At Chequers the Cabinet needs to talk about what Brexit really means
The Cabinet gathers at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country house, tomorrow to try and thrash out a unified approach to Britain’s discussions with the European Commission. Ministers will try to determine what they can all agree to ask the twenty-seven countries of the European Union for, bearing in mind what they think the members of the EU are willing to agree to. It is not going to be easy. For the last forty-three years of our membership of first the European Community and more recently the European Union, opinion, across both major political parties, has been sharply divided on the issue and there is no reason to think Theresa May will magically be able to conjure up unanimity where her eight predecessors of the ‘EU-era’ have failed.
No-one can have failed to have spotted that in the heat feelings are running high inside and between the political parties. Social media means we do not have to rely on newspaper reports and broadcast bulletins. It is there writ large for all to see – and it is not a happy spectacle. Sitting on the sidelines with ringside seats, but with no direct control or input into this process, are the British people.
Having been consulted in the referendum vote we turned out in record numbers and expressed a view – a view from which, if opinion polls are to be believed, we show no sign of moving. In the process, and by Parliaments own hand because they voted in support of holding the referendum, we disempowered our elected representatives from having the final say on this significant decision. We further disenfranchised our elected representatives when, at the last General Election we decided not to give a single political party a majority in the House of Commons. We facilitated the end without granting the easy means of delivering it. We have therefore forced our political class into a position where they have to work together and find some common agreement. But where will this be found?
For a start it would help if the discussion about Brexit was actually centred on what it is about. For example, if the business voice – whatever that is – mattered as much as perhaps it ought we would not be leaving the European Union at all. It seems clear Brexit, at least in the short term, is harming investor confidence and business confidence. It is likely that larger businesses will be able to weather Brexit turbulence better than SMEs, after-all they have more capacity and deeper pockets. Smaller and medium sized businesses do not. They are much more obviously likely to suffer more, the harder the Brexit. This should concern every member of a Conservative Cabinet.
Nevertheless, it must be reckoned that whatever those who run businesses of all sizes may say a fair number of those they employ must have voted for Britain to leave the European Union, despite the dire warnings of what that would mean for their jobs and livelihoods. Certainly, the deep-seated rupture between business and the Conservatives cannot be a position the Tory party is comfortable with. The pitting of their view of Brexit against the expressed will of the British people cannot be a comfortable position for those who run Britain’s businesses. But Brexit is not primarily about business and trade, they are the proxy for the real argument.
The real argument is much larger and profoundly more fundamental than one about supply chains and trade deals – important as they are. It is about who runs Britain. It is not about our national prosperity but about political responsibility. The vote to Brexit, on the highest voter turnout in our history, was a national eruption of dissatisfaction with the prevailing political settlement. A political settlement that, broadly speaking, had run from John Major, beginning in 1990, through Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and which came juddering to a halt with David Cameron. A settlement that broadly agreed on the market as a means of delivering economic prosperity, lowish taxation, lightish regulation on business, military interventionism, and an embrace of globalisation. It was a twenty-six-year period where a smallish group of roughly like-minded people governed with similar values sharing a common language, regardless of which political party had actually won the election.
Although not all that long ago that period can already be seen as a distinct and coherent era in British politics. For some it was a period of increasing living standards, peace, continuing investment in public services, and growing opportunity. For others it meant increasing exclusion as technology advanced, a sense of alienation from fractured communities, no real political choice at election time, and the military activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya with each leaving a very uncomfortable aftermath. Above all the financial crash which left the taxpayer footing the bill, stagnant productivity, insipid wage growth, and a nagging sense we were being both bossed about and taken for a ride. Fair or not the terms of political trade changed, for Labour as well as the Conservatives, having arrived in Scotland sometime ago in the form of the SNP. It is that continuing process of change, of revolt by the electorate, that is driving through British politics like a combine harvester through a field of wheat.
Whatever administrative processes the European Commission will eventually agree to will become apparent in the fullness of time. They will not be hurried no matter how uncomfortable we find it. When the accommodation is arrived at it would be unwise of the Prime Minister’s cabinet or Parliamentary colleagues to force her to look for support in the lobbies across the aisle.
At Chequers tomorrow instead of wrangling about essentially peripheral issues over which, in the end, we will have relatively little control, the Cabinet should be focussing on what confident and coherent vision they will be offering a Brexited Britain that deals with the underlying forces and concerns which made the country vote to leave.