This week in Brexitland, January 26, 2023
Was soft Brexit really ever available after June 2016? Did Remainers have a hand in bringing about the hard Brexit we ended up with?
I feel the need to clear the air about something that has long festered within debates about Brexit: the ability Remainers had or didn’t have to help us end up with a soft Brexit instead of the hard Brexit we got. A lot of this centres on the indicative votes that were held in 2019 on what form of Brexit parliament wanted. It is the cause of much confusion and indeed, mischief making by Brexiters, Corbynites and even some Remainers. Therefore, it’s time to set the record straight, once and for all.
This is brutally important because it gets to the heart of this theory that Remainers are almost completely to blame for hard Brexit. The theory goes, if we’d all just accepted we had to leave the EU after 2016, then a compromise position could have been reached and a soft Brexit would have been what we ended up with instead of the disaster we are still experiencing now.
Now, I think Remainers did make mistakes between June 2016 and December 2019. I don’t think the second referendum was ever a good idea and I’m actually glad it didn’t happen. If it had, either Remain would have won and the backlash would have been massive, with populism raging out of control, or Leave would have won, giving them a double victory. If the latter had occurred, we’d be in so much worse a place than we are at present, with no way back.
Yet having said that, the idea that Remainers had anything to do with the hard Brexit we’ve ended up with in any material sense is bollocks. Sheer nonsense. Nothing the Remainers ever did, including within the indicative votes, which I’ll come to, could have changed a thing.
Let’s rewind a little from 2019, when the indicative votes happened, to January 2017. That’s when Theresa May gave her “Lancaster House” speech. It is remarkably underrated in terms of how influential it turned out to be on the shape of British politics from that moment onward. Its reverberations will be felt for generations, for this is when hard Brexit became the only possible outcome, impervious to anything anyone did from that point onward.
It was in this speech that Theresa May ruled out remaining in either the single market or the customs union.
“And that is why we seek a new and equal partnership – between an independent, self-governing, Global Britain and our friends and allies in the EU. Not partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union, or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out. We do not seek to adopt a model already enjoyed by other countries. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave.”
In other words, we want out of everything to do with the European Union. We want hard Brexit and that is what we’ll get. “No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain,” she said later on in the same speech.
Of course, it is worth remarking on here that I don’t think May believed much of what she said that day, as her actions later on betrayed. Her version of the Withdrawal Agreement would have kept us in the customs union until a solution to the Northern Ireland issue came up that allowed us to leave it, i.e. never, and it was clear that she didn’t seriously entertain the idea of a no deal Brexit at any point.
That’s not the issue though. By saying all this in a public speech, May was unwittingly goading the hardcore Brexiters in her party to push for nothing less than what she had promised. After January 2017, there is no way that they were ever going to settle for anything less than a very hard version of Brexit. And there were more than enough of them to ensure that this happened.
Skip ahead now to March 2019 and a very different world. May had lost her majority in a foolishly called snap general election a few months after the Lancaster House speech. She had already lost multiple votes in the House of Commons on her Withdrawal Agreement in early 2019, most of them by all time record amounts. Her premiership was for all intents and purposes over, and the only person who didn’t seem to understand that was her. The ERG and other hardcore Brexiters in her party were never going to allow anything that remotely came into the orbit of being a soft Brexit to become reality by this point. They rejected her Withdrawal Agreement, one that would end of freedom of movement and take us out of the single market, as being too soft already.
We found ourselves as a country in a situation in which there was a lame duck prime minister, a hung parliament, a lot of different opinions about what should happen with Brexit spread across the House of Commons and a speaker of the house willing to cause a little mischief. This is how we came to have what are known as the indicative votes in early spring of 2019.
The idea was to try and break the logjam and at least figure out if there was theoretically a majority for any particular form of Brexit. This would take the form of what had been laid out in summer 2018 regarding what should happen if an impasse such as parliament had found itself in should arise. “A motion in neutral terms” was going to be passed in the form of indicative votes on different Brexit possibilities.
The “indicative” word is critical here. Even if there had been a majority in the House in one of these votes for say, staying in the customs union, in practical, meaningful terms this would have meant absolutely nothing. It wouldn’t have resulted in Britain remaining in the customs union, it would have just meant that an indicative vote had shown that there would theoretically be a majority in the House for staying in the CU, were an actual deal involving this be put to the House.
This is why so many MPs took things lightly and didn’t consolidate behind any one solution, holding out for whatever their preferred Brexit might be - the vote was ultimately meaningless. If there had been a majority in one of the indicative votes for staying in the customs union, May would have either ignored it, pointing out the vote was neutral, or she would have been brought down by her party at that point, and then Boris Johnson would have ignored the vote when he got into Number 10. This isn’t conjecture on my part - this is 100% what would have occurred. No indicative vote result would have been actioned. Remainers in parliament did not thwart soft Brexit because it could never have happened under any genuinely foreseeable set of circumstances.
Having said all that, I still lament the way the indicative votes went down. If MPs could have got together and voted for staying in the single market or the customs union, even if that never would have actually happened, we would now be able to point to that vote in parliament and say the hard Brexit we got was foisted upon us against the will of parliament. Although, given we had a general election that same year and the parliament that resulted from that did overwhelmingly vote for the hard Brexit we’ve ended up with, I don’t think that argument would hold much water outside of ultra-Remain circles. Still, I can see that it still would have been better than the logjam we got.
If Corbynistas want to be upset about the indicative votes, I think they should spend more time being angry with the tactics used by their beloved when he was Labour leader. If you thought May’s Brexit would have been preferable to Johnson’s, that is something you could have in fact had, if Corbyn had seen to it happening. May was desperate to get her Withdrawal Agreement over the line in early 2019. Desperate. Corbyn could have whipped his MPs to vote for May’s deal. If it had passed, as in, if enough Labour MPs obeyed the whip to get the deal over the line, parliament would have then officially voted for May’s Withdrawal Agreement. That vote, unlike the indicative votes, was a real one with binding consequences. Of course, Tory MPs could have brought her down the next day and tried to scupper the whole thing before it was signed. They might have succeeded in doing this - however, given how reticent Tory MPs were to get rid of her at the time, they might well have failed as well. Either way, this was the only real chance post-Lancaster House speech to bring about a softer Brexit than the one we ended up with.
A further advantage to Labour it is worth pointing out: had Labour voted for May’s deal, the Conservative party would have ripped itself to pieces, completely and totally. The meltdown you see now would be minor in comparison. Just think about the ERG types, frothing at the mouth because they didn’t have quite enough support to end her premiership, meaning her version of the Withdrawal Agreement became what was signed between the UK and the EU. The Conservative party might well have split over the issue in a permanent sense.
To summarise, once May gave her speech in January 2017, there was no hope of a soft Brexit whatsoever - or even the softer version of Brexit May tried to get herself. We were nailed on for either something like what we got from Johnson or no deal. If Remainers in parliament had rallied round one solution in the indicative votes, whether that be staying in the customs union or the single market or whatever, it still wouldn’t have changed anything. In fact, almost nothing that occurred subsequently would have played out any differently had that occurred.
If it makes you feel better to believe that we got hard Brexit because Remainers refused to compromise, go for it. If you want to think that a “Corbyn Brexit” would have been substantially better than what we ended up with, you’re welcome to think that. But the facts remain what they are. The Tories were never going to allow anything other than a very hard Brexit to take place, and they had almost absolute power to ensure that was what happened.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.
This is a very good and welcome antidote to what is in danger of becoming an accepted, but false, re-writing of the history of what happened 2017-2019. I cover some of the same ground, and made some similar points, in a blog post in December 2020 when that revisionism first began to gain ground: https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-problems-with-if-only-debate.html
One point which is in that post, and strongly implied in yours, that needs to be emphasised is that even if the Indicative Votes had yielded a decisive outcome there was no government to enact it - and there would have needed to be, not just for one vote, but for what would then have been the months or years to turn that vote into an agreement. For all that around that time there was talk of a 'National Government', and arguably that would have been a good way forward, there wasn't the tiniest prospect of May and Corbyn (or their parties) creating one, and without their participation none could could have been formed.
Another point, which I don't make in my blog and you don't make in yours, though I do mention it in my book Brexit Unfolded, is that, despite the Lancaster House speech (and I entirely agree with your analysis of that) there was another pivotal moment in which the possibility of soft Brexit was killed off, and that was in May 2018 when the EU Withdrawal Bill was amended in the Lords to require the government to seek EFTA membership. When it came back to the Commons, Corbyn whipped his MPs to reject it. Had he not done so, there's at least the possibility that there would have been enough Tory rebels to pass it (as shown by the 'Amendment 7' rebellion the previous December, which was the reason why May had to hold the 'meaningful votes on the WA, votes which ironically were used by the ERG, who had called Amendment 7 treachery, to scupper May's deal). Of course, even if that had happened it can't be said with certainty that soft Brexit would have happened, but it was certainly possibility.
Very good analysis!
I am always surprised how many seem to cling to the idea that all was still possible in 2019.
The indicative votes were more like a "last stand" effort and woefully uncoordinated for that purpose.
I think the only realistic change to move off the path to hard Brexit has been right after the 2017 election.
With May's majority gone, it would have allowed for a change in government and thus a change in Brexit strategy.
Given the massive consequences of leaving the EU after 40+ years, the most suitable way forward in any other country would have been a "grand coalition" between Tory and Labour parties.
Not only would this have allowed to sideline hardcore positions in either party, it would have resulted in negotiation goals that an actual majority of people would have been OK with. Not ideal but acceptable.