4127

This article on the surface seems sensible, but I’m not so sure:

This has become accepted wisdom amongst the bien-pensant, but really, which “pragmatic remainers” could she have appealed to? The SNP/LibDems want to revoke Brexit, and fair play to them. The “pragmatic remainers” in Labour seemed happy enough to back the party policy of ambiguity, dishonesty and misdirection for two years. She could have won more support from the pro-European wing of her own party, but how much would that really have helped her? What would the “compromise” have looked like.

He’s right that a No deal outcome was never an option given the parliamentary arithmetic, but what May did was crafted a compromise that, in the end, carried most of her own party. To win votes from outside, she would have had to lose most of her own party, and therefore her office.

But nothing had changed! 15 votes one way or another wasn’t enough to change the fundamental situation I described above. Indeed, her mistake was not calling the election, but treating it with such arrogance as a foregone conclusion. The situation meant she needed a larger majority and an overwhelming mandate within the party to carry through her compromise and deliver on Brexit, so she should have made that the priority of the campaign, and added in a couple of popular, eye-catching policies (more police perhaps?) and featured her more charismatic ministers, rather than trying to reform one of the third rails of British politics and focussing he campaign on herself.

Actually the problem was by this point it was too late. She should have made sure the withdrawal agreement was sorted much earlier, allowing for an early vote. She then pushes the EU to say “This is the deal, take it or leave it.”, and resigns with time for the party to select a new leader and hold a GE.

The real problem is that she never took account of the possibility of failure at any point, and as a result produced a hopelessly optimistic strategy. However all the criticisms from the centre reflect an equally hopelessly optimistic belief that she could have compromised her way out of the situation. It turns out what they mean by compromise is “Give us everything we want”, and they ask for this while simultaneously (and correctly) denouncing her as a weak leader. How could she possibly carry her party with her in such a compromise. It’s just another unicorn, except this time it’s from people who pride themselves on their rationality.

(I note that if the Labour party had done what they are supposed to and provided a fit and proper government in waiting, then the government would have lost a no confidence vote by now. )

4128

Excellent post - thank you :)

I think Mays most recent mistakes are:
a) To capitulate to an article 50 extension
The moment she abandoned her position of “my deal or no deal” it weakened her considerably. She was already severely embattled but the knives really came out for her after the EU summit. Her previous threats were shown to be worthless and hence all subsequent threats equally so. I can understand the reasoning. Parliament were already attempting to seize control and extending A50 bought her more time to try and force her deal through. Unfortunately this has just delayed the inevitable battle (that is going to take place this week) and merely further weakened her position to fight it.
b) To capitulate to offering her resignation
This finally removed what little authority she had left and sparked the jostle for leadership. She became dead-PM-walking. Again, I can understand the reasoning. It was the only incentive she had left to offer to push (most of) the ERG to vote for her deal. Despite her vague promises though I think she’ll find it’s impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

4129

Sorry, slightly off topic:
This week might be the most interesting week in Parliament in my lifetime. I was thinking about other climatic events in recent times and would be very interested to see what happened in Parliament during the 2008 financial crash. I was considering going through the Parliament archives so I could view what happened but does anyone know of any good documentaries on the subject?

4130

I always got the impression it was settled by back room meetings and telecons between the Treasury, Bank, FCA and financial institutions. RBS was a 11pm sunday night decision. “Bail out or we dont open tomorrow.”

4131

Yeah, I don’t think much was going on in Parliament at all. The government at the time had a reasonably big majority, and most of the critical actions weren’t legislative.

4132

I recommend Darling’s book - hardly an unbiased account, but it does give a good feel for how the decisions were made.

4133

Yeah, I agree with almost everything here.

Blaming May for everything seems increasingly simplistic (and OK, that does coms with the job). But she had to deal with the ERG acting like uncompromising zealots who assumed that the threat of no deal gave them the strongest negotiating position, and the DUP (yay, more zealots!). Any theoretical cross-party negotiation would have had to go through Corbyn; how could that possibly have worked out well?
I have no clue how to even strategise a different approach. If you want to build a coalition, you need good faith negotiating partners!

And this is the part I disagree with, for all the same reasons. Most of the two years were wasted trying to build a coalition within the Conservative party (and never mind the party, just within her own cabinet!) . Could she have successfully “sorted” a withdrawal agreement if her cabinet weren’t willing to vote for it?

4134

I don’t think she actually spent a lot of time persuading the cabinet (I’m not sure she spent a lot of time persuading anyone). I think she spent a lot of time waiting for the EU to make concessions that it was never going to make. Then again a fair few of the cabinet probably thought she could “just negotiate harder”.

Incidentally I do think it was possible to play hardball in those negotiations. The EU’s position is not as strong as it appears. But to do so she would have had to been both willing and able to credibly walk away with no deal, and also do further damage to diplomatic relations with EU states.

4135

I guess we’ll never know, as it wasn’t tried until it was way too late.

If it was really as laughable an idea as you imply, May should have tried it anyway as soon as she didn’t win a majority in the election she called, to at least show willing to build a consensus. It would have forced Labour to take a more concrete position earlier on for her to attack; and if talks failed, show the opposition wasn’t ready for govt etc etc.

(And I don’t think it would have been a foregone conclusion - to the chagrin of a lot of leftie remainers, Corbyn is more eurosceptic than we’d like, and I think would have been receptive to a soft Brexit compromise.)

But she didn’t, and I think we all know why: to build a compromise, there needs to be give and take. She would need to drop a red line or two, and she has been consistently unwilling to even consider that for a second.

4136

You’ve said this a couple of times before, and I still don’t get why you think this is the case. The UK has a lot more to lose than the EU has; the comparative sizes of our economies, and not least the fact that the UK has a massively service-based economy mean that Brexit - especially a no-deal Brexit - will always be worse for the UK than the EU. Never mind that it still just takes 1 nation of 27 to want to screw the UK over, so pissing off individual EU states is a really bad strategy.

The current situation where there are states in the EU arguing that a no-deal Brexit is preferable to continued delays is another indication. No-deal Brexit will be painful for companies doing business in the UK, but no vital government services or supplies will be impeded by it in the EU.

4137

We’ll only know the detail of the internal conversations once people start writing their books. But in the meantime, I think that the Chequers Agreement was the first detailed negotiating position that got full cabinet agreement, well over a year into the 2 year Article 50 period.

I think Corbyn would have really struggled to negotiate on any serious basis given that his own position on Europe is so distanced from his party’s official position. He’s only preserved his freedom of action by careful ambiguity, and that’s only available as long as it’s not his job to sort out the details. What’s more, I read him as someone who is personally as well as politically hostile to the Conservatives. Given how often he’s focused on the Brexit issue as a reason for the government to resign etc, I can’t imagine him wanting to hand them any kind of success. Watching them fail trumps the national interest.

Not that I’m trying to exonerate May on that score either. Surely she could have preserved more options for the country if she’d focused more on the national interest and less on party advantage. Or even if that also wasn’t politically possible, at least she could have failed while trying to do the right thing.

4138

I read what he wrote as saying that yes, the UK position is bad, but so too is the EU position, and that their seeming strength isn’t that secure.

I didn’t read it as saying that the UK position was better than the EU, more that May could have pushed harder.

Anyway, that’s how I read it, could be wrong.

Ask @Aceris

4139

Labour and SNP to whip in favour of “Common Market 2.0”, aka Norway+.

4140

Meanwhile, here’s how it broke down last time:

4141

Indeed. I was merely saying that there was some scope for aggressive negotiation on the basis of no deal as a fallback. The EU’s goods trade surplus with the UK, budget shortfall and economic weakness are certainly vulnerabilities.

I actually don’t think that would have been good strategy. May could have secured a best a slightly better deal by paying two costs:

  • Genuine risk of no deal.
  • Further alienating European allies.

(Note that this is the mirror image of the risks that the EU has incurred by its own hardball negotiating strategy on NI, and a large part of what Ivan Rogers refers to when he lambasts the EU’s strategic myopia).

4142

ISTM that the aggressive negotiation actually happened; it just failed due to the weaker position. Over the course of the past few years, the UK has asked for any number of things that were aggressive demands, up to and including release for the divorce bill.

4143

Labour and SNP are now both apparently supporting Norway / Common Market 2.0?

4144

With confirmatory vote yeah.

It will be interesting to see if anything gets a majority. I expect a lot of “the noes have it! unlock!!!” today though :)

4145

I expect this:

4146

Right.

I definitely agree that a better deal could have been negotiated than what May has delivered, probably any smart negotiation strategy could have landed a better deal than what May has managed - simply because she managed to put the UK in the worst negotiating positions again and again.

But I think the key to that would have been having realistic goals to start with, rather than aggressive negotiating tactics. No negotiation tactics would ever make the EU budge on the four freedoms and the likelihood of Ireland budging on the border seem slim as well. Yet that is (it seems) where a huge amount of the negotiation time has been spent, rather than on the areas where there was space to negotiate favorable terms for the UK.