A minor collision between politics, law and constitution

In Facts, the website which nobly attempted to inject a clear dose of reality into That Campaign, has raised an interesting point about the government's potential responses to the legal challenge to Brexit.

With merciful concision and clarity, it points out that the most compelling legal argument in the government's defence is that it CAN trigger Article 50 because in doing so it doesn't take away any rights; that is the basis for the legal challenge, but it is also only true if the government acknowledges that Article 50 can be revoked. That would mean that the invocation itself would not deprive any citizen of any rights.

However, in making this acknowledgement, argues InFacts editor Hugo Dixon, Theresa May would incur an unbearable backlash from the Brexiters, who would instantaneously smell treachery, this time without a smile on its face, and threaten to overturn her apple-cart, so recently arranged with many of the rotten ones apparently near the front, and here we would find ourselves once again in 1996, a Tory government led by a hard-working but hapless leader in tatters because of the frothing madness of the Europhobes.

Dixon's argument is clear, and it allows us to hope that the government might reveal itself a little in the coming weeks and months as it responds to the appeal. Were Mrs May to permit the presentation of a defence along these lines, acknowledging the reversibility of Article 50, we may begin to hope. Of course we still have her strident rhetoric to leave us quaking in our boots that she may drag us out anyway. But as we've posited before, for Theresa May, this could all come down to hard-nosed pragmatic choices about the impact of all this on us, our families, our households. As the economic misery builds up, and we approach the first full quarter since 23 June, she may reasonably calculate that Brexit is destined, in the end, to become an unpopular choice which we are itching to reject.

Faint hope

 1. Theresa May is not a convinced Brexiteer. She campaigned for Remain.

2. But she was a bit lukewarm. So we can deduce a) that she does not favour Brexit, but that she is pragmatic about her support for Remain.

3. She landed in Number 10 in August or whenever it was, and her immediate action was to start repeating "Brexit means Brexit" all over the shop.

4. She didn't trigger Article 50 straight away even though she could have. She put three Brexiteers in charge of Brexit. These are both very pragmatic choices. She doesn't seem to be the world's No 1 Brexit fan.

5. And going on about "Brexit means Brexit" steadied the economy, her party and everything else for a bit. So I think she was firstly concerned not with Brexit, which is years away, but with stability. And she achieved it.

6. By the end of the summer we were all getting a bit antsy because "Brexit means Brexit" means frog all. Did she return from the recess and trigger A50? Nope.

7. So while she has successfully kept a lid, so far, on the mouth-frothing lunatics in the Tory party, she has also done nothing substantive to make Brexit happen.

8. Meanwhile, some of what she has done has created the conditions for Brexit to be stopped. She has now given a date for triggering Article 50, but she has allowed time for the view that this is reversible to gain traction. She has continued to show that she is committed to delivering what the Leavers wanted, but that includes some very ugly consequences which are likely to become very awkward. She has axed the £350m commitment giving those who promoted it nowhere to hide.

9. Lastly she was very emphatic that the Union (UK) is important to her and there's been no doubt that Brexit could splinter the Union.

10. So it's entirely conceivable that she imagines a future in which a second vote, or some other occurrence which makes Brexit obviously undesirable (such as the end of the UK, economic disaster, food price hikes, etc etc) is rejected by the public and she can say: "I did everything I could to deliver on that referendum result. This is what you asked for, and I did it. It's not my fault if you now realise that you voted for a bucket of sick and have changed your minds."

Every silver lining has a dark cloud

Optimistic possibility: Theresa May, having decided that stability and purpose are the most needed qualities in government at the moment--whether needed by her, her party, or the country--has decided to allow a pathway to Brexit to develop. She will be supportive, Brexiteers will lead on the detail, and either Brexit will become a reality or not. She may hope not, or she may be sanguine about it, simply wanting to hold on to power beyond the moment when a decision either way is finally made. 

Personally, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility. Of course I hope for such an outcome, but I'm encouraged that little Theresa May has done seems to suggest that she really wants to follow a course other than this: she could have activated Article 50 by now. She could have come out openly against Brexit by purging Johnson, Fox and Leadsom from her Cabinet rather than installing them near the top. 

Another reason to suspect that this could be the game plan is to see the world from May's perspective: she is a politician, and politicians usually try to navigate their way through whatever waters are ahead. She probably feels she can live with Brexit if it happens, even though she believes politically that it's best not to quit the EU. 

Even if we indulge this view, there is an increasing worry. May may seek to offer decisiveness, security, optimism, but the referendum unleashed forces and views in British society that, while they may not result in the kind of revolution we've prided ourselves on avoiding by comparison to the Continent, are certainly damaging our social cohesion. 

Amber Rudd's disappointingly stupid proposal to list foreign workers is one. This news, that the Government has decided not to listen to 'foreign' academics, is another. Even if we believe that Theresa May's course will allow us to retain EU membership, to fight the madness of Brexit and win, the journey will leave us damaged, exhausted, a shade of the country--and the society--we were. 

Tony Blair's legacy was overshadowed by Iraq, inevitably. Inevitably, David Cameron's legacy--those positive steps for which he was rightly praised, in the end, by Jeremy Corbyn, such as equal marriage--all that will be eclipsed utterly by the lost gamble of 23 June 2016, which failed to save the Tory Party and on which date our divisions finally cut so deep that we may reasonably fear that they may never heal.   

What's Cameron's game?

David Cameron has quit as an MP. When Tony Blair finally went, the applause in the Commons made no real difference to the obvious fact that his legacy, ultimately, would be consumed by the history of the war in Iraq and the madness that surrounded it, before and after. That has become increasingly true as recollections of his achievements, many substantial, all recede into recent history and grow pale by comparison with that war.

Cameron, on the other hand, was much less of a colossus. My view is that he has been an important figure in our recent political history, playing an interesting and eventually successful game in order to purge the Tories of their recent record of abject failure and return them to the position they now occupy, a party of government with further majorities in sight. He has reunited the Conservative Party with electoral success. That is important, because his three immediate predecessors all proved unable to penetrate the miasma of stupidity that infected the top layers of the party for ten years after the destruction of John Major.

He is also important because he set a tone. Yes, the Big Society was quietly laid to rest in 2013 or so; yes, some of the successful Tory policies that propelled them to victory were in fact Liberal Democrat ones painted blue (and, in the case of tuition fees, one of their most objectionable policies was simply painted yellow and hung like a stone around the neck of his deputy prime minister). And yes, there was a marked tack to the right in the later years of his premiership, not surprisingly given the cutting of the Liberal Democrat brakes.

But Cameron did show that Conservative solutions can be at least tolerable again, and that potent change meant their return to the other side of the Commons was possible.

There is equal marriage, often cited (even by Jeremy Corbyn on Cameron's departure from office) as a change for which we should all be grateful to him. (We may wonder, of course, whether this would have proceeded as smoothly had Cameron never been shacked to Clegg). There could have been Universal Credit, if Iain Duncan Smith had not proved unequal to the task of its completion. There is, undoubtedly, the avoidance of complete national disaster in the economic mess that engulfed us all during the last Parliament, whether or not you feel that the extent of austerity was justifiable or the targets, now abandoned, were necessary to get us through. The fact is that we didn't suffer as much as we could have done.

And then Brexit.

And then he quit, and we have Theresa May, his own Home Secretary, who has proved a stable pair of hands and a calming influence - as she clearly intends to be, with her regular, stabilising incantations of "Brexit means Brexit". The wounds are open, and the only reason the party is not bleeding to death just yet is that both sides of the debate feel they have a chance of victory. For Remainers, the challenge is to present Brexit as unpalatable and not, ultimately, what the electorate voted for; for Leavers, it's to show us that any Brexit is better than remaining in the Brussels clink, stymied and emasculated and apparently not in control.

It is hard to see at this point that David Cameron's resignation can do anything other than free the wings of his party up to prepare for a bloody civil war to cap anything he previously ended, and - certainly a sadder thought - overshadow his legacy of re-centring the Tories, injecting a little warmth and reason into their party leadership after the Howard and Duncan Smith years, his avoidance of economic disaster, and, most regrettable of all, his social progressivism, such as it was.

The price of Blair's failings - so many lives - should never have been paid. Cameron's disasters may not be in the same league in severity, but we have not yet seen the start, let alone the end, of the blighting of lives by all the consequences of the Brexit vote - from the deprivation of European citizenship all the way up to the potentially staggering economic impact. People will suffer. And, sadly, the blame must fall in great part on Cameron and his failed gamble.

The Boris Factor: 3

In which we draw lessons about Boris Johnson from his book about Winston Churchill, The Boris Factor. It's a good read about a great man, but it's as interesting for what it says about what Boris sees and values, as for what it says about Churchill, that otherwise little-known figure from British history.

"They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of [his father] Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas - to take risks that no one else would take. In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous."

Yes, Boris. So we have discovered.

"But you can't win a war without taking risks, and you won't take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers. His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue - the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others."

Right. So we're going to deduce from your little flurry of bungles over Brexit that you're fundamentally brave. And I suppose, unfettered by the consensus and nauseating community of the EU we might end up facing a war, or at least a dire threat against our lonely little nation - so perhaps these are the circumstances in which we will recall the strength of that brave old crackpot. Good old Boris. Yes, Theresa May's not good enough to get us through this crisis. We need Boris! Boris!

What was that about a primordial virtue?

"Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt."

Ah.

Boris, you may be pushing it a bit far, old boy.

Brexit: time to give up?

The prime minister's statement at the start of the Chequers cabinet talks today certainly seems to make it clear that Brexit cometh. "We must continue to be very clear that “Brexit means Brexit”,", she says:

"...that we’re going to make a success of it. That means there’s no second referendum; no attempts to sort of stay in the EU by the back door; that we’re actually going to deliver on this."

Oh, dear. Have we Remainers who hope for sanity to prevail come to the end of the road? When you add in the line at the end of the BBC's coverage of this story - that Number 10 has said Parliament won't be consulted before the activation of Article 50 - it may be time to decide between angry, sad or puking emoticons ready for use when the miserable day finally arrives.

After all, the future that Theresa May is hinting at is one where the government produces a surprisingly positive vision of Brexit, everybody starts to think it might be OK, and she just pings off an email titled "Re: thanks for everything" to Jean-Claude Juncker. Easy as pie.

Now, we can speculate (and we probably will) about Theresa May's real convictions on Europe and her motives in office. (For my part I think she's decided that clarity and firmness are for the best, and that she is taking the bull by the horns rather than allowing herself to become bogged down in a messy argument over Europe like five or six of her immediate predecessors).

But whatever we think she's up to, whether she really wants out or whether she does have a game plan to keep us in, we all have to dance to her tune. And she has made it plain that the constitutional route to salvation may not be open to us. She has to act, either through conviction or convenience, like the Brexit prime minister. She cannot be seen to be soft. She clearly does not feel that going back to Parliament is defensible - perhaps because it will enrage the frothing Leavers and terminate her ministry. She will therefore press ahead when the moment comes. We should not ignore the constitutional implications of this potential route, by any means; but what May is telling us is that we cannot rely on a constitutional hiccup to save us from Brexit.

Constitutional tools are not available to us, then. But political tools remain. May proposed to act in a way consistent with her chosen identity as a modern Iron Lady: firm, accepting of the Brexit "verdict", clear about her power. But she has yet put in place pauses and delays, which allow the debate to develop and the players to build their cause. To build a Remain cause now around the hope of constitutional salvation seems a closed road. There's not even much point arguing about whether or not such a method, of relying on constitutional diddling based on the current situation - the "referendums are advisory, dontcherknow" approach - would ever be legitimate. What we have to do is shift the sands. The avenue open to us - the avenue that Mrs May is leaving open to us, deliberately or not - is political. We may find help from the Supreme Court or the House of Lords, but unless there is real, public anger with the passage of Brexit, a feeling that the alternative we have got is indeed worse than what anybody wanted, and a proper understanding that this is madness--or at least, enough persuasion that EU membership is the better option--then nothing will stand.

We have to stop theorising, diddling, dithering, hoping and regretting. We have to start persuading. Now.

Labour: fiddling while Labour burns?

Any number of Labour observers, headed up by their no doubt increasingly-stressed MPs, are concerned about the weight the party will have to throw around in the next Parliament, what with the dire predictions of electoral destruction--not to mention the resurfacing Cameroonian plan to axe fifty constituencies which will apparently squeeze Labour even further.

From my interested and, if I may say so, reasonably well informed viewpoint, Labour appears to have fallen into full victim mode. Bullied by segments of its own membership in the courts, cowed by the iron grip it has given its own leader, its MPs ignored by their own party leadership and, it seems, membership: I don't really know which bit of Labour is Labour any more. The party is a victim and the diagnosis is quite possibly terminal confusion.

It seems to me that a medicine that would have an immediate effect would be clarity. (My wife takes that for her hay fever, a-ba-doom-tsh). No organisation so divided can hope to coalesce suddenly around an issue, unless Theresa May suddenly decides we should go to war with Germany. But in order to coalesce somebody needs to put the markers down, and that puts Jeremy Corbyn and what we might call the 'official' Labour party leadership in the driving seat - for evidence of their relative power, see the little tsunami of ineffectual resignations that so delighted us during July. Besides, who else in a political party can send up the flare that will draw together the surrounding boats?

We turn, then, with eager gaze to Jeremy Corbyn. This, surely, is a moment for him to seize. I've written before that I don't mind Jeremy Corbyn. I am glad that somebody like him has been able to ascend to the summit in our system, suggesting that the epoch of the spads has yet to take hold totally. I agree that much of the media hostility is unjustified. I don't see him as a messianic guaranteed winner, but I don't think he's the unelectable millstone of lore. Given a cause, some clear messages, and a reasonable electoral wind I think he could confound the doommongers.

Will he do it? Can he seize that moment? A government, led valiantly by Mrs May into the jaws of Brexit, with a small majority; Europe, the issue that destroyed the last Tory government and leader after leader for a decade; an economy on the brink of dreadful post-Brexit statistics; and surely the opportunity to grab the agenda from a new government, to detect the weak spots left, or caused by, the exit of David Cameron.

What's coming through? What am I, as a relatively engaged observer, picking up? Challenges to Theresa May about her One Nation agenda, her commitment to real equality, to protecting the positives of EU membership or even just getting a good deal? No, I'm afraid not. It's really just Owen Smith's non-dick non-joke and today the monumentally uninteresting call for a "digital Bill of Rights". And, for good measure, he's decided to ape a recently-defeated leftist US election candidate. Inspiring stuff. (After all, no previous US politician has successfully adopted a grassroots, internet-driven strategy that we could cite instead, have they?) Mind you there are other echoes of Bernie about Corbyn, but I'm not sure those are necessarily desirable.

Am I blaming Corbyn? Not entirely. Of course there is a persistent media narrative hampering him. But he's not without his platform. And he's not without his position. And he did make it into the news, even if he fell away quite quickly, with his "Digital Bill of Rights" (I can't bear to abandon those quotation marks, as though they can protect us from the inanity of it all). He has his choices and his opportunities. And it seems to me that he just isn't making the best of them.

The Boris Factor 2

"Even those who thought [Boris] was brilliant - and most people could see that - were often dismayed by his lack of judgement, his tendency to hyperbole, to overexcitement, even to hysteria."

Sorry, that should have read "who thought [Churchill] was brilliant". Yes, we're back on Lessons about Boris from Boris's Book About Churchill again.

This passage goes on:

"In 1931 he became so worked up about the prospect of Indian independence that he called Mahatma Gandhi a 'half-naked fakir' - in words that have certainly not been forgotten in India."

Today's lesson from Boris: "Churchill offended foreigners and he was still a top chap. Surely I can be too, eh chaps?"

A thought

Either Theresa May is just going for the simple life - "I'm going to get us out, so no point dithering" - or she can see clearly that there is absolutely no way any government could deliver without the people changing their minds, so she's going to do the best she can and wait for the whole project to fail - and pin it on the original Leavers.

The Boris Factor: 1

I'm currently reading Boris Johnson's book The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. This hovered on my list for a little while, and then the author was made Foreign Secretary. I'm a great believer that how a person writes, and what they write about, tells you much about them. John Major's memoirs, for instance, as well as his later writing about cricket and music hall--two subjects he successfully enthused me about, at least a little--reveal him to be a much warmer and wittier character than the media painted him. Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, writes just as perfunctorily as her apparently humourless and mechanistic image suggested; Tony Blair's memoirs were as ghastly as I'd feared, but Chris Patten's significantly better. 

I recall Johnson's biography of Churchill being reviewed, fairly neutrally, on Radio 4 some time ago, and one of the panellists remarked: "thank goodness we have Boris Johnson to cast some light on this little-known figure from British history."

Well, it turns out that Boris Johnson's biography casts light not just on Churchill, but on Johnson.

Exhibit A.

"Rab Butler might have been Prime Minister. In 1940, he was a junior minister, and a strong supporter of appeasement. Here is what he had to say about the ascent of Churchill:
"'The good clean tradition of English politics has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history,' he was heard to say. 'Surrendering to Winston and his rabble was a disaster and an unnecessary one', mortgaging the future of our country to a 'half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.'"

May: Might she not?

Step 1. Restate how precious the United Kingdom is to you.
Step 2. State clearly that you wish to reach a common UK negotiating position before activating Article 50.
Step 3. Open negotiations on UK negotiating position.
Step 4. Refuse to budge on the principle that Brexit means Brexit.
Step 5. Act surprised when SNP rise to hysteria about the prospect of Brexit and announce a second referendum on independence is imminent.
Step 6. Save the Union by trumping second #indyref with second #EUref, in which the key question is: is Brexit worth the cost of splitting the UK once and for all?

Enough already with the US-style paranoia, Corbynistas

After a frosty response to a few of my anguished posts after the EU referendum, the last thing I want to do is tell anybody engaged in political discussion to shut up. So yes, I've titled this post "enough already" but that doesn't mean "stop talking".

That disclaimer out of the way, the thing that's pushed me to post this is this story, about the ongoing wrangling over the level of support for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. I noticed a comment on a Facebook post about it which referred to "the MSM". Only by reading the responses - which all seemed to be familiar with the term - did I realise that this means "mainstream media". And suddenly, dismay hits:

1. "Mainstream" is one word. Ugh.
2. The term "mainstream media" is one I associate with the cries of Trump supporters in the US, the headbanging right who exist somewhere in a twilight zone of paranoia and alienation. In this weird world, the vague feeling that "something's not right"--based on something that could be justifiable alienation, could be personal psychopathology, could be political expediency--entitles you to bypass completely all critical analysis, and instead cleave to the conviction that the media are all liars and none should be believed, or that what matters is what you believe to be true...these are the prime ingredients of what is increasingly called 'post-factual politics'.
3. And then you look at the way the Corbyn debate is going--was that a Corbyn rally? Isn't that crowds celebrating Liverpool's last European Cup win? Why is this not on the 10 o'clock news?--and it's just depressing that the tone is so concerned with "how my cause is being represented by the media" and not really on the issues.

I'm a bit fed up of being told that the mainstream media isn't reporting Corbyn rallies. I've been open minded about Corbyn--I was warmer to him than many, I think, at the start of his leadership--but as I grow increasingly cool, I'm totally aware that he has a very large support base and that lots of people are flocking to support him. No, it's not headline news--I don't think it should be--but the news stories are there, the buzz on social media is there, and ultimately: I don't really know what Corbyn thinks, or even what his supporters think, because all I see is "don't believe the lies!"

It seems to me that the left in the UK is losing its attention on facts and debate and opposition, and has instead pitched its tent in that twilight zone of outrage and suspicion that has hosted the US right for so long. Am I suggesting that Corbynistas are as lunatic as Trump supporters? No. I'm worried that a segment of British political thought which is usually a bit less hysterical has decided to go where the right so often makes its home. Theresa May has stamped her authority on her party for the moment, but these are the Tories. It won't last. Eventually the lunacy will start again. And if the left hasn't recovered some sense of purpose, there will be an even smaller proportion of those in British political life who still put moderation, sensibility and rationality above selfish outrage.