Matt Dunham/AP Photo
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives at Downing Street, September 2019.
Never has Britain felt so blocked.
Brexit has been a flow of concrete setting hard around the nation. Its leaders and opinion-formers shout and wave their arms either for or against leaving Europe, but their feet and legs are covered in quick drying concrete and no one knows how to move forward, or even back.
The weekend debate and vote in the House of Commons was a defeat for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But it was not a victory for the opposition parties and certainly not for Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose half century of hostility to European construction and partnership remains embedded in his political DNA.
On Saturday morning, the Financial Times reported that Downing Street believed it had enough MPs to vote for Johnson and accept the Withdrawal Agreement Bill negotiated in Brussels.
Johnson was counting on ultra-hard anti-European Northern Irish protestant MPs in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who are closer to a cult than a normal political party. The 10 DUP parliamentarians represent not much more than 25 percent of all Northern Irish voters who are strongly in favor of staying in Europe.
But the party representing the Catholic nationalist half of the Northern Ireland population is Sinn Féin, and they refuse to send any of their seven elected MPs to Westminster—as they refuse to recognize British rule in Northern Ireland.
Johnson has never taken much interest in Northern Ireland, and once compared the blood-stained border between the UK’s province and the Republic of Ireland as being less consequential than crossing from one London borough to another.
Three-thousand people were killed in the fighting over Northern Ireland and 40,000 injured when Johnson was at Eton and Oxford. The British Army had to deploy 400,000 soldiers to pacify the province. One-hundred years ago, Ireland elected a majority of Sinn Féin MPs in the hurriedly-called election after the end of World War I. The British government refused to recognize Ireland’s claim to nationhood, and a bloody war of independence was launched. It ended in British withdrawal from Ireland except for the six counties in the north of the country where a protestant majority loyal to the king, to British colonialism, and the official religion of England held sway.
These facts are known to everyone with an Irish gene in their make-up. But they are unknown to Johnson who can talk about Pericles in Athens 2,500 years ago but has no idea of how Irish politics in the 21st century actually work.
So when, in his Withdrawal Agreement, he reverted to proposals made by EU officials in Brussels to Theresa May two years ago that effectively would remove the menace of a return to a hard border in Ireland by leaving all of Northern Ireland in the EU’s ambit for its trade within the island, it was a massive decoupling of Ulster from the UK.
The Catholic nationalists and Dublin were happy, as any reduction of British presence on the island is their longstanding goal. But for the protestant loyalists it was a moment of stupefaction; they saw themselves being sold out in Johnson’s rush to get the UK out of Europe in as hard a way as possible.
They refused to vote for him and so his majority disappeared. Other factors were in play. In September, anti-EU Labour MPs claimed there were 50 of their number ready to vote for Johnson’s push to leave Europe. In the event, just six did, and five of those are elderly long-time anti-EU MPs who will retire at the next election.
So Johnson has to sweat out the next weeks. The Withdrawal Agreement—in effect a mini-treaty necessary to leave the much bigger Treaty organization, the European Union in due and proper form—just covers three points. These are the money the UK owes, the treatment of EU citizens currently in the UK, and the absence of a hard border with Ireland.
Everything else—from import-export rules to the right of 350,000 city finance industry firms and executives who hold so-called EU “passports” to do business in Europe, the presence of Japanese auto firms in the UK exporting with hindrance to Europe, London as a hub for selling U.S. movies into Europe, the possibility for up to 2 million British citizens to keep living, working, or enjoying retirement across the Channel—remains to be negotiated.
These negotiations with take a “Brexiternity” to conclude. It took the EU and Canada seven years to negotiate and ratify a modest free-trade agreement covering a limited number of goods—timber, agricultural products, metal, and chemical and pharmaceutical products.
Eighty percent of the UK’s GDP is based on services—insurance, banking, pension funds, education, health care, creative industries, and consultancies. This is where Britain makes its money by selling into Europe. But the service sector is rarely, if ever, covered by the WTO or bilateral free-trade deals.
So, many years of Brexit-induced uncertainty for employees and businesses lie ahead.
Meanwhile, more than a million people marched through London to Parliament Square to demand the right to be consulted. In June 2016, only a third of the UK’s 52 million voting-age citizens supported Brexit.
Many feel there should be a second consultation to confirm or change the 2016 vote, which was influenced by money from the U.S. and from Putin in Russia (who is big fan of Brexit just like President Trump). The White House and the Kremlin share with the British right a dislike of the rules-based, liberal, enforceable open society aspects of the European Union and want to see Europe revert to rival closed-frontier nations.
So while an elite group of British rightist politicians led by Boris Johnson sought to hurry Britain out of Europe, they failed to get the numbers. Meanwhile, more than a million Brits marched to Parliament to ask their voice be heard.
Neither parliamentary democracy nor the democracy of the plebiscite seems to be working in Britain. The country is as blocked and unable to move as never in its history.
In the end, sheer weariness may wear down MPs, and they will vote through the withdrawal agreement. But that is just the prologue. The rest of the Brexiternity drama will play out over the next decade.
