Martin Kettle
‘It was a majority that eluded Theresa May three humiliating times among exactly the same MPs.’ Photograph: Jessica Taylor/Reuters
It is almost as easy to lose your bearings amid the furious churning of the Brexit crisis as it is to get lost in the fog of battle. Fresh Brexit preoccupations succeed one another chaotically, and with dizzying speed.
Tuesday’s votes at Westminster exemplified this mercurial and even hysterical quality in our politics. A major victory for Boris Johnson on his EU withdrawal agreement bill was instantly followed by a defeat on the tight timetable for debating it. Within seconds, the talk was of an entirely new subject: a general election.
Stepping back, if that is possible, it becomes clearer that two significant things have crystallised in recent days. The first is that Johnson has succeeded, albeit so far only briefly, in assembling a majority for withdrawal from the EU. That achievement should not be dismissed, in spite of all the surrounding distractions, or because remainers will devoutly wish it had not happened. It was a majority that eluded Theresa May three humiliating times among exactly the same MPs. But that majority has always been latent in the House of Commons. On the face of things, it would now appear to lay the ground for Johnson to bring about the Brexit that his party elected him to achieve in July, and for which the majority voted in 2016.
Yet the second significant conclusion is that Johnson is a prime minister who remains, rightly in the circumstances, the hostage of a sovereign parliament. In the hung parliament that the nation elected to deal with Brexit in 2017, he has no majority.
He can therefore only secure Brexit either by making war on parliament and hoping it buckles, or by making important concessions to other parties and factions. Having tried the former and been defeated, he is now coming to terms with the latter. The concessions he must consider are procedural, showing more respect for proper process, and substantive, altering some of the contents of the withdrawal terms. These are extremely difficult to balance, as he found out on Tuesday evening. But they remain the key to the Brexit outcome.
It is natural, given his instinctive resentment of both hard work and being humiliated, that Johnson chafes against this. But although the situation is difficult, it ought not to present insuperable problems. There is real momentum – even if some of it is spurious and a lot of it is media driven – behind the view that Brexit should be delivered soon. The coalition that backed his bill on Tuesday is proof of that.
Johnson initially held back from trying to consolidate his achievement because he feared loss of face from the Brexit extension that parliament wants, and which was the probable consequence of his timetable motion defeat. But since that extension would probably involve, at most, a few weeks, and since Labour appears willing to negotiate with him, that hardly gives him a valid reason for withdrawing his bill. It certainly does not justify another attempt to call a general election before Brexit has been clarified, even though the current poll numbers and the desire to take on Labour while Jeremy Corbyn remains leader will make it tempting.
The more difficult task, which the fast-track timetable was designed to avoid, is to control the shape of the bill that emerges from a more detailed phase of parliamentary scrutiny. MPs have applied the brakes, so they may soon have the chance to amend the bill in the committee stage. Attempts will be made from a variety of quarters to retain membership of the EU customs union, to protect employment and environmental regulatory alignments, to make the bill dependent on a second referendum, to block the possibility of a no-deal exit at the end of the transition period, and to give the devolved parliaments a say in the process.
Johnson may well decide to tough out all these attempts. After all, he now has a contingent majority for his bill, which he will try hard to protect. He may also judge that there is no overall majority for any of the individual amendments and that this House of Commons will fail – as it did on the indicative votes in March and April – to come together to back the ones most likely to win. He will trade on the public’s presumed impatience for closure. He may well be right to do so. But he cannot be certain.
Times have also changed since the spring. There is Johnson’s new government. There are now – partly as a direct consequence – more independent MPs and opposition MPs than there were then. Parliament has also learned lessons from its previous failures, and has managed to create the majority that secured the Benn act in September and passed the Letwin amendment on Saturday. It has also twice rejected Johnson’s premature calls for a general election.
Johnson’s hand is stronger now than May’s was in her final months. But he does not hold all the cards. That is why his most sensible course is still to seek a parliamentary route on a withdrawal deal.
The risk he would run is that parliament could decide to finish the job on terms that would blow the new majority for a deal wide apart. But the chances of that happening are limited. There is little sign right now, for instance, of a fresh parliamentary majority emerging for a confirmatory referendum as envisaged in the proposed Kyle-Wilson amendment.
During Tuesday’s debate Johnson also offered some a number of verbal concessions on future regulatory relations with the EU. These were not watertight, and could be turned into binding concessions in the withdrawal agreement bill’s committee stage without loss of government authority. Johnson will also have to accept, finally, that a no-deal exit is not going to happen – not on 31 October and not when the transition period ends next year.
The biggest realistic risk to going through parliament is that MPs would eventually come together behind an amendment to remain in, or aligned with, the EU customs union. Such a motion came within three votes of winning a majority in an indicative vote in April. But it did so with more than 80 MPs abstaining, including the whole of the SNP (on the grounds that it would be a vote for Brexit), and more than 30 Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats and the DUP also voted against.
Although some votes will have switched since April, the likelihood would be that almost all Tories would now vote against. If the SNP, the Lib Dems and the DUP also maintained their previous stances, Johnson could have high hopes of seeing off a customs union amendment.
The prime minister often casts the Brexit crisis as a conflict between a remainer parliament and a leave people. Yet this is misleading on several counts, not least because most of the delays to Brexit have been caused by Tory leavers.
Parliament has a very great deal to be proud of in its stubborn, patient insistence on its rights in the Brexit debates. Those debates, including this week’s, have been of high quality. But the most ironic reason why leavers are wrong to berate parliament is that this House of Commons, if allowed to do so according to its own procedures, may well be on the threshold of voting in favour of Brexit under Johnson’s own premiership. The more’s the pity.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
It is almost as easy to lose your bearings amid the furious churning of the Brexit crisis as it is to get lost in the fog of battle. Fresh Brexit preoccupations succeed one another chaotically, and with dizzying speed.
Tuesday’s votes at Westminster exemplified this mercurial and even hysterical quality in our politics. A major victory for Boris Johnson on his EU withdrawal agreement bill was instantly followed by a defeat on the tight timetable for debating it. Within seconds, the talk was of an entirely new subject: a general election.
Stepping back, if that is possible, it becomes clearer that two significant things have crystallised in recent days. The first is that Johnson has succeeded, albeit so far only briefly, in assembling a majority for withdrawal from the EU. That achievement should not be dismissed, in spite of all the surrounding distractions, or because remainers will devoutly wish it had not happened. It was a majority that eluded Theresa May three humiliating times among exactly the same MPs. But that majority has always been latent in the House of Commons. On the face of things, it would now appear to lay the ground for Johnson to bring about the Brexit that his party elected him to achieve in July, and for which the majority voted in 2016.
Yet the second significant conclusion is that Johnson is a prime minister who remains, rightly in the circumstances, the hostage of a sovereign parliament. In the hung parliament that the nation elected to deal with Brexit in 2017, he has no majority.
He can therefore only secure Brexit either by making war on parliament and hoping it buckles, or by making important concessions to other parties and factions. Having tried the former and been defeated, he is now coming to terms with the latter. The concessions he must consider are procedural, showing more respect for proper process, and substantive, altering some of the contents of the withdrawal terms. These are extremely difficult to balance, as he found out on Tuesday evening. But they remain the key to the Brexit outcome.
It is natural, given his instinctive resentment of both hard work and being humiliated, that Johnson chafes against this. But although the situation is difficult, it ought not to present insuperable problems. There is real momentum – even if some of it is spurious and a lot of it is media driven – behind the view that Brexit should be delivered soon. The coalition that backed his bill on Tuesday is proof of that.
Johnson initially held back from trying to consolidate his achievement because he feared loss of face from the Brexit extension that parliament wants, and which was the probable consequence of his timetable motion defeat. But since that extension would probably involve, at most, a few weeks, and since Labour appears willing to negotiate with him, that hardly gives him a valid reason for withdrawing his bill. It certainly does not justify another attempt to call a general election before Brexit has been clarified, even though the current poll numbers and the desire to take on Labour while Jeremy Corbyn remains leader will make it tempting.
The more difficult task, which the fast-track timetable was designed to avoid, is to control the shape of the bill that emerges from a more detailed phase of parliamentary scrutiny. MPs have applied the brakes, so they may soon have the chance to amend the bill in the committee stage. Attempts will be made from a variety of quarters to retain membership of the EU customs union, to protect employment and environmental regulatory alignments, to make the bill dependent on a second referendum, to block the possibility of a no-deal exit at the end of the transition period, and to give the devolved parliaments a say in the process.
Johnson may well decide to tough out all these attempts. After all, he now has a contingent majority for his bill, which he will try hard to protect. He may also judge that there is no overall majority for any of the individual amendments and that this House of Commons will fail – as it did on the indicative votes in March and April – to come together to back the ones most likely to win. He will trade on the public’s presumed impatience for closure. He may well be right to do so. But he cannot be certain.
Times have also changed since the spring. There is Johnson’s new government. There are now – partly as a direct consequence – more independent MPs and opposition MPs than there were then. Parliament has also learned lessons from its previous failures, and has managed to create the majority that secured the Benn act in September and passed the Letwin amendment on Saturday. It has also twice rejected Johnson’s premature calls for a general election.
Johnson’s hand is stronger now than May’s was in her final months. But he does not hold all the cards. That is why his most sensible course is still to seek a parliamentary route on a withdrawal deal.
The risk he would run is that parliament could decide to finish the job on terms that would blow the new majority for a deal wide apart. But the chances of that happening are limited. There is little sign right now, for instance, of a fresh parliamentary majority emerging for a confirmatory referendum as envisaged in the proposed Kyle-Wilson amendment.
During Tuesday’s debate Johnson also offered some a number of verbal concessions on future regulatory relations with the EU. These were not watertight, and could be turned into binding concessions in the withdrawal agreement bill’s committee stage without loss of government authority. Johnson will also have to accept, finally, that a no-deal exit is not going to happen – not on 31 October and not when the transition period ends next year.
The biggest realistic risk to going through parliament is that MPs would eventually come together behind an amendment to remain in, or aligned with, the EU customs union. Such a motion came within three votes of winning a majority in an indicative vote in April. But it did so with more than 80 MPs abstaining, including the whole of the SNP (on the grounds that it would be a vote for Brexit), and more than 30 Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats and the DUP also voted against.
Although some votes will have switched since April, the likelihood would be that almost all Tories would now vote against. If the SNP, the Lib Dems and the DUP also maintained their previous stances, Johnson could have high hopes of seeing off a customs union amendment.
The prime minister often casts the Brexit crisis as a conflict between a remainer parliament and a leave people. Yet this is misleading on several counts, not least because most of the delays to Brexit have been caused by Tory leavers.
Parliament has a very great deal to be proud of in its stubborn, patient insistence on its rights in the Brexit debates. Those debates, including this week’s, have been of high quality. But the most ironic reason why leavers are wrong to berate parliament is that this House of Commons, if allowed to do so according to its own procedures, may well be on the threshold of voting in favour of Brexit under Johnson’s own premiership. The more’s the pity.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
