The year of Brexit: How the UK went kaput

A WIND blew from the sea, and it blew the roof off the old lodging-house we call the United Kingdom. As the year of 2018 shuddered to its end, the walls were still standing but everyone could see into the building. And what the world saw was decay.

The ancient constitution beams supporting the whole structure were cracked and sagging. The once-noble wallpaper was peeling off in strips, the hallway was knee-deep in unopened mail. And the English, once assumed to be the most stolid and pragmatic of nations, were throwing chairs about in the dirty kitchen and screaming insults at each other. Meanwhile, the rats around their feet grew bolder.

This has been a terrible year for Britain and its institutions. As Brexit proceeded – or stumbled about in the dark – precious china fell off shelves and there were tearing sounds as delusions unravelled. By the autumn, a horrifying truth was emerging. A gigantic constitutional and political crisis was approaching, but Parliament had lost the power to cope with it. The emergency was simply too big for Westminster to grasp or control. The Government had no majority, the main parties were fanatically divided, the Labour opposition was too dim and confused to offer an alternative.

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This had happened once before, in 1914. Three menaces were converging on Westminster: a combined attack on capitalism from the “triple alliance” of trade unions, the mounting fury of suffragette militancy, and the Tory-backed threat of civil war in Ulster. With the main parties split, Parliament was paralysed. Only the unexpected outbreak of war in August 1914 headed off domestic meltdown. Luckily for us, unluckily for her, no war is going to let Theresa May off the hook.

Part of the Brexit problem is that so many politicians don’t believe in what they are doing – and it shows. In the 2016 referendum on EU membership, 479 MPs voted Remain and only 158 voted Leave. The 2017 election only slightly increased the minority of sincere Brexiteers in the Commons.

But in 2018, almost all those MPs –including the Remainer Theresa May, of course – were agreeing out of duty or cowardice that Brexit must happen in some form. In other words, most MPs and some Cabinet ministers are supporting a policy which they privately think is wrong for their country. They weaken both themselves and democracy.

This absurdity arose because – incredible as it seems – nobody knows what Britain’s law of state is. Who is the supreme authority? Is it the elected and supposedly sovereign Parliament, or the “will of the people”as expressed in a referendum, or perhaps “the Crown” – which means the executive, which means the Cabinet, which usually means the Prime Minister? Because there’s no written constitution, politicians can make up their loyalty as they go along.

The dispute about sovereignty wasted a lot of 2017, before MPs gave it up as insoluble. It was in February 2018 that Michel Barnier, for the EU Commission, and David Davis as Brexit secretary sat down for their first negotiation. Davis, easily bored, soon wandered off and left it to his officials. Had he stayed around and listened to them, May’s Government might have recognised months earlier that there were serious problems ahead. (One lesson of all this is: “Never leave diplomatic spade-work to elected politicians”).

The National:

The Government took nearly a year to grasp that the Withdrawal Agreement had to be completed before future trade terms could be discussed. Again and again, in the withdrawal discussions, leading Brexiteers in Cabinet headed by Boris Johnson brayed that the UK held the winning hand in the talks and that Brussels – threatened with the loss of British markets – would back down.

This was utter delusion. In the course of 2018, Britain invented a fantasy Europe, at one moment a hostile monster out to punish the UK for daring to leave, at another a carpet-seller cringing and whining before Britannia’s proud rebukes. The Brexiteers were genuinely astonished whenever Brussels didn’t instantly accept every British demand to have its cake and eat it.

A nadir of cack-handed ignorance was reached in October, at the Conservative conference, when the new Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said that the European Union was turning into a prison-state like the Soviet Union: “We won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape.” The EU nations, and not only those who knew what Soviet tyranny really meant, were appalled. Europeans have learned to shrug off most Brexiteer silliness, but the damage done by Hunt’s words is lasting.

The National:

With great difficulty, talks which lasted from February to November reached agreement on two of the three withdrawal issues: the rights of British and EU citizens in each others’ territory, and the “divorce bill” (Britain’s outstanding debts to the EU). What remained was the matter of the Irish border. How was it to be kept open, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement preserved, if Brexit turned the border into an external frontier of the European Union?

But it makes sense to see the “backstop” saga as part of the strain which Brexit puts on the whole devolved UK structure – Scotland as well as northern Ireland. May had to bribe the Democratic Unionists (DUP) to keep her in power. Scotland, she thought, could be safely bypassed. After all, there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that the far larger SNP group of MPs could be bought, like the DUP, to support a Tory administration. All year, the Scottish Government vainly demanded that Scotland should stay in both the customs union and the single market. They were ignored.

EARLY in 2018, it became clear that Westminster intended to hang on to some of the powers which Scotland had delegated to the European Union. The SNP condemned this as a “power grab”, and in March 2018 Holyrood boldly passed the Continuity Act – an attempt to forestall the Westminster Withdrawal Act which covered the repatriation to London of powers once granted to Brussels. It took until December for the Supreme Court to pronounce that the Continuity Act had mostly been lawful, but had later been obliterated by Westminster’s legislation on the same subject.

So far, so predictable. But under the surface of the power-grab row, Scots began to see the outlines of something more sinister. Michael Russell, as Nicola Sturgeon’s Brexit Secretary, was not the only politician to realise that devolution itself, as designed back in 1997, had assumed EU membership as part of its architecture. But after Brexit, Scotland stripped of its European relationship would find itself in a very different UK – a kingdom isolated, unpopular, desperate to reassert control over a bitterly divided population.

Devolution would be seen as a threat to “national unity” and clipped back. All through the spring and summer of this year, May was preaching the need to “strengthen our precious, precious Union”. Strengthen? Did that not mean “tighten”, a centralising restoration of London’s grip on the shaky post-Brexit state?

The Irish border problem was similar only in this: Westminster and Whitehall’s total lack of empathy for the component nations which – now or in the past – formed Great Britain. (Sooner rather than later, England itself will beg for that empathy, and not find it.) Irish difficulties with British policies, described on almost every page of a hundred history books, still take London by surprise. Did nobody warn May that you don’t kick Irish cans down the road, because they contain Semtex?

Our children will be baffled by the fatal “backstop” dispute. Why, they will ask, could “no British Prime Minister possibly consent” to a customs border in the Irish Sea? Why not? Only the dull paranoia of the DUP insists that counting Irish pigs at Stranraer rather than Strabane spells death to the Union.

The real climax of the year came in July. The temperature was rising fast. In the split Cabinet, Boris Johnson (then foreign secretary) strutted. In June, the Westminster SNP group had protested that Scotland was being treated with contempt; they rose and walked out of the Chamber, and – sure enough – their protest was treated with contempt. The Joint Ministerial Council meetings, at which UK and Scottish ministers are supposed to discuss policy as “partners”, had long withered to a farce in which the UK side read out the agenda, declined to answer questions and left. By June, the House of Commons was sufficiently worried about the sterility of the Brussels negotiations to demand a “meaningful vote” on any deal which emerged.

In July, in baking shirt-sleeve weather, the Cabinet met on the lawn at Chequers to discuss May’s design for a Withdrawal Agreement. Not for the last time, her ministers agreed to her proposals and then, when her back was turned, told the media that they were utterly unacceptable and resigned. Boris Johnson was replaced by Jeremy Hunt, David Davis – as Brexit minister – by Dominic Raab.

Their main objection was to her Irish “backstop” plan. This argument had become a tangle of theology. Supposing negotiations about the border bogged down, could Ulster and/or the UK stay in a temporary customs union for a period which London could not unilaterally end and which the European Court of Justice might oversee?

Tory politicians roared that this was the surrender of British sovereignty and treachery to the 2016 referendum. In reality, they cared little about Northern Ireland or its people, and were mainly out to overthrow May.

As 2018 moved into autumn, with May still insisting that her “Chequers package” was the only possible deal, the deeper background began to vanish in the smoke of battle. Two huge implications fell out of sight.

One was what sort of Britain the Brexiteer faction wanted. Earlier this year, that had been clear: Brexit was to be the completion of Thatcherism – an unregulated, hell-take-the-hindermost capitalism in which the state would be shrunk to a stub. The second implication was for the future of Scotland. The myth of “partnership” was dissolving, as Scottish needs and voices came to be treated with a new, insolent impatience not seen for many generations.

In November, things began to fall apart fast. Once again, ministers agreed to May’s Chequers package – then denounced it and resigned. Her chances of getting her deal through the Commons were shrivelling. But she still insisted that the only choice was between her modified Chequers or a “no-deal disaster”.

There was loud disagreement. Enormous demonstrations in London for a People’s Vote second referendum were thinly-disguised campaigns to reverse Brexit itself. Much of England outside London retorted: “Just get on with it!”

But that was exactly what the Government – if it could still be called one – couldn’t do. In December, a Jacob Rees-Mogg plot to unseat May as Tory leader failed, but weakened her as much as his Brexiteer plotters. May blocked the Commons voting to defeat her Withdrawal Agreement, and – incredibly – got away with it. But her desperate flights to Brussels and other European capitals brought no concessions to help her get the deal through Parliament.

Westminster has splintered into factions: each with an idea, none with the power to put it into action. As Christmas approached, the UK twirled helplessly in the current sweeping it towards the cliff-edge of no-deal.

The March 29 deadline is almost in sight. “Take charge, somebody!” But who?

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