Looked at logically and dispassionately this is now a way forward that is highly likely to be agreed with Brussels and to be implemented. There is little or nothing in this Banal Brexit that the EU cannot agree with after a bit of tweaking.
There are some positives about this. It means that we aren’t going to see customs posts on the Northern Ireland border or huge queues of lorries in Dover. It makes an ugly new trade deal with the US unlikely so we can avoid having our sovereignty destroyed by US corporate lawyers telling our Parliament what areas of the NHS must be opened up to competition. It avoids a race to the bottom on safety standards and product quality and it should avoid a mass exodus of UK industry to the Continent. We may even be able to improve on EU regional programmes such as the European Social Fund and on EU agricultural policy and avoid ruining too many of the freedoms to move around Europe that we currently enjoy. Essentially May is now trying to achieve business as normal with a few tweaks.
Obviously, this is going to wind up her far right and even some of her closest assistants. She’s already lost David Davies. That could result in a completely chaotic collapse of her government and a hugely unpredictable General Election in the middle of a serious split in the Conservatives. I doubt it. The fear of losing seats and power should be enough to hold the majority of May’s party in place and she has enough heavyweight supporters of Banal Brexit on her backbenches to be able to easily replace any Ministers who peel off. Nicki Morgan for example would be quite capable of doing David Davies job if May has the guts to really face down her opponents.
The most likely scenario is therefore that May secures a deal and then goes to the country around May 2019 claiming that she has seen us through choppy and difficult waters so we can trust her to run the government in easier and more predictable times. There is every prospect that she could win such an election. The majority of non-political people I have spoken to over the last couple of years have been a mixture of worried and bored by Brexit and just want the thing to work out half way sensibly. Sold well a modest Brexit could win over a lot of those voters. It is entirely possible that May could perform better in her next election – she could hardly perform worse – and that she’ll romp home on a wave of national relief that something has finally been worked out and the roof hasn’t fallen in.
Those of us who wish to prevent that happening aren’t going to get much help from Labour. The key message from Corbyn this weekend has been that he could deliver a better Brexit than Theresa May. He still believes he can use Brexit to produce socialism in one country and to implement the alternative economic strategy that he has been plugging since the 1970s. That is a message that can play very well in traditional Labour areas that just want a return to the factory jobs and the working class lifestyle of the 70s. So his vote will hold up very well there. It is not a message that will win him an awful lot of new votes in areas that voted Remain or from anyone that wants to seriously face up to the challenges of the future.
The only parties that can seriously challenge the Conservatives in the more prosperous parts of England are the Lib Dems and I’d like to believe that in a few select areas such as Skipton and Ripon the Greens could do the same job. There is a very different message to Corbyn’s that is likely to be very popular with voters for the simply reason that it is self evidently true. What is the point of Brexit if we follow all the rules but don’t get any say in making them? Why have we gone through all this pain if it has produced so very little? What kind of government takes two years to agree with itself on something that was obvious to the rest of us days after the referendum? How can we trust a party with a greater majority if it contains quite so many ideologues who preferred to tell British industry to fuck off whenever they politely advised them that their latest madcap scheme would cost jobs? What kind of future would a smug newly elected Conservative Party deliver if it got five years of power with a large cohort of Rees Mogg clones trying to remake the country?
Re-electing the Conservatives would be a hugely high risk strategy because at each election fewer and fewer of them are actually conservative and more and more of them are admirers of Donald Trump style politics and the US Tea Party. Rallying around Corbyn to try and prevent that is an even more high risk strategy as he is good at getting out his core support but bad at persuading people who don’t already agree with him. The most likely way of defeating May at the election we must now expect to happen in 10 month’s time is to start to do deals amongst progressives. Since Labour refuses to join a Progressive Alliance and smaller parties would be mad to simply fold up and go away this means alliances between Lib Dems, Greens, and open minded nationalist parties. We’ve already seen what this can achieve in places like Richmond. Anything that can be done to secure more genuine alliances on the ground in local constituencies increases the chance of victory.
We also need to focus on pointing out the utter incompetence and hypocrisy within this Conservative government. The first time Boris Johnson heard the proposal for Banal Brexit he described it as a turd and pronounced that you can never polish a turd. Then he voted for the proposals. That is the kind of person who is now running this country.
Johnson was, as usual, quite wrong. If a turd is dried out for long enough it becomes a fossilised relic that can be polished and kept in a cabinet. Remind you of anyone?