Those who argue for a people’s vote on Brexit are frequently warned that a fresh referendum would infuriate millions of voters who thought they had made their position perfectly clear in 2016. It would be idle to deny that many might indeed be affronted – especially if the campaign to stay in the European Union were foolish enough to frame the argument as a rematch rather than as a completely new judgment upon the shambles of the past three years.
But the anger that such a vote could conceivably trigger is as nothing compared with the democratic recoil there will be from the Labour-Conservative stitch-up that many at the apex of both parties now favour.
Talks between the two negotiating teams will resume on Tuesday. According to the Sunday Times, Theresa May’s plan is to offer Jeremy Corbyn a temporary customs arrangement with the EU – to be reviewed in 2022 – bolstered by selective alignment with single market regulations on goods, and a commitment to match all EU measures on workers’ rights. If this were to be agreed – a ghastly marriage of the old Tory “magic circle” and Labour “beer and sandwiches” – Corbyn would find himself in a quite extraordinary position. In practice, the supposed enemy of the establishment would have entered a national coalition with the Conservative party. After a lifetime of Tory-baiting, he would finally be hugging close the authors of austerity, “neoliberalism” and invitations to Donald Trump. From Che Guevara to Ramsay MacDonald in less than four years: is that really how Corbyn wants to be remembered?
The deal is not done yet, and may never be. On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, declared that he did not trust the prime minister and believed that she had “jeopardised the negotiations” by allowing details of their progress to be leaked. Meanwhile, on Pienaar’s Politics, Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, said that Labour would not resolve the Brexit crisis “by bailing out a failed Tory deal”. More remarkable, however, is the resilient enthusiasm for an agreement in the upper echelons of both main parties – spooked by last week’s local election results, desperate to get Brexit in the rear-view mirror.
On Sunday Rory Stewart, the new international development secretary and aspiring prime minister, told Sky’s Sophy Ridge that the two teams were only “a quarter of an inch apart”. In the Mail on Sunday, May herself wrote of her strong belief “that – more than 34 long months on from the referendum – what people want is for their politicians to come together in the national interest and get Brexit over the line”.
From some Corbynites, there is a pleading tone unbecoming to a party that claims to be ready for government: the gist of their complaint being that they deserve a lot more sympathy than they are getting, as victims of the electoral complexity of Brexit. Can’t we all see that a deal would make life easier for them, and enable Jeremy to get on with being wonderful? Why aren’t we more grateful?
Separate but related is the growing fear among Labour remainers that Keir Starmer has finally lost patience with his boss’s twitchy indecision and sees a Corbyn-May pact on Brexit as an opportunity to resign and launch his own bid for the Labour leadership. (Needless to say, Starmer’s admirers deny that he has any such plan in mind.)
The whole idea underpinning these talks is nonsense on stilts. To change the metaphor: Brexit is not a minor complaint to be quickly sorted – a geopolitical gammy knee or mild chest infection. Depending upon your perspective, it is a gangrene requiring amputation by public vote (or revocation of article 50); or it is a chronic condition that will require indefinite treatment. Even if the EU were to accept these muddled proposals – highly unlikely, in my view – the next few prime ministers would still spend much of their time embroiled in their implementation. There really is no quick fix in this waking nightmare.
In any case, I do not understand how May and Corbyn imagine that any such deal could pass the Commons. It is true that Ken Clarke’s customs union proposal was defeated by only three votes on 1 April, by 276 to 273. But 100 MPs didn’t take part, and only 36 Tories supported the measure. More to the point, an indicative Commons vote is little more than an opinion poll with green benches. A meaningful vote on a putative Labour-Tory deal would be something else entirely.
The Tory right would vote en bloc against what Jacob Rees-Mogg has already condemned as “an attempt by the political establishment to avoid Brexit, to have a pretend Brexit”. In this instance, he would be correct: any such customs arrangement would, of necessity, involve the continued jurisdiction of the European court of justice (or what is called “disguised subservience”, achieved by the creation of a new arbitration tribunal that is, in practice, governed by the rulings of the ECJ). And, in spite of recent claims to the contrary, the EU would never allow the UK to make its own trade deals.
A great many Labour MPs would oppose a pact with the Tories on principle. On both sides of the house there would be a (perfectly legitimate) fear of the public’s perception that the whole venture was precisely the sort of elite scam that they voted against in 2016.
A deal that nobody opted for in the original referendum, brokered by two flailing party leaders in a desperate bid to save their skins: who wants that? Who could possibly be satisfied by that? The public are angry about Brexit already. It’s time to give them a final say.