Brexit gets messy

For more than two years, British Prime Minister Theresa May has been looking for a pair of exit ramps — one to successfully navigate her country out of the European Union, as called for by voters in a 2016 referendum, and another to avoid further damage to her deeply divided Conservative Party. The coming days will determine whether the damage to herself is irreparable.

Background

On June 23rd, 2016, Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union, stunning Europe and the world in general. The EU employs a set of policies for its 28-member states that aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods and trade among other services. Britain is deeply intertwined with the workings of the EU especially with regard to trade.

PM Theresa May’s leadership in the negotiations has been heavily criticised. She has been unable to form a consensus within the Parliament, or even her own party, for the course of Brexit. Her “directionless” leadership has not convinced most of her peers in Westminster and she was challenged by a no-confidence motion in early December 2018, which she narrowly won.

Despite her best efforts, the British parliament is not accepting the proposed Brexit agreement. Irrespective of whether they arrive on a deal or not, the UK is officially set to leave on March 29, 2019.

Analysis

The current UK prime minister Theresa May was dealt a terrible hand by her predecessor, David Cameron. It was Cameron’s decision to call the Brexit referendum in the first place, hoping — and perhaps believing — that it would once and for all quiet the anti-Europe wing of his party. It proved a spectacularly failed gamble.

Unexpectedly, the referendum measure narrowly passed, a crushing blow to a political establishment that had lined up almost uniformly in favour of remaining. It also foreshadowed a political revolt by anti-elitist voters that hit the United States a few months later with the election of Donald Trump as president.

And as Britain nears the March 29 deadline for leaving the E.U., Trump continues to undermine the already weakened prime minister as he wages his ongoing campaign against elites.

Immediately after the Brexit referendum, Cameron resigned as prime minister and May won the leadership battle to succeed him. It has turned into a hollow victory that has left her as the prime minister with the single largest defeat on a resolution in the history of Parliament, another defeat nearly as big, a party that is a shambles, an E.U. leadership that has lost its patience, a country exhausted and on edge, a dysfunctional political system, and her future as head of government now measured in months rather than years.

May is not solely responsible for the condition in which Britain now finds itself: She has been hamstrung by hard-liners in her party who have so far made consensus impossible. But as the leader of the country and her party, she has focused more on maintaining unity in that party (or trying to bring it about) rather than pursuing another strategy.

May has absorbed the criticism from all sides. She is pummeled on editorial pages and by members of her own party, even her own cabinet. In other times, her government probably would have fallen. Still, she has soldiered on, unwilling to admit ultimate defeat, unwilling to step aside, constantly scratching and clawing for more time and more tweaks to an exit agreement in the hope of gaining a majority vote before the deadline.

This week alone, the degree to which she has painted herself into a corner has become more vividly clear than ever. On the one hand, she is handcuffed by a ruling by John Bercow, the colourful and independent-minded speaker of the House of Commons, who said Monday that she cannot bring the exit agreement back for a third vote without substantial changes. She had planned to try that third vote. Now it’s not clear when that will happen.

Assessment

Our assessment is that PM May is fighting an increasingly uphill battle with no respite from either the Parliament or her own party on the terms of the agreement. We believe that the EU’s conditional acceptance of an extension will not be agreed by the Parliament when the next vote on the agreement is called for. 

Image Courtesy: Ashley Basil (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019-01-18_The_Brexit_Brick.jpg), „2019-01-18 The Brexit Brick“, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode