The Conservative government of Great Britain, prior to the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, had declared that, deal or no deal, they are going to leave the European Union on October 31. This position was arrived at by party insiders and “hard Brexit” advocates including Boris Johnson, who has since become Prime Minister (in an internal Conservative Party vote). Having gamed the opportunity for the power to enforce his policy, Johnson as Prime Minister has since rapidly cemented his reputation as a Donald Trump who can actually speak English.
In an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Brexit is no longer very popular, Johnson first decided to “prorogue” Parliament for five weeks to forestall debate on the terms of departure, which is legal by parliamentary rules but alienated members from all parties, including some Conservatives. Perhaps as a result, Johnson lost not one, not two, but three votes before the suspension of Parliament, with the House of Commons first voting to pass a bill requiring approval for a no-deal Brexit. A vote to pass the bill on second reading succeeded the next day, and Johnson’s request for a general election failed to pass a vote. Several Conservatives voted against their own party on these measures. Johnson attempted to enforce party discipline by threatening dissident Conservatives with expulsion, only to have many members call his bluff, resulting in the ouster of several, including not only Mr. Soames (Winston Churchill’s grandson) but Johnson’s own brother. Even before that, his parliamentary majority consisted of only one vote, and with the purges, that majority is now gone.
And yet, because of that parliamentary setup (which makes the chicanery of American politics seem simple and easy to follow), there is still a chance for Boris to come out on top. This is the thesis of Andrew Sullivan’s latest weekly column in New York magazine. Sullivan is an old-school (C)onservative who knew Johnson back in the day, and he believes that a general election will be called in response to Johnson’s gambit (although not necessarily on his terms) and that this will in effect be a second Brexit referendum. “This time, the choice will be starker than in 2016: a no-deal Brexit or staying in the E.U. And this week, by firing the dissenters, Johnson has succeeded in making the Tories the uncomplicated “Leave Now” party. By clearing up any confusion, Johnson will thereby stymie the threat to Tory seats by the Brexit Party, which stormed to victory in the recent European elections. … And that is a Tory strength, as it stands. Just before Johnson won the leadership, Labour and the Tories were roughly even: around 26 percent each. Right now, the Tories have recovered under Johnson, as Brexit Party voters have come home, and have a clear ten point lead over Labour: 34/24 percent. The Brexit party still has 13 percent. Now that the Tory position on Brexit is the same as the Brexit Party’s, they form a no-deal bloc of 48 percent of the vote. The unabashedly pro-Remain party, the Liberal Democrats, have 18 percent, the Greens 5 percent, which added to the Labour total, gives the anti-no-deal bloc a total of 46 percent. It’s still close however you look at it.” Sullivan sums up: “Johnson has a clear case: that he stands for respecting a democratic vote to leave the E.U., that his opponents are elitists trying to defeat the will of the people in favor of a foreign entity, the E.U., and that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be allowed into Number 10.”
Yeah, I’m not so sure. It is quite true that Labour leader Corbyn, simply by being Corbyn, has miraculously squandered the immense advantage he has in the unpopularity and fecklessness of the Conservatives, since in this environment, he could have been the Prime Minister now. It is also true, as Sullivan says, that Labour itself is feckless, largely because it has never been as strong in support of “Remain” as the Conservatives are in support of “Leave.”
Way back at the time, I had said that the results of the Brexit referendum (in which 37% of Labour voters backed Brexit) indicated that there is a substantial group of people that rejects the closed-off, neo-liberal, “globalist” establishment, and that in the case of the Labour statistic, this group isn’t limited to right-wingers. I had also said that the Brexit vote (in the summer of 2016) could be a warning to those who think they know what “the people” want and what’s best for them. And this turned out to be the case. Trump got elected president, and we have had alt-right parties gain success in Germany and elsewhere. And the fact that the anti-establishment sentiment is actually a common cause of both the nationalist Right and the socialist Left means that an anti-globalist policy isn’t necessarily a reactionary and racist position. Nobody thinks that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist. Unless you’re Andrew Sullivan.
The problem, especially in the cases of the US and the UK, is that discontent with mainstream liberalism doesn’t mean that the conservative wing of the country knows what it’s doing, and since they don’t, people have to live with a government that is both malicious and incompetent. Which means that the conservatives currently in charge have to present themselves as the last defense against Evil Socialism, when all they have to recommend them is malice and incompetence. Now, we’ve seen that this is actually the selling point for the Trump Administration, but in the case of Brexit, it may not be enough, especially because of that unacknowledged Labour influence on the Leave vote.
Sullivan’s bet is that people are more sick of Corbyn and the Left than they are of the Conservatives, but the history of Brexit itself undermines the case. The referendum was first proposed by then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, because he was actually in favor of remaining in the European Union under re-negotiated conditions, but was pressured by hardline Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The Brexit referendum was intended as a defense of the moderate, negotiated position, and when the Leave vote won, Cameron resigned his seat. This is how Theresa May became Prime Minister. She herself had supported Remain, but felt obliged to uphold the Conservative position that a Leave vote meant that the government should enact a plan to leave the EU. After almost a year in office, having previously said there would be no general election, May made a “surprise statement” announcing a snap election to seek support for the Conservative position. As a result of the 2017 election, the Conservatives actually lost seats, and while Labour failed to capitalize, the Conservatives needed to form a coalition with the hard-right Unionist Party of Ulster to keep their majority. The main reason May’s government held up as long as it did is that it took this long to build up a consensus for a successor.
The pattern thus far has been that Conservatives want to promote a policy which is both controversial and has a real level of support. In order to bolster support, they use the election system in the hopes of increasing their majority and reinforcing a mandate for the policy. And the end result causes them to lose seats and by implication, support for the policy. This was the case with Cameron’s referendum, it was the case with May’s snap election, it has been the case with Johnson’s parliamentary votes, and there is no reason to believe that that will not be the case with another snap election.
Why? It might have been a lot easier if the people who are always going on about enforcing the choice of the Leave voters actually had any sort of plan to do so. If they’d had any sort of time table to work within a deadline, as opposed to setting a deadline and hoping somehow a time table would come to them before then. If they’d considered that they still had to work with European Union negotiators who now have that much less reason to deal with the Conservatives. If they’d considered the other practical consequences of their policy, namely the fact that the United Kingdom still has a land border because of Ulster, which means that a “hard” Brexit could restore a hard border with Ireland since the two nations will no longer be in the same economic community, and the economic and social consequences of that could lead to the result that British foreign policy has been trying to prevent ever since the Irish state was founded – the loss of Ulster and the reunification of Ireland.
This leads to another point. It has been said that a crucial advantage of the Right in politics is the idea that they don’t want more government. They have an advantage over the Left in that the Left does want more government, so gridlock is usually to the advantage of the Right. This also applies in political terms, because the average voter who isn’t concerned with political affairs or “social justice” takes the current situation as the given and is often suspicious of anything that would change that, even an ostensibly good reform proposal. But in this situation, it’s the Conservatives who are the radicals. In his column, Sullivan quoted a pro-Brexit blog using the phrase “By Any Means Necessary” with a picture of Malcolm X. “When a Conservative Party cites Malcolm X as a role model, it seems safe to say it is no longer conservative in any serious meaning of the word.” Which again would not be a bad thing if the proposed reform were actually good and it were not in fact destructive to the current order, with no real benefits. I return once again to the example of our “conservative” party in America, which wailed and moaned about the “radical” agenda of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (which had its antecedents in the pro-market Romneycare of Massachusetts and a Ron Bailey article in Reason magazine) and when the ACA was the new idea being forced into the system, it was easier to make a case against it. But by the time the Republicans actually got a Republican president who would sign one of their numerous repeals of the ACA, it was clear that they didn’t have anything to replace the ACA with. Which was bad enough. But in the interim, enough people had gotten real benefit from Obamacare that we had to consider the consequences of going back to the status quo ante, which would have cut a lot of people off from medical coverage. In the current situation, the radical and destructive position is to remove the “socialist” (actually business-oriented) reform of the ACA, and if people had actually wanted to go back to the prior standard, it would not have been changed in the first place. Republicans have not succeeded in repealing the ACA, despite valid criticisms of the program, because they don’t have a better idea, and everyone knows it.
Likewise, despite real support for the idea of leaving the EU, Conservatives have not been able to capitalize on that, because they don’t have a real plan other than “crash out” by default, which has consequences that no one really wants. Sullivan’s thesis is that Labour is sufficiently unpopular (and disorganized in its own priorities) that Johnson’s government will prevail anyway, which discounts the point that the Conservatives are the ones endorsing the radical and destructive policy. It discounts the point that in this context, all that the Labour-led opposition needs to do is to endorse the default status quo. To endorse the policy of not changing. You know- the conservative position. There’s also one factor here that doesn’t exist in America, which is that the flexibility of parliamentary politics means there actually IS a viable third party in the UK, called the Liberal Democrats. They have some things in common with Conservatives on economics, but are basically like the old Liberal Party that existed before the Fabian Socialists of Labour took over the opposition to the Conservatives. The LibDems might not be socially conservative enough for some Tories, but they provide a real choice to those who want an alternative to Conservative whackery and the socialist whackery of Labour. Which again provided an escape valve for Johnson’s internal opposition and allowed them to call his bluff. Even Sullivan says, “if Labour were to win, or go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, they could keep the U.K. in the E.U. without appearing to be acting directly against the wishes of the people. Or they could hold a second referendum. Either way, some kind of resolution would happen — and through a democratic process like a general election.”
In any event, the parallels continue: if the original Brexit vote was a sign that the liberal establishment was not invincible, the three years afterward have demonstrated that for the Right to actually take advantage of that and create positive change, they have to have a plan to do so. The problem has been that they don’t have a plan to do so, because at heart, they don’t believe in positive change. This has already had bad results for the “conservative” movement, despite the weakness of the Left, and that lack of foresight will continue to undermine them in the future.