to leave the EU but did not specify where it wanted to go. Now it knows what lies ahead. A second referendum would present a choice of the two destinations. Yes, it would be divisive and bloody. In a fit of self-loathing, voters might even decide to drive over the cliff. But gradually has run its course. Suddenly, Britain must make up its mind.
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