The Brexit shambles has exposed the UK in more ways than one


British prime minister Theresa May has requested from the EU an extension of the current deadline of March 29 until June 30 to negotiate a Brexit agreement. This seems like far too short an extension. If the framework for a deal had been agreed upon and all that remained was to tie up loose ends, then three months may have been adequate. But the situation surrounding the current negotiations is nothing like that. Given that even after two years, they have failed to arrive at even the outlines of a deal that parliament can support, expecting it to happen in three more months seems wildly unrealistic.

Clearly the EU feels that a short extension will solve nothing and it is not clear that the EU is going to agree to it. European council president Donald Tusk has said that they will agree to a short extension only if the British parliament passes the existing deal by the existing deadline, something it has failed to do twice already by large margins. The Speaker of the House has ruled that the deal cannot be brought up again in this session. Getting past that would require some fancy parliamentary footwork.

But it gets worse. An extension beyond June 30 would require the UK to take part in upcoming elections for the European parliament. May must feel that that would so enrage the Leavers that they would topple her as party leader. So she is trying to give the can just a little kick down the road, hoping she can miraculously pull a deal out of the air that would be agreeable to the parliament and the EU in that time. But if they do get the June 30 extension and do not take part in the EU elections, that might jeopardize the possibility of another extension after June 30 if there is no deal, which is presumably the scenario that the EU leaders see as highly likely and want to avoid.

The Guardian has a review of how the Brexit debacle has shredded the image that people once had of the British as a savvy, pragmatic people with a competent bureaucracy that would know how to negotiate complex deals with other nations. The opinions of others in the EU of the UK performance so far are scathing, calling it “pathetic, incoherent, and chaotic”.

For politicians, diplomats and officials across the continent, the past two-and-a-half years of the Britain’s fraught, seemingly interminable and increasingly shambolic departure from the EU have proved an eye-opener.

To the shock of many, Brexit has revealed a country they long looked up to locked in a narrative of its own exceptionalism, talking mainly to itself, incoherent, entitled, incapable of compromise (with itself or its neighbours), startlingly ignorant of the workings of an organisation it has belonged to for nearly 50 years, and unrealistic.

Some British politicians are “on another planet”, Lamy said, incapable of seeing that Brexit is the infinitely complex diplomatic equivalent of “trying to take the eggs out of an omelette. Even today, they spout the most monstrous nonsense. Many have still not landed in a place one could call reality. The cognitive dissonance is … remarkable.”
….

In practical negotiating terms, “efficient and knowledgeable” officials had been short-circuited, Lamy said, “cut out of both the decision-making and the action, replaced by people who are ideologically pure – and, of course, have royally messed things up”.

Alexandre Holroyd, a member of the French parliament’s European affairs committee and Franco-British friendship group, said Brexit had laid bare “how little real understanding there is, even in a national parliament, of how the EU works, of its rules and institutions”.

When he was asked in 2016 how Brexit would turn out, Krichbaum said, he had replied that he feared the EU27 would “struggle to put up a coherent front” and warned that the Brits were “excellent negotiators and savvy political communicators. I got it completely the wrong way around, on both counts.”

Many put the failure down to the arrogance of a nation that once had an empire and saw itself as an indispensable nation that other countries in the EU would strive to accommodate at all costs. But the EU clearly seems to be fed up and thinks it can do perfectly well without the UK being part of it. They also said that parliament voting against a no-deal Brexit meant nothing.

A European commission spokesman offered a withering assessment of the decision by MPs to ignore Theresa May’s assertion that no deal was the default position unless there was a deal in place by the time of the UK’s departure.

“We take note of the votes in the House of Commons this evening,” the spokesman said. “There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal. The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal – you have to agree to a deal. We have agreed a deal with the prime minister, and the EU is ready to sign it.”

At the same time, the EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, told EU ambassadors that she feared the Commons was “divorced from reality”.

Quoting private remarks by the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, Weyand concurred with his description of the decision to vote for no deal as “like the Titanic voting for the iceberg to get out of the way”.

I have been posting quite a lot about Brexit not because it affects me directly but because I am astonished at how people in government who should know better can let things drift along until it is too late to stop a disastrous end. It is like a faster version of what is happening with climate change.

Comments

  1. Dragged Into Political Hell says

    It’s a clusterfuck, where adherance to party ideology and preservation of position have ousted the idea that; parliament will serve the people. The country has been divided for the pleasure of the catastrophe capitalists. The people are just collateral damage.

  2. says

    Nothing summed up the arrogance and unpreparedness of the British Government’s negotiators better than the images of them meeting their EU counterparts where the EU team members were laden down with documents files and the British guys were empty-handed. Yeah, you’re really taking these negotiations seriously.

    Another issue is that the British Civil Service, after ten years of being cut to the bone by Tory “austerity” programmes, and preceded by twenty years of New Labour & Tory free-market/ public-private-partnership hoopla, is ill-equipped to take on the additional burden of all the administrative functions being returned from Brussels. The whole British state apparatus sorely needs an injection of cash and people to handle the increased workload, but given that the ones advocating the loudest for Brexit in the Tory party are also the ones most fond of free-market orthodoxy in its most virulently fundamentalist forms, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell of this happening. I expect more outsourcing to low-ball bidders, more service level agreements not worth the paper they’re written on, and all manner of kickbacks and corruption in the bidding and tendering process that will keep scandal sheets like the Private Eye in business for decades hence…

  3. Mark Dowd says

    I thin its come down to exactly 3 possibilities now: deal, no deal, or stay.

    I dont know enough about how Parlaiment’s party coalitions work to speculate that much, but I rate deal as the least likely option. The margin of defeat has been absolutely huge.

    Stay or no deal is a harder call, and I think comes down to if another referendum is held. I dont think the politicians are going to choose stay on their own, and I dont think another referendum will pick leave. I can’t predict how likely a referendum is though. I think they’re too close to the wire for it to be possible.

    Theres a lot of complexities in this, but I think the summary I gave my mom this weekend is pretty accurate: “Brexit is UKs version of the Trump administration. A clusterfuck of epic proportions that was pushed by a campaign of racism (especially against immigrants) and lies.”

  4. says

    Mark Dowd’s summary is essentially corrrect. There are some people on the Brexit side who have non-racist reasons for leaving the EU. But IMO, most people who voted for it were voting against immigrants and refugees. Despite the fact the we have 100% control over non-EU migration, and net non-EU migration has way over the Conservative Party’s ‘target’ for he entire time they’ve been in power. So just getting control over EI migration as well will change almost nothing. And will not, of course, change the status of refugees.

    I didn’t believe it a few months back, but I think it’s now obvious that Mrs May’s ‘strategy’ to get the UK Parliament to OK her deal is essentially a game of chicken. She’s hoping that when it comes to the last day or two, Parliament will vote for her deal instead of no deal or revoking article 50. I don’t think Parliament will stand for it. I suspect (and hope) that Parliament will revoke article 50, with a fig-leaf policy of re-submitting a notice of intention to leave once they’ve sorted out exactly what kind of Brexit Parliament will support.

  5. file thirteen says

    I think its come down to exactly 3 possibilities now: deal, no deal, or stay.

    As opposed to? 🙂

    Seriously, I’m presuming by “deal” you mean “May’s deal”, and I agree. And I still think May’s deal will carry the day, even now, even though it’s hated more than ever.

    No-deal deal would be such an act of extreme irresponsibility that I do not believe it could happen, not even now, not even though that’s what a minority of nutters -- the ERG (extremely racist gentlemen :)) want. The commons have voted emphatically against this possibility. Business groups have signalled it must not happen and have received assurances it won’t. If it did happen, May would have to immediately resign, her legacy would be one of incompetence, and that brush would tar all the Conservatives. When the choice is between May’s deal or no-deal, May’s deal will win.

    On the other side, there will be no referendum (no time for that anyway) or repealing of article 50, no matter how bad things get. May and the Conservatives would be a laughing stock. May would have to immediately resign, and she wouldn’t be departing alone. When the choice is between May’s deal or a repeal of article 50, May’s deal will win.

    It’s still the best turd they have.

  6. Dunc says

    Avoiding a “no deal” outcome requires a level of competence I no longer believe we can muster.

    Picture a drunk, one foot jammed firmly in a bucket, a bee’s nest on his head, staggering through a field of rakes, carrying a large cream cake and a pot of whitewash. It’s not going end well.

  7. mnb0 says

    “the image that people once had of the British …..”
    How many decades is that ago? More or less than 10? Because I can’t remember that image.
    Sorry if I’m overly sarcastic -- I’m seriously pissed off now the Dutch cryptofascists have won the Dutch elections.

  8. Mark Dowd says

    Seriously, I’m presuming by “deal” you mean “May’s deal”

    Is there any other deal I could possibly be referring to?

    No-deal deal would be such an act of extreme irresponsibility that I do not believe it could happen, not even now, not even though that’s what a minority of nutters — the ERG (extremely racist gentlemen :)) want. The commons have voted emphatically against this possibility. Business groups have signalled it must not happen and have received assurances it won’t. If it did happen, May would have to immediately resign, her legacy would be one of incompetence, and that brush would tar all the Conservatives. When the choice is between May’s deal or no-deal, May’s deal will win.

    You are way more optimistic than you have any reason to be. At this point, “extreme irresponsibility” makes that option a shoo-in. I was not being glib when I compared Brexit to Trump, the impulses behind them look pretty much the same. And we see what kind of insane delusional hysteria has happened here when the huge amount of bigotry was energized by con men preying on all their prejudices. That same insanity is driving Brexit. I cant count out any of these options.

  9. sonofrojblake says

    the image that people once had of the British as a savvy, pragmatic people with a competent bureaucracy that would know how to negotiate complex deals with other nations

    We’ve still got that. But…

    In practical negotiating terms, “efficient and knowledgeable” officials had been short-circuited, Lamy said, “cut out of both the decision-making and the action, replaced by people who are ideologically pure

    We’ve locked the pilots in the toilet and handed the controls over to two or three chaps who were wearing an acceptably-coloured tie.

    Many put the failure down to the arrogance of a nation that once had an empire

    It makes a nice, comforting, schadenfreude-ish narrative, but that’s bollocks. This is nothing to do with arrogance. Empire and arrogance are nowhere in the reasons for this. The reasons are at root quite simple. There is a minority within the Conservative party in the UK who are vehemently opposed to Europe because its tendency to regulate interferes with their ability to make money. They have never supported it and were a thorn in the side of Heath, Thatcher and Major.

    Cameron believed he could shut them up by promising a referendum in the manifesto for the 2015 election. He didn’t expect to actually win a majority in that election. His calculation was that he’d be able to shrug and say “I tried” when the Lib Dems (the coalition partners for the previous five years) quashed it.

    What he failed to realise was that the Lib Dems had promised to abolish university tuition fees in their 2010 manifesto, then when they unexpectedly got into (coalition) power not only did they not abolish them, they supported the Tory policy of TRIPLING them. The public didn’t forgive them, and in 2015 they were wiped out. The Tories won a majority, no coalition was needed, and now Cameron had no excuse for not calling the referendum.

    So he called it, but made it a non-binding, advisory-only one, so they could legally ignore a “wrong” result. Another thing Cameron failed to consider was that although he’d won an election, he wasn’t that popular personally. Someone who WAS that popular was Alexander “Boris” Johnson. Johnson calculated that if he backed Leave, even when he lost he’d have improved his position to make a move on the leadership. What neither of these Eton and Cambridge educated millionaires stopped to consider was that five years of Tory austerity cuts meant the public was angry and looking to make an anti-establishment point. And Leave won. Nobody saw it coming, even until the day of the referendum.

    And then Cameron, in a huff, resigned immediately. This threw the Tory party into a feverish leadership contest, one in which Johnson had no chance because his erstwhile co-head of the Leave campaign, Michael Gove, stabbed him in the back. It looked a lot like the party might tear itself apart for a bit. It ended up with the not even having a proper leadership contest as weaker candidates simply stood aside and let a Remain voter (May) take the reins.

    And May decided to treat the outcome of the referendum as legally binding, even though it explicitly was not and she knew it was a terrible, terrible idea. Why? Not because leaving was the best thing for the country. No -- because if she didn’t respect the result of the referendum, it would damage the Conservative party.

    THAT is what this entire thing is about -- what’s best for the parliamentary Conservative party and its future as a single party. The good of the country, the will of the electorate, our position in the world, Empire, arrogance, anything at all to do with Europe -- all of those things are irrelevant. This is now and always has been a matter entirely about the internal politics of just one of the UK’s political parties, and even more specifically about the internal politics of, I would estimate, a group of fewer than two hundred people.

    What’s perhaps worse is that any competent opposition party leader would at this point need to do very little beyond simply stand there looking vaguely competent in order to appear on the world stage as some sort of cross between Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and JFK. Unfortunately this is beyond our current opposition.

    Bafflingly, we have a party in charge who want to leave who are led by a Remainer, and a party in opposition who want to remain who are led by a Leaver. Is it any wonder we’re fucked?

  10. sonofrojblake says

    Our best hope is the fact that the EU don’t want us to crash out with no deal. That’s bad for them too, although nowhere near as bad as it is for us. I just wish someone in the EU would say out loud “Why not just… not?”. And we could rescind our Article 50 notification, “postpone” our exit until we can come to a deal that works for everyone, i.e. until hell freezes over, and get on with life. “Brexit” would become something this and all subsequent governments would fight over, like defence or the NHS or education or whatever, but crucially it would never actually happen.

    There is a part of me -- a part I don’t like and am not proud of -- that fantasises occasionally that the left could be as ruthless and violent as the right. That someone could go round the European Research Group (the cabal of extreme Eurosceptic Tory MPs nominally represented in the media by Jacob Rees-Mogg) and put polonium in their tea or novichok on their doornobs or something. There really are few enough of them that you could change the entire political trajectory of this country to a more progressive direction for a century or more with a single box of bullets. But that is not how we work

  11. Dunc says

    Nobody saw it coming, even until the day of the referendum.

    Not entirely true -- a small group of hedge fund managers with access to some very expensive private polling and the ear of Nigel Farage saw it coming, and they made a fortune.

    To expand on my earlier comment, the big problem here is that any route to avoid a “no deal” exit requires a majority of the HoC to actually make a decision which (a) they’ll have to take some sort of responsibility for, and (b) will piss off a significant portion of the electorate. On the other hand, stumbling off the cliff doesn’t require anybody to actually do anything, and more importantly, allows everybody involved to blame somebody else.

    It’s a classic Tragedy of the Commons. Pun very much intended.

  12. sonofrojblake says

    Yeah, fair enough. I should perhaps have said nobody on the Remain side and almost nobody on the Leave side saw it coming. Alexander “Boris” Johnson in particular emerged on the morning of the result looking like someone had shot his favourite puppy, and his side won.

    Re: no deal, it allows everybody involved to blame Theresa May. It’s been a disgusting sight these last nearly three years, watching her party sniping at her from the sidelines, watching the sharks circle her, but not a single one of them wanting to take an actual bite because she is the nominated scapegoat for all this. It is massively important to the Tories that Brexit and all the diabolical shitshow that will inevitably follow if and when we leave is firmly and unequivocally identified with her, personally, so that someone else (Johnson? Don’t write him off yet) can swoop in and promise to fix the damage she has done.

    Which is another reason that a little part of me hopes that, far from being the human personification of integrity-free incompetence that she appears, May is in fact a strategic genius who is playing the Tories like a harp. They can’t get rid of her until we’ve left, and she’s spinning it out and spinning it out, failing to agree a deal, failing to come up with a new one, delaying, delaying, and potentially (I hope) eventually reaching a point where she can rescind A50 and not leave at all.

    THAT would be a legacy for which history would hail her -- the woman who prevented Brexit, by sheer Machiavellian guile, disguised incredibly well as staggering weakness and failure. I do hope I’m right. If I am -- if she somehow stops it happening -- I’ll do something I’ve never done before. I’ll consider voting Tory. Just consider it. Because if she manages it, she’ll be the best leader we’ve had since Churchill, which will be a nice contrast to Cameron, the worst since Chamberlain.

  13. EigenSprocketUK says

    Dunc and SonOfRojBlake make excellent points in the previous four tweets, though SonOfRojBlake joins a beautifully straight line through carefully selected dots with the benefit of a huge dose of hindsight.
    A huge factor not mentioned is the unprecedented scale of the illegality of the funding in Vote Leave, the dodgy foreign interests masquerading through Brits, and the massive scale of psy-ops carried out by Cambridge Analytica through its willing shills in “Leave.EU”.
    To fail to draw a line which includes Cambridge Analytica, AIQ, and SCL is a massive oversight. The sheer audacity of their campaign built on hacked Facebook and social media profiles (mine included) was astonishingly effective. Even if you don’t know who they are, they probably know you. Their strategy was one of naked racism, errant nationalism, and misguided support for the NHS which they promised £350m/week on the side of that big red bus. They didn’t care when an MP was murdered in the campaign, those FB ads carried on rolling. Their strategy was to push as hard as possible as late as possible towards the end of the campaign; the polling results show how effective this was, and how people have seen the light since.
    This was never a simple case of political strategy gone wrong. To claim it was that simple is to make the exact same mistakes that the official Remain campaign made: wrongly to imagine that only party politics counts when people’s gut reactions and base natures are quicker and stronger.
    For those in the USA, remember that these techniques are getting better, you’ve only had a taster. Brexit is the warm-up for your presidency. Kenya and others were the warm-up for Brexit.

  14. Jazzlet says

    EigenSprocketUK says
    Don’t forget the ‘Turkey will be joining the EU next year and we’ll get 70,000 Muslim Turks invading Britan with no way to stop them coming’ lie, my former butcher was absolutely convinced this was fact, nevermind the trajectory Turkey has taken away from policies that would permit EU accession under Erdogan -‘The Muslms are coming!’. When he regurgitated that with absolute conviction (and facts greeted with ‘rubbish!’ ) a couple of days before the vote I started to get really worried.

  15. file thirteen says

    I don’t think May is some kind of Machiavellian genius -- rather the opposite. She seems like a decent person. But I would label her as incompetent.

    She spent far too much time with the EU coming up with a deal that nobody at home in the UK likes, and she seemed not to even realise that that was a possibility. Now maybe I can’t fault her for the quality of the deal -- maybe it wasn’t possible to come up with a deal that the commons would accept, no matter how hard one tried. That’s what I personally believe, so I don’t fault her for that, although for all I know that could be incompetence too; many MPs believe so.

    What she has done is to completely fail to convince even the MPs in her own party that the deal she has is the deal it’s going to have to be (which it is). She’s had two votes on it, and both times the deal was resoundingly defeated. MPs are digging their heels in to reject a third, even if she gets that past the speaker. Now, after running down the clock to the brink of disaster, her brilliant persuasive skills are on display in her speech, in which she blames MPs for their stubbornness -- the very MPs she needs to bring onside to pass it!

    Journalists were immediately tweeting after yesterday’s speech that that might not have been the best move. They saw it, we all saw it, but the prime minister, the one that needs to be the inspirational leader that MPs rally towards, didn’t? May is not the solution, she’s part of the problem. She’s incompetent. She just doesn’t have what it takes.

    Despite that, I still think the EU deal is the only viable option.

  16. Dunc says

    She’s certainly not a Machiavellian genius, and I don’t believe she’s a decent person either. Her entire career has been distinguished by authoritarianism, racism, hostility to the poor and down-trodden, and general inhumanity. She’s a nasty piece of work.

  17. file thirteen says

    @Dunc

    I yield to your description; on reflection, I am guilty of wishful thinking. I don’t know much about her other than in the context of Brexit. A more accurate comment would have been “I want her to be a decent person”.

  18. says

    I was struck by this:

    To the shock of many, Brexit has revealed a country they long looked up to locked in a narrative of its own exceptionalism, talking mainly to itself, incoherent, entitled, incapable of compromise (with itself or its neighbours), startlingly ignorant of the workings of an organisation it has belonged to for nearly 50 years, and unrealistic.

    I’m not struck because I’m surprised by it, but rather because I think it’s a statement that need be barely-tweaked to perfectly describe the US. Replace “Brexit” with “Trump/Kim negotiations” would get you most of the way there. Perhaps replacing “Brexit” with “Trump’s NATO demands” would get you all the way there with no other changes needed.

    The idea of “globalism” isn’t frightening to countries that long have been participating members of an international ecology. The idea of “globalism” is frightening to countries that believe that they can and should dominate others. “Globalism”, rather than the secret consolidation of power in the hands of an elite, is in fact that diffusion of power into relationships between nations. This does constitute a loss of power to former Imperial powers, but it doesn’t construct any new imperial powers. That of course is part of why the authoritarians have such a hard time understanding it at all.

    The USA and the UK both show every sign of a complete failure to believe that they’re part of a world in which cooperation is possible. At the population level as well as at the ministerial level we speak and act as if we will either dominate or suffer domination. But when we refuse to cooperate and insist on dictating to others, those others can simply walk away -- and here is the shocking part to our authoritarian mindsets -- without granting casus belli.

    In both the US and the UK we have built huge and expensive military machines thinking that if we fail to get our way, we shall then have the ability to send in troops to kill those that oppose us. But we don’t. Even if our populations are too authoritarian to imagine true cooperation, they are far enough removed from the mindset of the first half of the Twentieth Century to recognize that you can’t bomb an ally because they didn’t meet spending commitments. So Germany announces that they won’t meet the 2% GDP military spending demands of the US, and the great military might of the US is useless. Even if we wanted to bomb Germany back to the stone age, the money we would spend on such a horror is far more than we would save if NATO allies increased their war spending.

    Ultimately, what other actors on the world stage are doing is far more damaging than opposing the UK or the US. Instead they are simply ignoring us unless and until we have an offer that they want to accept.

    We are of course “incoherent, entitled, incapable of compromise, [and] startlingly ignorant of the workings of [international organizations]”. We frankly lack on the one side the imagination and empathy to see things from others’ perspectives because in our arrogant self-importance we have no practice with attempting to see others’ perspectives, and on the other side we have no practical experience negotiating as equals and accepting the mixed bag of accomplishments that results.

    We are entirely unprepared for this world. The only good thing about this whole mess is that our overblown fears of Chinese domination are proven by these current messes to be just as unfounded as our own arrogance. Should the Chinese attempt to dictate to the world they will find themselves as badly disabused of the relevance of their own imperial ambitions as we are being of the relevance of our past imperial accomplishments.

  19. sonofrojblake says

    Eigensprocket is of course entirely correct that (a) my analysis only makes sense from the point of view of now, and probably could not reasonably have been foreseen given that it rests on unexpected turns (Con/Lib coalition, Lib Dem hypocrisy, LibDem wipeout, etc. etc.). and (b) the enormous importance of the Cambridge Analytica stuff and illegal spending.

    File this under “shit you could not make up” -- the referendum was explicitly NOT legally binding, as I said. If it had been -- if Cameron had made it so, which he had the power to do -- then information Eigensprocket is on about which has since come to light about campaign funding would REQUIRE the result to be set aside as the result of illegal behaviour. But because it was “advisory”, there is no legal power to set aside the result. Cloud fucking cuckoo land, land of my birth.

  20. ColeYote says

    But remember, we can’t have another referendum on it because that would hurt people’s confidence in the political system or something.

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