Brexit : how TF did this happen ?

Two good articles from the Guardian on Brexit. The first, linked below, I have no problems with. The author summarises May's main mistakes very well :

The first was to act at the start as if the only people who mattered were the 52% of voters who backed Brexit while treating the 48% as an irrelevance to be ignored or insulted. Where she might have endeavoured to bind together a fractured nation and forge an alliance of the sane Brexiters and the pragmatic Remainers, her language and approaches have further polarised the country and radicalised opinion on both sides. This was compounded by concentrating her energies on trying to please the unsatisfiable subset of Brexiters who wanted the most impossibilist versions of the enterprise.  

I suppose I should interject here and say that there are forms of Brexit I would be prepared to accept (not that I have any real choice about it). To be sure, I'd prefer to just call the whole thing off, or put it to another vote and then abide by whatever the result of that was. But if we absolutely have to go with it, then there are very clearly softer versions of Brexit that would do a lot less harm than others.

The second major mistake was to call the hubristic snap general election in the spring of 2017, squander her majority with an atrocious campaign and then respond as if, to use one of her most notorious phrases, nothing had changed. A bolder and more agile leader would have reached out to the opposition benches to see if a consensus could be moulded. I grant you that this would not have been easy when Labour is led by Jeremy Corbyn, as tribalistic as Mrs May in his own fashion. She could still have made an effort to build bridges with the many reasonable people on the opposition benches, but she didn’t even try.

Her third large misjudgment has been the conduct of the endgame. Once it was very apparent her withdrawal agreement was neither popular in parliament nor attractive to the country, she persisted with trying to bludgeon it through. When it became evident this simply was not going to work, she might have pivoted to another strategy. She could have looked at alternative versions of Brexit. She might have allowed MPs to explore other ways forward, as they are very belatedly doing now. 

The rigidity of her personality has been a key component of her failures. She is not the first prime minister to be awkward, shy and introverted, but these are very serious disadvantages in a political age that demands a high level of communication skills from leaders.

Being shy and introverted are fine; May's energy and indefatigably are seriously, genuinely impressive. Unfortunately they are matched by her complete inability to see that she might be in the wrong, which has nothing to do with being shy. As in Braveheart :

Uncompromising men are easy to admire. But it is the very ability to compromise that makes a man noble.

What's curious is not the May is not that she's inflexible - she's done plenty of u-turns in her time - but that she always chooses exactly the wrong stance. She tries to be rigid and "strong" when she should bend. She yields when she should fight back. She's far from stupid, but she has all the political acumen of a dead hamster. Each morning I wake up wondering, "oh no, what fresh hell will Discount Thatcher : Maybot Edition wreak upon us today ?". And so many of these political disasters feel totally unnecessary.

On to the second article, which is rather more radical.

There’s one obvious lesson which Westminster, despite centuries of dire experience, still fails to learn. Do not kick Irish cans down the road. Some contain Semtex. All have a way of rolling back and tripping you up. There’s an English habit of not thinking about Ireland lest it spoil a nice afternoon... It was Nicola Sturgeon who gave Theresa May the smartest epitaph: “The only leader in modern times who tried to fall on her own sword and managed to miss.”

The machine has broken down. This is because it wasn't built to take the strain of minority governments. Incredibly, nobody knows what the law of state is. Where is final authority – in the sovereignty of parliament (a weird old doctrine), in the “peoples’ vote” by a referendum or in the “executive”, the cabinet claiming to embody the royal prerogative? In this fog, the 2017 election left a minority government unable to steer a divided house composed mostly of Remainers: MPs and even cabinet ministers who were pledged to honour the referendum result but didn't really believe in what they were doing. 

Laws are made by Parliament, not the executive or the people. That seems clear enough to me, though it's true that the referendum has muddied the waters due to the useless way it was advertised to the public.

The Westminster power machine is still heavily authoritarian. In parliament, it has operated through the massive majorities created by “first past the post” voting. This conceals the fact that “parliamentary sovereignty”, in the narrow local sense that the Commons could order a government about, has mostly dwindled to myth. The Brexit struggles with Mrs May’s minority administration have been horribly revealing. They show how far executive power has crept forward in recent years, to the point at which the Commons can only wrest back control over its own agenda by cunning and ambush.

There is certainly some truth in that. Since Parliament is designed for majority governments, and we're used to them, campaigns and manifestos are built around the principle that, "if we get in, we'll try and do as much of this as we can". This is very democratic, but it means that prospective MPs and parties do not know how to campaign in a more representative, cooperative system, e.g., "here are the values I will negotiate on, here's how we'll try and work with/argue against the other proposals available". The system works well enough in a majority case but I'm definitely coming round to a more flexible approach.

What I'm less keen on is the article's sentiment that the system is fundamentally broken. It needs, I think, reform more than it needs remaking. Brexit in particular feels like the perfect way to torpedo a weak spot in the system, more than it does the machinery itself breaking down. What we've suffered from is a unique set of circumstances which we would have been able to avoid under most other conditions. Consider :

- The referendum was advertised with the strong message that the result would be respected, despite not being legally binding. This created a serious legal tension that should never have been allowed (we can blame Cameron's hubris for that one).
- Rules on fraudulent political advertising are lax, with incredibly minor penalties for infractions. The Brexit bus was a lie. Vote Leave were fined minuscule amounts for over-spending. Such things ought to give us pause to reconsider the result.
- No-one prepared a leaving plan. While it was possible to make reasonable extrapolations about what a Remain vote would mean in practice, this was not the case for voting Leave because no-one - no-one at all - said how they would implement the result. This too could have been avoided.
- The Tory party was split by about 2:1 in favour of Remain:Leave. This gave any leader a serious headache, but they elected Theresa May... a truly feckless Remainer with absolutely zero talent for building bridges and an almost delusional obliviousness to reality. Meanwhile Labour were staunchly Remain but had, to everyone's great surprise, elected a leader who is basically pro Leave. Both of them are stubborn in the absurd : May keeps repeating votes on her same rejected deal while Corbyn didn't step down after badly losing a vote of no confidence. Getting either of them to change course on policy is like pulling teeth from an enraged sabre-toothed cat - you can do it, but you really don't want to.

No-one can know what would have happened if the referendum had been called under a different government. But my guess is that things would have been very different. True, the system itself has probably encouraged the individuals we happen to have in charge right now and thus the result (I mean the whole sorry package, not just the referendum result) we got. But sheer bad luck has also played a role. More flexible leaders, able to adapt to changing situations and bring forge a consensus on what should be a cross-party issue, would not have had us in this mess. The system most certainly needs reform, but it may yet escape with mere evolution rather than revolution.

On the other hand, I worry that the damage done may already be too great. Brexit has exposed the soft underbelly of Parliamentary democracy, but it's not yet clear if it's been dealt a nasty blow, eviscerated its very guts, or actually stabbed through the heart. I suspect and hope it's somewhere between the first and second options, that this is something that needs serious treatment, but isn't going to need full-on organ transplants. Well, we'll see...

Theresa May was dealt the worst of hands and has played it spectacularly badly | Andrew Rawnsley

She got the keys to Number 10 because Tory MPs thought her a safe bet. She's been anything but