Brexit, mother of all messes

Solving the crisis will need time—and a

second referendum
2 days ago

NO PLAN BY any modern British government has been so soundly

thrashed as the Brexit deal thrown out by Parliament on January
15th. The withdrawal agreement, the centrepiece of Theresa
Mayʼs premiership, which she has spent nearly two years
hammering out with the European Union, was rejected after five
daysʼ debate by 432 votes to 202. Her own Conservative
bankbenchers voted against her by three to one.

The mother of parliaments is suffering the mother of all

constitutional crises (see article). Three years ago, in the biggest
poll in the countryʼs history, Britons voted in a referendum to leave
the EU. Yet Parliament, freshly elected a year later by those same
voters, has judged the terms of exit unacceptable. The EU shows
little willingness to renegotiate. The prime minister ploughs
obdurately on. And if this puzzle cannot be solved by March 29th,
Britain will fall out with no deal at all.

To avoid that catastrophe, the priority must be to ask the EU for

more time. But even with the clock on their side, MPs seem
unlikely to agree on a solution to Brexitʼs great riddle: what exit
terms, if any, truly satisfy the will of the people? With every week
in which MPs fail to answer this question, it becomes clearer that
the people themselves must decide, in a second referendum.

The rout this week was the result of two years of political
misjudgment. The referendum of 2016 was won by just 52% to
48%. Yet rather than consult the defeated side, Mrs May pursued
a hardline Brexit, hurriedly drawn up with a handful of advisers
and calibrated to please her Conservative Party. After she lost her
majority in 2017 the need to build a consensus became clearer
still, but she doubled down. Even after Parliament established its
right to vote on the final deal, she didnʼt budge, instead trying
(and failing) to frustrate Parliamentʼs vote by running down the
clock. The doggedness that has won her many admirers now
looks like pig-headedness. The prime ministerʼs promise after this
weekʼs crushing defeat to work with opposition MPs comes two
years too late.

But the crisis is not just about poor leadership. Brexit has exposed
two deeper problems. One concerns the difficulties that will face
any country that tries to “take back control”, as the Leave
campaign put it, in a globalised, interconnected world. If you take
back the right to set your own rules and standards, it will by
definition become harder to do business with countries that use
different ones. If you want to trade, you will probably end up
following the rules of a more powerful partner—which for Britain
means the EU or America—only without a say in setting them.
Brexit thus amounts to taking back control in a literal sense, but
losing control in a meaningful one. Leavers are right that the EU is
an increasingly unappealing place, with its Italian populists,
French gilets jaunes, stuttering German economy (see article)
and doddery, claret-swilling uber-bureaucrats in Brussels. But
they could not be more wrong in their judgment that the EUʼs
ominous direction of travel makes it wise for Britain to abandon its
seat there.

The second essential problem Brexit has exposed concerns

democracy. Britain has a long history of representative
democracy, in which MPs are elected by voters to take decisions
on their behalf. The referendum of 2016 was a rarer dash of direct
democracy, when the public decided on a matter of policy.
Todayʼs crisis has been caused by the two butting up against
each other. The referendum gave a clear and legitimate command
to leave the EU. To ignore it would be to subvert the will of the
people. Yet the peopleʼs representatives in Parliament have made
an equally clear and legitimate judgment that Mrs Mayʼs Brexit
deal is not in their constituentsʼ interests. To sideline MPs, as Mrs
May has all along tried to do, would be no less a perversion of
democracy.

The prime minister has piled moral pressure on MPs to back the
deal anyway, arguing that even if they donʼt much like it, it is what
their constituents voted for. It is not so simple. Mrs Mayʼs deal is
not as bad as some of her critics make out, but it is far from what
was promised in 2016. Ejection from the single market, the
decline of industries ranging from finance to carmaking, the
destabilisation of Northern Ireland and an exit bill of some $50bn:
none of this was advertised in the campaign. Voters may be
entirely happy with this outcome (opinion polls suggest
otherwise). But there is nothing to say that the vote to leave must
entail support for Mrs Mayʼs particular version of leaving. That is
why all sides can claim to represent the “real” will of the people.
For MPs to back a deal that they judge harmful out of respect for
an earlier referendum which issued a vague instruction would be
neither representative democracy nor direct democracy—it would
be one doing a bad impression of the other.

The first step to getting out of this mess is to stop the clock.
Because Mrs Mayʼs deal is dead and a new one cannot be
arranged in the ten remaining weeks, the priority should be to
avoid falling out on March 29th with no deal, which would be bad
for all of Europe and potentially disastrous for Britain. If Mrs May
will not ask for an extension, Parliament should vote to give itself
the power to do so. This desperate measure would up-end a long
convention in which government business takes precedence over
backbenchersʼ. But if the prime minister stays on the road to no
deal, MPs have a duty to seize the wheel.

With more time, perhaps a deal might be found that both

Parliament and the EU can agree on. Either a permanent customs
union or a Norwegian-style model (which this newspaper
endorsed a year ago as the least-bad version of Brexit) might
squeak through. But both would demand compromises, such as
Britain relinquishing the right to sign its own trade deals or
maintaining free movement, that contradict some Leave
campaign promises.

That is why the path to any deal, whether Mrs Mayʼs or a

revamped one, must involve the voters. The give and take that
Brexit requires mean that no form of exit will resemble the
prospectus the public were recklessly sold in 2016. It may be that
voters will accept one of these trade-offs; it may be they will not.
But the will of the people is too important to be merely guessed at
by squabbling MPs. Parliamentʼs inability to define and agree on
what the rest of the country really wants makes it clearer than
ever that the only practical and principled way out of the mess is
to go back to the people, and ask.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition

under the headline "The mother of all messes"