Chaos Theory. Why the Brexit process has proved to be so exceptionally challenging

This week sees the House of Commons in recess (albeit later than originally intended). The UK has still not found a means of leaving the EU. The departure date currently pencilled in (who would ink anything in during this saga?) is a full seven months after 29 March 2019. There continue to be cross-party talks between the Conservatives and Labour, but few are expecting a consensus and in the unlikely event that one emerged it would doubtless be shot at from all sides. The reporting of overseas news outlets suggests that the country is perceived to be in a virtual nervous breakdown. All in all, with characteristic British understatement, it could be said that things are not going well.
Which is obviously true. The most interesting question is ‘why?’ What has this episode revealed about the wider British political system that has allowed it to have been so hopelessly tied up in knots over what at one level might appear to be the relatively straightforward task of taking a referendum result which Parliament had commissioned and implementing it coherently? Is this a one-off episode concerning an issue that is uniquely corrosive or does it suggest that there are much wider challenges to traditional British politics and political institutions which require more thought? If it is the former, then once Brexit is ‘sorted’ the system is restored. If the latter, then it will not be.
As ever, a reasonable answer to this set of questions simply begs another series of questions. The following three observations might be of some value in deciding what is actually going on today.
The United Kingdom political system simply does not ‘do’ minority administrations
So many of Theresa May’s difficulties over the past two years stem from the fact that she inherited an albeit small majority (12 in 2016, 14 at dissolution in 2017) but then called a general election looking for a significant increase in that standing only to achieve a reversal in her numbers.
In one sense, it could be argued, the 2017 election effect is exaggerated. After all, her first two attempts at securing assent for the Withdrawal Agreement went down by 230 votes and 149 votes respectively, so either not calling the 2017 election or winning by a respectable tally (say a majority of 60 seats) would still not have helped her. This is true but her political leverage over her own party would have been stronger without the 2017 debacle, and the extraordinarily oversized significance of the Democratic Unionist Party that has existed for almost two years now would not have occurred.
The brutal truth is that the UK political system simply does not do minority administrations. That is particularly true for the Conservative Party. Where it has been in quasi-minority situations before such as 1886-1892, 1895-1900 or 2010-2015, it has found a stable coalition partner (in the first two examples the Liberal Unionists, in the last one the Liberal Democrats) and has eaten that ally alive.
The Conservatives perceive themselves as the natural party of government – with a majority – and almost any other outcome is a deviation from that maxim. Until now, there has not been an unstable Conservative Government (with the exception of a few months of the John Major era) since the minority government headed by Benjamin Disraeli from February to October 1868, and the Lord Salisbury interregnum in 1885-1886 while the Liberals blew themselves up over Irish Home Rule.
Although Labour is a much younger political party, it has more experience of and less hostility to minority status than the Conservatives (there have been Labour minorities in 1924, 1929-1931, February to October 1974 and 1977-1979). These were not enjoyable experiences but the party could cope with them. A Conservative minority by contrast, especially the unique occasion of a Conservative minority administration which has followed a Conservative majority one, is something akin to sticking a lump of Blue Tac on the eyestalk of a Dalek. It cannot work out what it should do.
The above has been compounded by a spectacular collapse of party discipline on both sides
Allowing for the above, what has been truly unprecedented since June 2017 is a spectacular collapse in party discipline in both major parties. Ordinarily, minority governments create havoc for those who are notionally in office but reinforce solidarity in the Opposition which expects to seize power.
That has not happened this time. What we have seen instead is much closer to a five-party nexus. These are the frontbench Conservatives, backbench Conservatives, frontbench Labour, backbench Labour and a wide assortment of others (SNP, Lib Dems, Independent Group/Change UK, the DUP and Plaid Cymru) who have often demonstrated more consistent discipline than the other four.
This has been the product of a highly atypical set of circumstances plus some longer-term trends. The strange conditions are the staggering weakness of the Prime Minister after 2017 in terms of the Conservative Party, the astonishingly warping impact of Europe as an issue in British public life, and the Corbyn effect, which has meant that talent within the parliamentary Labour Party is manifestly located among those who refuse to serve under their current leader and not those willing to do so.
The (perhaps, this is to be tested) longer-term trends are that MPs on all sides no longer see their own advancement as conditional on slavish loyalty to whomever controls their party machines. With the historical class affiliations of UK citizens weakening, and social media rising as an alternative forum to party organisations throughout established democracies, MPs have reason to believe that they can cultivate personal votes in their own constituencies and make themselves national political figures by means other than patiently working their way up the greasy pole and becoming the Junior Minister for Paperclip Production or the Shadow Spokesperson on local council refuse collection.
This sense that there is an alternative career path out there which might allow one to evolve into a politician of importance without being tied to the party machine smacks the system in the teeth. The acid test would be whether it continues to operate if any party were to regain a sizeable majority. There has to be at least the possibility that ‘party discipline’ as historically conceived is near death’.
The extremely unusual UK ‘constitution’ has been sorely exposed by the entire Brexit episode
The final (inter-connected) element concerns what passes for the revered British Constitution. The UK is one of precisely three countries that does not have a single codified constitution. The others are Israel (although it is partly codified via its Basic Laws of 1950) and New Zealand (which again is not as uncodified as is true for Westminster since the enactment of the Constitution Act of 1986). While this does make the UK politically ‘flexible’, it has also opened it up to attack on all fronts.
Consider the following set of incidents that have occurred in less than three years. Once the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016 it could only do so by following EU law viz Article 50. It had no other route out that it might prefer. Later on it emerged via the European Courts of Justice that Article 50 could be revoked unilaterally by the UK if it wished (this was not clear in June 2016). The UK Government initially wanted to trigger Article 50 of its own account but the UK Supreme Court stepped in and informed the Executive that it had to have parliamentary consent in order to do this.
Once the (minority administration) Parliament was in on the act it truly went to town. It first insisted that any Withdrawal Agreement had to be subject to a ‘meaningful vote’ (namely the active assent of the House of Commons) and not, as ministers had originally planned, forced through on their own consent as a statutory instrument.
Having sent that shot across the bows, a ruling from the Speaker early this year opened the doors to MPs having the authority to amend all business motions as they wished, and earlier this month taking total control over the House agenda to pass a Bill preventing a no-deal Brexit in a single day.
Added to which, the ‘Bercow Doctrine’, aired upon 18 March and citing a precedent with its roots in the year 1604, utterly capsized the Government’s strategy of ensuring the Withdrawal Agreement was eventually adopted by bringing it back to the chamber repeatedly until it was embraced.
While some of the above might be peculiar to Brexit, a lot of it will endure beyond Brexit. Much of what was thought to be ‘normal’ in British politics will just never be the same again.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA