Brexit chaos shows our system of government is working

Among all the details certain to be ignored in the mad scrambling lunacy of Brexit politics is the news that cabinet ministers were asked to take a position on a 585-page draft document without being given adequate time to read it.

To give some sense of the scale: it would be a prodigious effort of speed reading amounting to 104,617 words or, give or take a paragraph or two, the length of The Martian by Andy Weir, which, quite aptly (depending on your view), is a book set some years hence, about a man stuck in a prolonged nightmare, isolated from the rest of humanity, and with his provisions rapidly running out, leaving him to exist on potatoes grown in his own excreta.

This is not the first nor the last time politicians will be asked to indulge their ignorance by voting blind on an issue. It isn’t even the first time that Theresa May has tried this trick. In 2012 when Home Secretary, she attempted to rush through the Draft Communications Data Bill, the so-called “Snooper’s Charter”, to avoid the scrutiny that eventually revealed how the bill exposed private individuals to government monitoring. Ultimately, the draft was read and rejected, becoming the watered-down Investigatory Powers Bill, which passed in 2016, though, again, with a haste that concerned many. Thus far, it looks like she’s going to be no more successful with her draft Brexit proposals in 2018.

The delayed response to the draft was perhaps indicative of the way the cabinet meeting on Wednesday night was handled. It spoke to the reality of ministers being sorely tested by the draft document and unity of Wednesday night was merely the prelude to Thursday’s chaos. Yet as much as it might feel debilitating in the moment, the inability of any executive to force through a decision should also be recognised as a sign of a healthy democracy. Nothing exposes the casual indifference that politicians sometimes have to reality – and adherence to party orthodoxy – quite like their signing off on unread policy documents.

Consider the scorn directed towards Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan last year when they presented Donald Trump’s long-heralded “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”. Five hundred pages long including handwritten changes in the margins, the bill was sent to Congress just hours before the vote was due to take place.

Senators were largely ignorant of what they passed, leading Jon Tester, the Democrat senator for Montana, to call it “Washington DC at its worst”.

This week might feel like Westminster “at its worst” but we can, at least, hold on to this one consolation: that what now feels broken might also be working as intended. The debates are bitter and the politics fraught but the eventual solution, whatever its shape, will be hard won and it’s only right that it should.

Legislatures are weakest when they are characterised by doctrinal purity and parties suffering from hive mentalities. It’s the worst kind of factional politics that denies individuals the right to be informed, so central to both the parliamentary system here in the UK and the Jeffersonian model of democracy in the US. It also makes a lie of the argument often raised against referenda. Government is different to the vox populi. It means being led by those with the luxury of time and advice to consider the facts. That can hardly be the case when those individuals are ill-informed, rushed into the process, and then whipped through the lobby, having had neither the time nor the inclination to read the policies to which they put their name.

That a draft document should suddenly be rushed through the cabinet in the middle of the Brexit negotiations is hardly a surprise. It did May no credit but it is to the credit of our system of government that she has met resistance. This is a rare and welcome moment of dissent at a time when partisan politics are all the rage and gestures towards the public mood convincing more and more voters. It might be a mess. It might be a failure of ambition or even a statement of reality.

Yet how encouraging is it that MPs and ministers see themselves as something more than placeholders for party dogma? We are not witnessing that hyper-partisanship that has made American politics so risible, where so much can rest on the rare conscience of a single senator. Nor does it create politicians who can be cynical enough to admit, like Max Caucus, the Democrat from Montana and also the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, once did: “I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the healthcare bill. You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts”.

It’s only too easy for politicians to see themselves as broad-brushstroke thinkers, leaving civil servants to fill out the details. That’s as true today as it was when Otto von Bismark remarked that “with bad laws and good civil servants it’s still possible to govern”.

Yet the other half of the epigram is as important to remember. “With bad civil servants, even the best laws can’t help.”

What we’re witnessing, then, is the organic process to find those good laws, aided by a civil service that is second to none. It is naïve to believe that Brexit was ever going to be as simple as the question posed in the referendum.

“Leave” or “Remain” would always require extrapolating into meaningful policy and, irrespective of one’s view, we should be grateful that our elected officials still care enough about detail to do just that. Divided opinions around difficult questions are the surest way to reach pragmatic solutions. Government should settle itself to getting this right. It’s the fetish for speedy delivery and arbitrary deadlines that need to change before we can get our country back on track.