It’s hard to get the image out of your mind — a fish head, completely washed up, dead and rotting away. Yes, it’s Theresa May again. She’s just suffered the worst defeat of a government in the history of the House of Commons. Her negotiated EU withdrawal plan went down 432-202 votes. The previous record holder was Ramsay McDonald, PM of the first Labour government in 1924, a very minority affair, losing by 190 votes on an utterly minor issue. May has not only lost a vote on the future form of UK sovereignty, and grabbed the top spot, she’s broken the 200-vote barrier. It’s quite an anti-achievement.
Every party except the Conservatives voted against the bill, and 118 Tory rebels voted against it too. Three Labour MPs crossed the floor to vote for the agreement.
The vote went down 7.30pm UK time (early Wednesday morning here). Labour immediately announced its intention to call a vote of no-confidence, which will happen tomorrow. The government is expected to win that, with Tory rebels coming back into line, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) eager to avoid a general election, which would give Labour a chance of gaining a plurality.
That would leave power in the UK bifurcated. Theresa May then still leads a minority government with confidence in her ability to manage drains, whack the poor, etc, etc, but which leaves an absence of leadership on the most crucial question of all.
That is what both Remain and Leave rebels on the Tory side have desired. Both sides withdrew amendments to the bill at the last minute — the key one, to make a “no-deal” crash-out “illegal” — that would have otherwise gained more support for the bill from one side or the other. Hence the magnitude of May’s defeat. It was a pretty classic ambush.
But, really, there was nothing May could do about it. To withdraw the bill a second time (it was meant to come to the vote in December last year) would have been absurd, and triggered a no-confidence motion in any case. Though given the margin of the loss, May may well reflect that it would have been better to leave the magnitude of the defeat as a mystery.
Now, should the no-confidence motion be lost, and May does not resign, she has three days to present a “Plan B” — B? Plan ZZQ — to the Commons, the result of an amendment voted up last week. The form of that amendment is not undodgy, compelling a course of action within parliament as the result of a vote, but the speaker let it through anyway.
Technically, May could say anything — “we’re going to keep on keeping on” — but realistically she has to put something forward. Prior to the “three days” amendment, she had 21 days as per the terms of the original withdrawal act — but that would have left only seven weeks between the presentation of a new plan in early February, and Brexit proper on March 29. That would have allowed for a bit of brinksmanship.
But the “three days” amendment leaves the government scrambling to cobble together something, anything to present to the Commons — without time to check it with the EU proper to see if it would be acceptable. This is, remember, the question of the sovereignty of the country of which the Commons is the law-making, constitutive body.
The paradox is hardly coincidental. The Leave/Remain referendum was designed to solve the problems of unity within the Tory party, and allow them to continue operating as the “practical” party of ruling class governance. But by projecting their own politics onto the wider canvas of the nation, they did that most unconservative thing: politicised the allegedly non-political. Since Tory parties thrive only by removing matters from the realm of the political into the “given”, this is an extraordinary reversal.
So what can May do now? She could resign and say that someone else will have to carry a new plan forward. But reputationally, she has no incentive to do so. It couldn’t get worse. Could it? She could declare that the public will is now impossible to divine without a second referendum — attractive to her as a Remainer, and putting the split back to Labour, whose leadership is desperate to avoid such. Ask for a delay of exercising article 50 from the EU? Yes, but all 27 EU nations have to agree to that, and their patience with the preening, arrogant, UK has long since been exhausted.
My bet would be a second referendum. Given that May may lose control of the House in any case (to pro-Remain backbenchers) she may want to try and gazump them, and go down in history at least as the PM who took it back to the people. That’d be my bet. So of course it won’t be that. General election. Whatever happens, they’re up Fish Creek, totally addled.
Just a thought, perhaps not entirely irrelevant: you never really get over being Top Nation.
The French still have tickets on themselves 200 years after losing that post, and half of Britain seems to walk around with the Empire rotting in their heads, three generations after Suez.
I wonder how the yanks will handle it.
Very badly, I suspect.
The Yanks aren’t handling it too well now. Shouting about Chinese aggression in the coastal sea off China and Russian aggression on Russian territory adjacent to the ring of US bases around their borders. Usually level headed commentators on CNN and MSNBC virtually froth at the mouth when they talk about the “dangerous hostile adversary,” yes, Russia with maybe two military bases outside its borders, one old aircraft carrier and about a tenth of the US military budget.
CNN and MSNBC have a job to do. Perpetuate the Russian bogeyman to cover up Clinton’s electoral fraud (4 top members of the party had to resign), actual nuclear deals with Russia (If I don’t get elected, we’ll all hang by this), and meetings in a foreign embassy for the actual purposes of collusion. Let these valuable news services get on with the business of the elite and US propaganda. I had no idea that the US was the only country in the world that doesn’t use propaganda.
Well observed, I’ve often thought that too. Post-imperial angst explains a lot. Look at Hungary, once half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – following up that loss of status with serial terrible decisions to regain prominence, including an alliance with Nazi Germany and the current authoritarian drift.
We have our problems here in Australia; but at least we weren’t ourselves once a great power, over the loss of which ranking we still agonise. That clearly does weird things to one’s (national) judgement and reason.
The Yanks aren’t handling it too well now. Shouting about Chinese aggression in the coastal sea off China and Russian aggression on Russian territory adjacent to the ring of US bases around their borders. Usually level headed commentators on CNN and MSNBC virtually froth at the mouth when they talk about the “dangerous hostile adversary,” yes, Russia with maybe two military bases outside its borders, one old aircraft carrier and about a tenth of the US military budget.
I think the relevant specific form of their ex-Top-Nation angst is the British delusion that they won WWII. By great and heroic effort they managed to survive it with enormous help and with consequent diminished status, but the war was won by the USSR and the USA.
The EU is primarily an attempt to shore the survivors against the prospect of another disastrous European conflict. Its primary value for the UK lies in that. Brexiteers think otherwise, or have forgotten.
Worries about EU domination, rule of elites, undemocratic institutions – all of these are real but also the specific European forms of world-wide issues. It may be that the EU can be reformed (with great difficulty, to be sure), but once dismantled it won’t be re-formed until there has been another devastating war. I know which problem I’d rather be confronted with.
There have been whole conferences about there being NO need for an exit deal. May has been against Brexit all along and the ‘deal’ should be seen in this light. Don’t judge politicians by what they say, judge them by what they do. No need to worry, like Ireland, the UK public will be re-voted into submission, and the exit vote is reversed. The longer this goes on, the more I think an exit might be the best idea.
That is one of the best opening couple of sentences I’ve ever read. Almost choked on my tuna salad, I was laughing so much. What a rotting school of incompetents!
Britain. Preening and arrogant? Yeah, maybe, but that doesn’t take away that there are serious issues with the EU that has quite a few countries pissed off. Voices of dissent in France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, just to name a few have been getting louder over such issues as the stultifying red tape, imposition of overriding laws and lately the handling of the refugee crisis. Instead of the EU taking this opportunity to restructure or reset its systems in the hope the UK will change its mind, it’s playing hardball and not giving an inch. With Britain gone, the EU’s problems will still remain and the clamouring will get louder.
On the contrary, the EU offered a number of concessions to Cameron, the UK rejected them. Yes the Eu does need reform, it allowed tinpot semi democracies to join. But the EU is a calm balance to adventurous Russian leaders. Putin thinks so, hence his bankers and oligarch mates fund the splinter parties in the EU including Le Pen and Farage.
I don’t know all the details OGO, but from what I read the concessions were just tinkering around the edges. I totally agree that Europe needs the EU, but unless they become more proactive in making real changes, increasingly angry and polarised communities will lose their patience and who knows where that will lead.
Ummm… have you actually been to the EU, Bref?
Apart from the perennially unwilling Britain, it has great public transport, decent welfare systems, free or cheap higher education, clean streets where people treat each other civilly, etc., etc.
Sure, a bit of an overgeneralisation, but when you step off the ferry or train from Ireland, the Netherlands or France the stench of British neo-liberalism and incompetence is overwhelming.
Yes, lots of things wrong with the EU, but far more wrong with Britain.
Bob, I’m not disagreeing with any one here on the importance and advantages of the EU and being part of it. I have spent many years in London and Europe and have a lot of family in Holland. Both business and family acquaintances have voiced disquiet concerning the EU over the years and it just seems to me it’s been increasing. In England, for various reasons, it has finally boiled over, but that doesn’t mean the rest of Europe is particularly happy with the status quo.
You are absolutely right to point out that Grieve’s ‘Plan B’ amendment fails to display the true one-hundred-percent grade A undodgy that every good democrat holds high. Like slipping on a dog turd as you make your way to dive head-first into a sewer, it’s frustrating and quite uncouth.