It’s Lent. Time to give things up, as we wait, hope and pray for our glorious Promised Land. On the radio, there are helpful lists of suggestions. Unchlorinated chicken. A few more car companies. A few more thousand jobs. Cancer tests. Cancer treatments. Yup, this is the country formerly known as the United Kingdom on 7th March 2019, carrying out the slogan they didn’t put on the side of a bus. Vote Leave and Die.
In a week’s time, things may be slightly clearer. Theresa May will have brought her “meaningful vote” to Parliament. The vote she said she would have on 11 December, and then put off till the end of January, and then lost in the biggest defeat ever in the House of Commons, and then put off, and put off, and put off, and put off, and is literally saving until the last minute, in the hope that she can bounce MPs into an agreement that says: sign here for no effing idea where you will end up.
It isn’t yet clear, if she loses it, whether she will “whip” her party into voting for “no deal”. Let me say that again. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is seriously considering forcing her MPs to vote for something that the Government’s own research shows will lead to mass job losses, serious food and drug shortages, more deaths from cancer and a drop of almost a tenth of our GDP.
(Call this Project Fear if you like, but the Government’s own papers call it Project Extremely Likely. They say that a “no deal” Brexit will lead to about 2.75 million fewer jobs, £158 billion less to spend on public services and an 8% drop in GDP. If this is better than “a bad deal”, that “bad deal” must be one where pretty much the entire population is wiped out.)
Call this Project Fear if you like, but the Government’s own papers call it Project Extremely Likely.
There is currently discussion about whether Tory MPs, and Government ministers, will be allowed a “free vote”. What this means is that the Health Secretary, for example, may be ordered by his own party leader to vote for a situation which the Government knows will cause thousands of the patients he was elected to look after to die.
Did anyone in this country ever think they would live to see a Prime Minister force a Health Secretary to vote for something that would cause cancer patients to die? I sure as hell didn’t, and I’ve had cancer twice.
Future historians will write whole libraries on how we got here, but that doesn’t really help us now. The short answer is by accident, like so much else. Last week, Tory ministers, realising that the leader they thought was bluffing was not, in fact, bluffing, threatened to resign if “no deal” wasn’t ruled out. They planned to vote for an amendment put forward by Yvette Cooper and Oliver Letwin that would have forced the Government to extend Article 50 if May’s “meaningful vote” was lost.
A cornered Prime Minister, operating on her usual principle of just-get-through-the-day-and-work-out-what-to-do-next-tomorrow, announced that MPs would be able to vote for a “short extension” if her deal didn’t pass. But the “cliff edge” at the end of that time would, she said, be even steeper. Vote for a delay, in other words, and more agonising uncertainty, and you get “no deal” anyway. Yes, perhaps there is one thing worse than “no deal”. And that’s a “meaningful vote” on May’s deal every week, for the rest of our lives.
Yes, perhaps there is one thing worse than “no deal”. And that’s a “meaningful vote” on May’s deal every week
Meanwhile, the pretend negotiations about “alternative arrangements” to the backstop in Brussels have continued. Surprise, surprise, the EU have kept saying that no, we can’t just withdraw from the backstop whenever we want to because then it wouldn’t be, you know, a backstop. And no, we can’t put a clear time limit on it because, well, as above. And no, we can’t change the withdrawal agreement, because it would break a rather important international treaty called The Good Friday Agreement.
We can write you a post-it note saying we’d all like this to be temporary, so let’s all keep fingers crossed. Would you like that?
And finally, finally, finally, the Government is realising that the EU means it. That when it spent two and a half years negotiating a very complicated agreement, as the result of “red lines” imposed on Theresa May by a young man from Birmingham who now writes columns in The Daily Telegraph slagging off his former boss for not being positive enough about the “economic upside” of Brexit, it couldn’t really find a way to replace that agreement, in a form that would honour international law and please Jacob Rees-Mogg.
So now the whole country is waiting to see if Sir Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, can come back from Brussels with something that will please Jacob Rees-Mogg. People are expecting some kind of codicil. They are calling it “Cox’s cod piece”. Because the whole thing is just so funny. Job losses are just so funny.
Can Cox put lipstick on a unicorn? If so, will it give Jacob the Jacob’s ladder he has said he wants to climb down?
Can Cox put lipstick on a unicorn? If so, will it give Jacob the Jacob’s ladder he has said he wants to climb down?
We don’t know. The clock ticks, the chess pawns move, and we just don’t know. As we wait, the Government that starved the country of funds for old people in care homes, young people being slaughtered on the streets, toddlers growing up on sink estates, shakes its magic money tree and brings on the bungs. Oh, here’s £1.6 billion we found down the back of the sofa for “stronger towns”, which is the new name for Labour constituencies whose MPs might be bribed into voting for May’s deal. Here’s a long list of “worker’s rights” we absolutely promise we’ll bring in. When we said we didn’t like trade unions, we didn’t mean it. We love them! Yup, just sign here.
Will it work? Will the bribes and the threats and the lies be enough to get May’s “blind Brexit” enshrined in law? Will our country’s future depend on the shade of lipstick on that unicorn? If so, we can probably all look forward to a hard right Tory leader taking over pretty soon, and two and a half years of more agonising uncertainty followed by a hard-as-nails Brexit in which “workers’ rights” are a distant dream.
We can probably all look forward to two and a half years of more agonising uncertainty followed by a hard-as-nails Brexit
My guess, even though most pundits now think it’s looking unlikely, is that it probably will. Jacob, and Boris, and Steve, and all the other rich, white men who dream of sovereignty and Little England, will huff and puff and strut and threaten, but they know that if they don’t vote for this, the Brexit they get will be a whole lot softer. And if there is another referendum, which is still extremely unlikely, this time their side is likely to lose.
Obviously, both these scenarios would be a whole lot better for the country, but who ever said any of this had anything to do with the country?
We’ll have to see. But I would be very, very, very, very, very, very, very happy to be proved wrong
