Culture

Boris Johnson’s Bad Saturday and the Contradictions of Brexit


During the debate on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new Brexit deal in the United Kingdom’s Parliament on Saturday—which ended, as these things often have, with a vote calling for another delay—Johnson exposed the most basic blindness of Brexit itself. Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, had just denounced the deal that Johnson arrived at with the European Union last week as a deep, bitter betrayal. The deal includes customs checks in the Irish Sea on goods travelling between the rest of the U.K. and Northern Ireland. Where, Dodds asked, was the chance for both sides in Northern Ireland—unionists like him, who want to remain an integral part of the U.K., and the nationalists, whose ultimate goal is to unite with the Republic of Ireland—to consent to such a deal? After all, the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which put an end to the period of sectarian violence known as the Troubles, calls for cross-community support for major, controversial changes in Northern Ireland’s status quo.

In rising to respond to Dodds, Johnson acknowledged the coöperation his government had hitherto received from the D.U.P., which supports Brexit and has helped to supply the Conservatives with their majority in Parliament. They also enabled Johnson’s rise to power by helping to scuttle an earlier deal that his predecessor, Theresa May, had reached with the E.U. (That deal was defeated in Parliament three times, forcing May’s resignation.) If it were not for the D.U.P.’s resolve, Johnson said, he wouldn’t have been able to convince the Europeans to make the compromises that he believed his new deal represented. But, “in all frankness,” he said, he found it “a pity that it is thought necessary for one side or the other in the debate in Northern Ireland to have a veto on those arrangements.” As he said this, there were cries of protest in the House, as Johnson arrived at the heart of Brexit.

“The people of this country have taken a great decision embracing the entire four nations of this country”—that is, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—“by a simple majority vote that went 52–48, which we are honoring now.” (This was the 2016 Brexit referendum.) Johnson continued, “And I think that principle should be applied elsewhere. And I see no reason why it should not be applied in Northern Ireland, as well.”

In other words, Brexit long ago entered a realm in which subsidiary obligations—to obtaining the consent of the constituent parts of the country, to their union, to changing circumstances, to international obligations, to good sense—have fallen away. The Irish border is the most obvious example. Brexit represents an extreme and controversial change in the status quo in Northern Ireland. The peace brought about by the Good Friday agreement relied on the effective invisibility of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Brexit threatened either to reimpose it or turn it into a beacon for smugglers moving goods between the E.U. and the U.K.—to sabotage peace, the all-island economy, the integrity of the single market, the Republic’s standing in the E.U., or all four. In the referendum, a majority in Northern Ireland voted against Brexit. The referendum represented a trashing both of the Good Friday agreement’s consent principle and, potentially, of all its good works. And yet it proceeded; it did so, once again, with the D.U.P.’s support and with remarkably little attention from just about everybody else to the concerns of the Irish on both sides of the border. That failure is what defines Brexit.

Johnson’s new deal does, in fact, include a consent mechanism for Northern Ireland, even if it’s only about the terms of Brexit—rather than whether to have Brexit at all—and not one that the D.U.P. likes. Under the terms of the deal, there will be a transition period until the end of 2020; four years after that, the Northern Ireland Assembly will have a chance to vote on whether the arrangements—i.e., keeping Northern Ireland de facto in the E.U. customs union—should continue. (If the answer is no, there will be a two-year cooling-off period, followed by more negotiations.) This would be repeated every four years, or every eight years, if staying in is approved by a “supermajority.” There are complications: the main one is that the Assembly has been suspended for the past few years, due to a breakdown in power-sharing arrangements. But the deal is far less disruptive to the Good Friday agreement, has the strong support of the government of the Republic of Ireland, and provides more of an opportunity for consent than the kind of Brexit that the D.U.P wants to ram through. Dodds’s complaint is almost the definition of hypocrisy.

That’s not to say that Johnson hasn’t betrayed the D.U.P.; he certainly has. No one railed more about the absolute impossibility of having customs checks in the Irish Sea than Johnson—back when he thought he couldn’t do without the D.U.P. It was probably a mistake to think that Johnson really cared about anything but his own interests. (In addition to the D.U.P., Sinn Fein holds seven seats in Parliament, but its M.P.s remain absent as a matter of principle.)

Among the angriest voices in Parliament on Saturday were Scottish. Scotland, like Northern Ireland, had voted against Brexit in 2016. Joanna Cherry, a Scottish National Party M.P., asked Johnson “in what way it strengthens the union of the United Kingdom for Scotland alone to have foisted upon it a Brexit it didn’t vote for.” Johnson replied that she was suffering from a “complete conceptual confusion,” which didn’t go over well. “Northern Ireland, thirty; Scotland, zero!” Ian Blackford, the S.N.P.’s parliamentary leader, said, referring to the number of times that each had been mentioned in Johnson’s opening remarks. Where was Scotland’s deal, one that would also allow a closer relation to the E.U.? Barring that, where was Scotland’s independence referendum?

The House of Commons was meeting on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War, in 1982; the session had been planned as the historic moment when Parliament would vote, up or down, on Johnson’s deal. The timing wasn’t just a matter of dramatics: the U.K. is due to leave the E.U. on October 31st, deal or no deal, and, to prevent a crash-out, Parliament had passed a law, called the Benn Act, that says if M.P.s hadn’t approved a deal by 11 P.M. on Saturday, then Johnson would have to ask for an extension until January 31st. Johnson submitted a bill laying out his deal in the nick of time, with the E.U.’s formal approval coming on Thursday. But Sir Oliver Letwin, a Conservative M.P., put forward an amendment saying that Parliament would decline to approve it until all the supporting technical legislation had been passed. The Letwin amendment turned what had been a yes or no on Johnson’s deal into a bill that said nothing more than “maybe later.” Its intended effect was to trigger the Benn Act and force Johnson to ask for an extension despite having a deal in hand. Johnson vehemently opposed the amendment. The D.U.P.’s ten M.P.s voted for it—and, thanks to them, the amendment passed, by a vote of 322–306.

What is the point of the Letwin amendment? Letwin claimed that he supported Johnson’s deal and only wanted an insurance policy to make absolutely sure that there wouldn’t be an accidental crash-out: once the extension was in hand, in his telling, M.P.s could calmly examine the paperwork. But the leaders of the E.U.’s twenty-seven other countries have to approve any extension unanimously, and they will likely want to know first whether there are enough votes in Parliament to approve Johnson’s deal—setting up yet another circular Brexit trap. There was suspense on Saturday about whether Johnson would even send the letter asking for an extension required by the Benn Act or whether he would defy the law. (Given his recent record, including a prorogation, or suspension, of Parliament that the U.K. Supreme Court found was unlawful, there was cause for doubt.) Finally, Johnson sent the letter but reportedly didn’t sign it and—in true Brexit fashion—enclosed a second, signed letter saying that he thought an extension would do “damage” all around, that he would “press ahead” with trying to get Parliament to approve his deal before October 31st, and that the E.U., in considering the extension request, should take its own good time.

One of the inescapable facts of Brexit politics is a lack of faith in Johnson—“we cannot trust a word he says,” Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said of the Prime Minister, on Saturday. But another is the lack of a cohesive opposition; there is little trust in Corbyn, either. The Letwin amendment also had the support of Remainers, for whom any delay to Brexit is, at this point, a lifeline. They are still hoping for a second referendum. The politics of Brexit are tangled; time and again, factions with very different goals—Remainers and the D.U.P., for example—have come together to say no to one plan or another, without ever agreeing on what should happen. A general election in the near future may be unavoidable, but the results are hard to predict—for one thing, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is waiting to jump in. The Letwin amendment is the distillation of the current dysfunction. It may seem like a clever, Johnson-thwarting move. But it only puts off the moment when the M.P.s hovering on the margins will finally have to make an irrevocable decision, and face the contradictions that were built into Brexit from the beginning. Johnson’s government will try for another vote early next week.





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