Brexit and Theresa May: A ray of hope
Jul. 10th, 2018 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerInteresting thread here. Interesting tweet here.
The thrust of which is that Theresa May has cleared out the major architects of Brexit, by saying "Right, how do we do this?" at Chequers, making it clear that the Hard Brexit types don't have either the concrete plans or the backing to actually pull of Brexit, and then letting them resign rather than sacking them.
This actually strikes me as much more sensible that sacking Boris (which he's been trying to engineer since Brexit), as it means it's his decision to go, and she can't be held responsible for not having the Brexit wing in the cabinet. He was, basically, unsackable, but now she's free to act in a more sensible manner.
As Theresa May was a Remain supporter this is almost certainly a good thing. We're probably still going to have _some_ kind of Brexit, because she always (from my reading) carries out a job, even if she disagrees with it personally. But she'll presumably aim for the smallest Brexit she can manage. Which would have public support, I suspect, as the polls are currently showing a 7% lead for "Brexit was a stupid idea" (47% vs 40% in favour of Brexit).
(I await the announcement, fifteen minutes after I post this, that we're leaving immediately, on No Deal.)
The thrust of which is that Theresa May has cleared out the major architects of Brexit, by saying "Right, how do we do this?" at Chequers, making it clear that the Hard Brexit types don't have either the concrete plans or the backing to actually pull of Brexit, and then letting them resign rather than sacking them.
This actually strikes me as much more sensible that sacking Boris (which he's been trying to engineer since Brexit), as it means it's his decision to go, and she can't be held responsible for not having the Brexit wing in the cabinet. He was, basically, unsackable, but now she's free to act in a more sensible manner.
As Theresa May was a Remain supporter this is almost certainly a good thing. We're probably still going to have _some_ kind of Brexit, because she always (from my reading) carries out a job, even if she disagrees with it personally. But she'll presumably aim for the smallest Brexit she can manage. Which would have public support, I suspect, as the polls are currently showing a 7% lead for "Brexit was a stupid idea" (47% vs 40% in favour of Brexit).
(I await the announcement, fifteen minutes after I post this, that we're leaving immediately, on No Deal.)
no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 11:35 am (UTC)I think people oversell a dichotomy between "stupid" and "machiavellian". I think a lot of people exist in the middle, of doing "whatever looks best for them at the moment", and that does actually require a fair amount of cunning, but it doesn't necessarily need a complicated ongoing plan even if it looks like one from the outside.
As I see it, May got elected because she was the person remain-Tory-MPs and leave-Tory-MPs could best agree on. And she knew perfectly well that any action she took which showed any decisiveness would have a high chance of losing her support from one or other wing of the party, so she did her best to keep the situation rolling on without committing herself as the situation got ever more dire.
Like, if you consider all the possible options, it looks quite ingenious, but if you consider from her point of view, concerned primarily with staying PM, she didn't have a lot of choices -- any positive action she took was likely to lead to her government collapse, so she let things roll on. It was her *only* choice, and from a selfish point of view, she took the only sensible option in taking it.
Finally we reached a crunch point on Friday. If May delayed any longer, she will give up any hope of a deal, and will ruin the economy. And the chance of a challenge from the left starts increasing. Apparently she was not (yet) willing to risk this.
She knew she couldn't propose a deal even as reasonable as the one probably-unacceptable one she invented on Friday without alienating the brexiters, but that was her only choice. It was almost irrelevant whether the brexiters agreed (easiest for her but unlikely) or rebelled (she was gambling she has the strength to resist them).
Most PMs would probably have done the same. A principled PM wouldn't have been elected in the first place, since only a bad compromise would get through the conservative leadership contest. May passed the first test, of having any initiative to take action at all -- a complete non-entity would have continued to drift until someone challenged her from the left.
However, she proposed the minimal possible amount of movement away from hard brexit to give europe and the remain wing any hope she would reach a successful compromise.
It's possible that she would actually prefer remain. I'm really not sure. I feel like if that's what she wanted, she could have set up a brexit commission with Johnson or someone in charge and promised to enact article 50 as soon as it had a workable proposal. I feel like she'll go on playing the game out without a good endgame -- of shifting to remain the minimum amount necessary to placate remain MPs while giving brexiters the minimum manoeuvring space possible.
By appointing more pallid yes-men from somewhere in the middle, she has somewhat consolidated her position and ability to do *something*. It gives me a lot more hope than I had on thursday. But not THAT much more:
I don't know if she's deliberately targeting a workable soft-ish brexit compromise europe are likely to accept, or if she's simply prolonging things as long as possible in the hope that she'll survive somehow.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 12:34 pm (UTC)Football 'fans' wrecking an ambulance response car and a taxi in Nottingham and London while 'celebrating' being fine examples of what we may expect from xenophobe England (and I use that word advisedly).
no subject
Date: 2018-07-12 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-13 09:50 am (UTC)From the hardest Brexit direction, Turkey or ex-Yugoslavian status with the EU is designed to be transitional towards joining the EU, not leaving, and so that's not going to be a long-term plan.
From the softest Brexit direction, even a Norway or Switzerland style deal (which I really don't think will happen with the current Government) would be unstable for the UK and for the EU because of our relative size, never mind our political culture.
The stable situations I see are the Canada model or full membership. And from here it would probably need to be full-throated membership, euro, Schengen, no rebate, and all, not our previous exceptional model.
On the other hand, the EU does excel at procrastination, can-kicking and fudge, and ceasefire/armistice lines can persist for a surprisingly long time. To take two examples, I would similarly say that the current situation in the Korean peninsula and the House of Lords are not stable, but they've lasted way longer than I would have expected. But not for centuries. Long term, I think we are either right in or right out.
But that, of course, is well past the career of even the youngest politician, never mind political horizons, which are much shorter.