One of the most striking things about the British government is its aura of politeness. That may sound like an odd claim to make, especially if you are a fan of the Thick of It. You might suggest that the top echelons of government are filled by a bunch of sweary, terrified bullshit-artists who try to cover their own powerlessness with sheer aggression, and I might or might not disagree. Civil servants pass round tales of where the Blackberries get thrown.
It should, by all rights, descend into a snarling cage-fight, with PMQs like a version of WWF wrestling. Yet it doesn’t. Governments consistently maintain the public fiction that they are united, even as they bicker and snipe amongst themselves. Ministers might not be able to bear being in the same room as some of their colleagues, but in the photograph around the Cabinet table they all have the same smile.
It is the expression of a two-hundred year old tradition of collective responsibility, in which the cabinet agrees to show unswerving support for everything the government does, even if its individual members personally disagree. But I’m beginning to wonder if that tradition will make it to the end of the month.
Laws and sausages
The aura of polite, calm, joined up policy-making was always going to struggle to cover Brexit. Brexit was voted in on a single word – “leave” – but involves the detailed redesign of a large part of the British state. It involves the creation, largely from scratch of a new relationship with Europe.
This is hard enough on a technical level. Yet the real killer is the fact that it must be done with all of the compromises fully visible. Every single one of the EU’s neighbours has a relationship that has evolved over decades and has involved giving ground. Even the Swiss, a nation so isolationist that until 2014 every bridge and tunnel into the country was wired with explosives, are closer to the EU on some key points than we are as members. Similar compromises for the UK – over Ireland, over customs, over trade deals with the rest of the world – now have to be at once, in public and to a timetable not of our choosing.
It’s a process that seems designed to invite maximum dissent. The argument for Leave depends on striking our own trade deals – if you compromise that through a customs partnership then the whole exercise was futile. If you are a middle-of-the-road unionist Tory, there is nothing on earth that can reconcile you to the idea of a customs border in the Irish Sea. And if you are a sane member of humanity, anything that undoes the Good Friday Agreement feels stupid to the point of suicidal. Any of these points might have been suitable for a quiet compromise in the back end of some wonkish treaty, but none of them can be given away in a spotlight this bright.
Six Impossible Things Before Brexit
The parallel for me is from 1931 – the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald were faced with the depths of the depression, and a fiscal orthodoxy that demanded that spending be cut even if it meant more economic hardship. MacDonald, his chancellor and a narrow majority of his party agreed. The minority did not, and resigned. The aftermath was that the sitting Prime Minister and his Chancellor formed a new government with the Tories, their own party threw them out, and Labour combined crashed to fewer than 70 seats at the election that followed. As a result, fifty years later some Labour party members would still turn MacDonald’s portrait to face the wall for his ‘betrayal’.
Without wanting to sound alarmist, our current situation looks a great deal worse. In 1931 it was only money. In 2018 it is money, trade, travel, civil order, international relations, animal welfare, the constitution, chlorinated chicken and Paul Dacre’s wish to have just one Stalinist purge of the British establishment before he dies. We are approaching irreducible points from which people cannot back down. To find a compromise we need a border that is not a border, our own rules that are also someone else’s rules, our own trade deals that do not upset our snug position in the EU’s market. Six impossible things before breakfast doesn’t begin to cover it.
A nation of gentlemen
I see two likely ways out of this. The first is outright government collapse, as one side decides that it cannot live with whichever option the PM signs up to. Whether we go for MaxFac or the Customs Partnership (or some other issue in a few weeks’ time), the losing side sends the requisite number of letters to the chair of the 1922 committee and we’re into a Tory leadership contest.
Except that will only be the start of things, because the winner in such Brexity circumstances is likely to be Boris or Rees-Mogg, and perhaps a quarter of the Tory party would quit before letting that happen.* Labour moderates would then be faced with a choice of Corbyn for PM (which would fall apart in weeks under the current parliamentary arithmetic), or a walk-out of their own. And after that, things get really complicated.
The other option, though, is politeness. That sense that has pervaded British politics for such a long time, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and irrepressible personalities. To bury one’s deep-seated concerns and accept that whatever the group decides will be for the best. I can imagine this more easily of the Remainers than the Leavers, since the latter have more intellectual commitment and/or stubbornness. Plus the Leave position encourages fundamentalism – without the ability to strike trade deals there simply isn’t a case for Leaving. The idea that these deals will outweigh the loss of trade from Europe might be fairy-dust, but it is fairy dust with a democratic mandate – and that might ultimately convince the Remainers to surrender the point in the name of good feeling.
If that happens, it will be a sort of a triumph for our way of government. In other countries there would be splits and protests and riots; in Britain there will be awkward shuffling and tricky interviews on the Today Programme. If you see this, you will see why it is that Britain has maintained continuous constitutional government longer than any other nation on earth. Where other nations start snarling, our upper lips remain stiff. Civility persists, even beyond where common sense would see it go.
But here’s the question – just how British can you be, when Brexit is coming?
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* As an aside, Tories MPs are usually more than smart enough to think two moves ahead, and would be at least this far into the reasoning before sending in their letter. For that reason, if this comes to pass I strongly recommend betting on Michael Gove to win the contest – as the person who is sound on Brexit, able to articulate a vision for post-Brexit Britain and not at risk of certification if he finds himself in the company of two medical professionals.
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