By Rafael Behr
The eye of a hurricane can be strangely quiet – an ominous calm that presages collision with another wall of storm. There is something of that eeriness about the current lull in Brexit-related political frenzy. The wind dropped before Easter. The departure date was delayed to 31 October and parliament went into recess. MPs are now back in Westminster, and the crisis is not settled, yet there is still barely a breeze of urgency.
When the cabinet met on Tuesday, Brexit was not even on the agenda. There is no significant government business scheduled for the Commons chamber all week. It is hard to legislate for life beyond Brexit without having legislated for Brexit first. But Theresa May still doesn’t have a majority for her deal, and Jeremy Corbyn has no interest in bailing her out with opposition votes.
Arguments that might persuade hardline Tory Eurosceptics to get behind their leader drive soft-Brexiteer LabourMPs in the opposite direction. It is the Rubik’s cube problem: actions that line up colours on one face mess up the opposing face.
Any Labour-Tory pact would involve Corbyn and May upsetting their respective parties in ways that neither leader is inclined to do. But both would prefer that the other take responsibility for the dialogue breaking down. There is also tacit agreement between the two biggest parties that EU membership should not be the defining issue in council elections on Thursday.
Partly this is healthy decompression after a period of intensity that left MPs physically and emotionally debilitated. But 31 October is not distant enough for Westminster to afford a leisurely reappraisal of priorities. It is six months – the same period that has elapsed since May first completed the withdrawal agreement, during which no progress has been made at all. In three years since the referendum, the country is no closer to consensus on any aspect of Brexit. Given that record (and a timetable that includes European elections and party conference season) who would bet on a tidy resolution before Halloween?
There would have to be a dramatic shift towards sober assessment of Britain’s strategic place in the global order, and the available terms of a future relationship with the EU. Debate is moving in the other direction. A dominant portion of the Tory party believes that Britain could comfortably quit the EU with no deal at all, and the prospect of a leadership contest prevents formerly serious cabinet ministers confronting that delusion.
Labour’s position has shrivelled into semantic haggling over a second referendum. A “damaging Tory Brexit” would require ratification by the public, but some benign Labour Brexit would not. Most of the party’s members and a large tranche of its MPs think the latter option doesn’t exist, but the leadership will not surrender the concept.
The collective retreat from hard decisions has happened despite the existence, since last November, of a detailed treaty setting the broad parameters for any Brexit model. The withdrawal agreement should have thrown a cordon of realism around the debate. It is revealing that the opposite happened. From the very start, Eurosceptics refused to accept that Brussels had substantial control over the terms of departure. But once ministers and officials started regularly crossing the Channel, sitting across the desk from Michel Barnier or attending awkward EU summits, there was a regular drip-feed of reality into Britain’s European discourse. It was not enough to overcome decades of cultural prejudice and nationalistic delusion, but it was something. And it was hard to ignore.
The dynamic of a 27 states-against-one negotiation was a rolling corrective to Brexit fantasies. That dissonant sound has now faded away, and Brexiteers are free to go back to thinking about Europe in terms they find more in harmony with their old prejudices. They didn’t like their brush with reality and choose to forget that it happened – all of it. Some Tory MPs talk about the Irish backstop and customs arrangements with an ignorance that would be justifiable only if they had spent the fact-laden years of 2017 and 2018 in a coma.
Continental leaders worried that something like this would happen. In a statement announcing the most recent article 50 extension, European Council president Donald Tusk signed off with a plaintive remark addressed directly to Britain: “Please do not waste this time.” We are wasting the time. This is not a normal political deadlock. There is something intrinsic to Brexit that seems to prevent Westminster from processing it normally – something that the body politic finds indigestible. The parliamentary arithmetic and the divisions within parties are proximate reasons why May’s deal has not passed, but they are not sufficient explanation for the atmosphere of intellectual and psychological paralysis.
There is a Commons majority for satisfying the referendum mandate but only in the literal sense of terminating EU membership. That is a distinct category of action from completing Brexit. One can be done overnight. The other is a revolution built on a jumble of social and economic discontent, hope and fear, with no end in sight because it attempts national renewal by a mechanism that reliably diminishes national status. It is pain sold as painkiller.
A more fraudulent sale is hard to imagine. It was possible because, over a generation, “Europe” and “Brussels” had become embedded in national debate as terms only tenuously connected to the true story of UK participation in – and influence over – continental institutions. Through the referendum, Britain blundered into a ferociously technical task under a ruling party that was wilfully illiterate in European affairs. And now the pressure has eased, the deadline has slipped, and the natural tendency to divergence returns. The complex of national demons that British politics conjures when it talks about Brexit drifts ever further away from what the rest of the world means when it talks about the UK leaving the European Union.