Trump takes Putin’s word over FBI
Former cabinet minister Justine Greening called for a second referendum on the Brexit question this morning (best of three then?) in a column for the Times. The Chequers proposal was the “worst of both worlds” for both Leavers and Remainers, she said, and “the only solution is to take the final Brexit decision out of the hands of deadlocked politicians, away from the backroom deals, and give it back to the people.”
But just as May’s Chequers fudge seems to have melted almost as fast as Boris Johnson can put together a well-written but half-arsed Telegraph column, a second referendum makes little practical sense.
There is no bespoke referendum instrument available so we would need another Act of Parliament, like the Referendum Act 2015, to give it a legal reality. The Referendum Act took seven months to get passed; we are now set to leave on the 29th March 2019. Essay crisis time.
So what would the proposed referendum look like? Greening suggested an AV-type second preference with three choices on the ballot: no deal, May’s Brexit proposal and re-joining the European Union. That looks like a potential mess.
It is unlikely that even soft Brexiteers in the country will be familiar with the shortcomings of the May compromise over a no deal, in which case, you may well be in a position where just enough people opt for a no deal out of a sense that this gives a greater clarity to democratic expression.
Equally, we might well be in a position where the Leave vote is just split enough that the Remain option manages to win through first preference votes, even though there is a clear majority for some form of Brexit.
Since Labour are bound to vote down the May Chequers proposal when it comes before the House, there now seems to be no clear majority, either for the May compromise, a willed no deal, the Norway option or the Canada option, raising the chances of an accidental no deal outcome.
That would be difficult, partly because neither the UK nor the EU have prepared properly for it, at a time when the Western alliance seems to be at a moment of genuine crisis.
Masha Gessen, the celebrated Russia watcher, predicted that the Trump-Putin conference in Helsinki would signify “the triumph of nothing over everyone”, her point being that the less interesting the outcome of the conference, the better it is for Putin: as long as he can be seen to be a world leader, facing off with a clown, he can call the summit a success. Well, he has gained much more than he could have possibly hoped for – Trump sided with Russia over his own security services.
Queried over Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian security agents for interfering the US election, he replied: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it should be.” Trump even responded positively to Putin’s offer for Russia to lend assistance to the investigation.
See how inadequate the popular orthodoxy on Trump is – take him seriously but not literally – as he explicitly attempts to fracture the existing Western multilateral settlement, slagging off the European Union as a greater “foe” than Russia and China in the same breath as he gives succour to a brutal dictator who has consistently violated Western sovereignty over the past couple of years, both through attempting to interfere in elections or even by carrying out extra-judicial killings on British soil.
It now looks more likely that Trump will offer to withdraw troops from the vulnerable Baltic nations (as he did from South Korea as a diplomatic sop) or perhaps recognise the occupation of Crimea as legitimate. Time to wake up to to the implications of a weakened West.
Alastair Benn
News Editor