Sunday, February 11, 2018

Brexit and the Conservative Party: a political nervous breakdown

There's a perceptible "last days of the Roman Empire" feel to Britain's governance under Theresa May and the Conservative Party.

Brexit seems to the Tories like the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown: some kind of unresolved psychological trauma that has been haunting the party's psyche ever since the UK joined the EEC, pushed to the back of the collective party's mind, until it was forcibly brought to the front of their attention by UKIP and David Cameron's referendum.
The issue could have been ignored, I suppose; UKIP would have won the European elections in 2014 regardless of whatever Cameron decided to do. That fate was settled with the unique result of the 2010 election, that kicked out the Labour Party, but neither gave a ringing endorsement to the Tories either. So we had the "coalition", with the result that Britain's three main parties were either in government, or had just been tarnished by it. It was this landscape that gave UKIP its opportunity.
As UKIP were really just the outside "radical wing" of the Conservatives, with many Tory MPs having views that were barely distinguishable from UKIP itself, the result was a "militant" arm of the governing party, with "moral support" from UKIP. This was the landscape that Cameron had to deal with after the 2010 election. The decision to give in to these pressures, rather than "ride out" the storm until the next election, tells us a lot about Cameron's personality. As well as appeasing this dual threat from his own party's radicals and the guerrilla tactics of UKIP, he also called the referendum for other, more vain, reasoning; he called for it simply because he assumed he would win.

Once the referendum was "lost", Cameron effectively handed to moral authority of his party (and the government) to his party's "militant wing", and the agenda of UKIP. The result of this was that Theresa May copied much of UKIP's rhetoric as well large parts of its social agenda, in order to appear on the side of the 52%. Apart from leaving the EU, May went even further with her radical envisaging of Britian's role outside the EU: to leave leave not only the single market, but the customs union as well; something that not even many UKIP supporters had considered feasible. Thus, in May's over-zealousness in want to appear on the side of the 52%, she went down a path that only a fraction of her own party's backbenchers (represented by the "European Research Group") followed.

In this sense, May's course of action since the referendum has been to place the government into the hands of the radical agenda of a faction in her party. She has disavowed any hint of moderation, and doggedly pursued an agenda that to any reasoned person's eyes looks completely unhinged. Although she has been able to keep her cabinet and her party's divisions from bringing down the government, this has only been achieved through her and her ministers' pronouncements that are feats in nonsensical semantic waffle. The government and its party are only held together by their fear of allowing Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister if they should fall. On Brexit, the Conservatives are impossibly divided.

As Michel Barnier has said, the clock is ticking. As well as the "clock ticking" on Brexit, the clock may also be ticking on the fate of the Conservative Party. Because the party has brought its own European psycho-drama out into the open, as it once fatefully did in the late '80s and early '90s, any observer can see that the party's differences are intractable. Now that the "clock is ticking", sooner or later, Theresa May, or her successor (more on that in a moment) will have to decide. If they don't decide, the EU will decide for them.
Theresa May so far has kept the government together simply by not dealing with the central issue, but putting it off repeatedly at each juncture with more useless waffle. The central issue is Britain's future relationship with the EU, and what the government's agreed position is. The problem is that the government doesn't have one. As the party is really a coalition of ideas, with the radicals in the ascendancy, everyone has a different opinion, as can be seen by ministers giving contradictory views on Brexit, even on the same day.

None of the options look good for the Conservatives.

If Theresa May somehow manages to get the government to have an agreed position that is somehow agreeable to the EU, this implies that a compromise would be involved, which would infuriate the radicals. The result of this could well be May losing confidence of her backbenchers and a new (radical) leader being selected, leading to a retraction of any previously-made agreement. Therefore Britain would likely leave the EU without any agreed terms (i.e. WTO). The result of this on the British economy is likely to be catastrophic, with the Conservative government getting the blame.
If May continues to procrastinate (as expected) and fails to reach an agreement on a transitional deal with the EU, the Tories will do badly in the local elections in May. This is likely to precipitate a leadership challenge and a new (radical) leader. Therefore Britain would likely leave the EU without any agreed terms (i.e. WTO). The result of this on the British economy is likely to be catastrophic, with the Conservative government getting the blame.
If May continues to procrastinate (as expected), fails to reach an agreement on a transitional deal with the EU, but the Tories don't challenge her leadership, then May will continue through the rest of the Brexit process until next year, when she can then be safely replaced and any mess can be blamed on her. The difficulty this would bring, and the likelihood of leaving the EU without a deal before March 2019, is that the Conservative Party's inner contradictions on Britain's future may well reach a point of detonation.
A last option (for the sake of brevity I've reduced them to four) is that the government somehow falls completely later on this year as a result of an impasse in the talks with the EU, or the government being forced to make a choice on Brexit that is simply impossible for some parliamentarians to accept; they would rather Labour take the heat for any future Brexit fall-out than themselves.

With the clock ticking, the EU will soon force the government to choose, or the EU will choose for it. If the government chooses a "soft" of "hard" Brexit (which will be indicated by how the transition talks pan out), it will anger one of the sides of its party, as just said. If the government doesn't decide, the EU will assume that the UK wants a "hard" Brexit, for the lack of receiving any other instruction from London. Ditto result for the Conservative Party.

Put it these terms, the Conservative government is quickly running out of time. They will face their fate, regardless of what they say or do. It is unavoidable. For now, they are running around like headless chickens, talking about Brexit "blue sky" thinking for how to make their contradictory and nonsensical ideas become a reality.
But Brussels will give the hammer blow of reality to the Conservative government sooner or later. What will be the state of the Conservative Party after that is anyone's guess. This fatalistic "end of days" narrative that seems to apply to the Tories reminds me of an article I wrote several years ago about the film "The Dark Knight Rises" and the psychology of the antagonist, Bane: it feels as though the Tories are in hock to their own ideological "league of shadows" - the "radical" Brexiteers - who are hell-bent on completely severing Britain's relationship with Europe, regardless of its impact on Britain or even their own party.
The looming threat of "hard Brexit" (like in the plot of "The Dark Knight Rises") feels a lot like the slow countdown of an economic time-bomb; the radical Brexiteers are either blindly-ignorant to this fate, or seem to implicitly welcome it, for their own reasons. "Hard Brexit" seems as the economic equivalent to Gotham's nuclear bomb, where the only people who hope for "zero hour" are the ones that either hope to get rich from Britain's carcass, or have a violent, millennarian agenda that requires the collapse of British society.
In this real-life "Gothic tale", the only saviour seems to come from the voices of the sane, who are being ignored.

















No comments:

Post a Comment