The A50 Window and the Horns of Brexit
The Supreme Court just made us a place to talk about Brexit. We can’t afford to ignore it.
Today the UK Supreme Court sent the government to its room and told it to tidy up before it can have any sweets. No, the Prime Minister is not a President. Parliament holds sovereignty in the UK, and Parliament must act. Or, rather, must Act.
Theresa May won’t want to produce a proper white paper. A Downing Street representative has already said that her speech last week was clear. It wasn’t, and more importantly she didn’t give it in Parliament — because she wants to avoid scrutiny by MPs who know full well her administration is divided on detail and ignorant of possibility. The Conservative party has been split on Free Trade for more than a hundred years, and the issue isn’t going away for them.
What that means is that Labour can in this moment advance its own Brexit agenda, with some real red lines. Jeremy Corbyn has a window in which to achieve big things, but it’s a narrow one, and it depends on May’s hesitation.
I say Corbyn because the Lib Dems, who might otherwise seize this moment, have simply rejected Brexit. They don’t have to account for what they think it needs to look like, because they don’t think it should happen at all.
Looking at the above response to the A50 judgment, it’s clear that his is the politics of resistance, not creation, and it’s a weak-tea version at that. Labour is promising to prevent Brexit from turning Britain into a tax haven. Well and good, but nowhere near enough. What will it become instead? For the Tories, that’s actually fairly simple: they’re going to hold a fire sale. Look for a loosening of work protections and a move towards at-will employment. Expect favourable tax laws for corporations and capital gains breaks for the wealthy. In the flux of Brexit, a thousand progressive knots will be untied. The UK will be radically re-envisioned in the direction of the free market. (If you thought neo-liberalism was a problem, Anglo-neo-Conservatism run from a position of comparative geopolitical weakness will be a bonfire of all you hold dear.) The inexorable logic of Brexit, especially in the hands of the Tory right, is a diminished social safety net and an erosion of protections at work. Maternity rights will go into reverse. Full privatisation of the NHS — which will by then have been strangled in terms of funding for more than a decade — is surely in the background, especially if it’s the price of a juicy US trade deal with Donald Trump’s cowboy capitalist America.
But what does Labour do instead? Corbyn has to tell us, and now. Labour has chosen to back Brexit. Very well, I think that’s a bad decision, but no one elected me to run the opposition. Corbyn has to give us a detailed picture of a functional, prosperous, post-Brexit Britain. It has to add up, because nothing May is putting out there seems to make any kind of mathematical economic sense. Brexit is a tone poem about green hillsides, pretty towns and tea shops that somehow became national policy. If he cannot see his way clear to a Labour Brexit formulation — and thereby force May to explain the full and functioning shape of her own vision — he has an obligation not to go passively into invoking Article 50, but to reject it. This is a critical moment not just for Labour, but for the country, and the people Labour protects. If he cannot make the numbers work, he must speak to that. If he can, he must to that instead.
Labour has to produce its own Brexit design, and do it now. It’s the only political action they can take which will change the trajectory Britain is on — which potentially otherwise leads to the party’s extinction, never mind what it does to the country. What will they say in 2020 if Brexit isn’t turning out well? That they supported it but would have done things a bit differently? If things are still relatively rosy by that point (and some analysis says the pain is likely to be deferred until 2022) they’ll be fighting an uphill struggle against a successful incumbent. After that, of course, they’ll have been out of power for more than twenty years and the political landscape will likely be unrecognisable. If they can’t produce such a plan, the implication is that Brexit either entails the end of the party because Britain has chosen a path that leads away from Labour’s politics into a new balance, or that Brexit itself is a disaster that can’t be done well, and Corbyn must require a new referendum with that determination in the balance.
In May’s hesitation is the moment to demand, not just for Labour but for all of us, the things we expect from any Brexit deal. If those things are not attainable, we need to be allowed to reassess the Brexit decision as a nation. If the promises of Brexit now look unachievable against the backdrop of reality, or if the premises upon which the Leave vote was based are now being chipped away — where is that £350m a week? — then a new mandate is required to go further into the wildnerness. If Corbyn doesn’t pursue one, and doesn’t present a coherent plan for moving ahead, it is the greatest imaginable failure. And if he fails, then we have to step around him, either in Parliament, at the referendum ballot box, or in the street.
