May prepares Britain’s next great Brexit mistake

Britain’s government will soon begin pleading for a delay in the country’s exit from the European Union (EU). Without this, Brexit would go ahead on March 29 with no agreement in place to manage the disruption that would follow. The House of Commons has already rejected (twice, and by huge margins) the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May, and the voted against leaving the EU with no deal — so a delay is undoubtedly necessary. The question is, what sort of delay?
A short pause is seen as most likely. But this is not the right answer. The delay shouldn’t be for a few weeks or months. It should be long and indefinite. In other words, Parliament should steel itself not just to briefly suspend Article 50, Britain’s notice to quit the union, but to revoke it altogether — and to do so while it still can.
For years disaffection has been especially pronounced in the United Kingdom. The Leavers’ narrow win in the referendum of 2016 understates it, because there were many reluctant Remainers like me, who believed that Brexit would end badly but have no great regard for the EU. If Britain remains a member after all, especially under these circumstances, popular resentment will only increase, and the issue will be anything but resolved. I understand all this. Nonetheless, I’m saying that Article 50 should be revoked.
The essential point is that the Brexit process has finally collapsed — and in the foreseeable future, starting from here, it cannot be rescued. Until further notice, it needs to be scrapped.
Things didn’t have to be this way. A wisely led EU would have come to an accommodation with the UK, developing a form of associate membership combining a high degree of economic integration with a looser form of political union. A minimally competent British government would have chosen either to pursue that goal patiently from the inside as a member with voting power, or else, if that proved impossible, to achieve the same result as an adequately prepared outsider.
The first and far more promising approach was dropped by accident. David Cameron, rebuffed by other EU governments over the issue of internal migration, tried to quell dissent in his party by calling referendum, which he then proceeded to lose. That was the error from which all the rest followed. Cameron’s bungling made it necessary to adopt the second approach: design a new arrangement having already decided to leave.
The pantomime of the past few days sums it up to perfection. May scuttles at the last minute to Strasbourg to beg mercy from the European Commission’s president, who graciously allows the UK a second chance, as he called it, to accept the EU’s terms — while saying nothing has changed and after this there’ll be no more clarifications of clarifications, because his patience is quite at an end. May returns to the Commons, voice failing, to croak out the case for approving the same withdrawal agreement that members had rejected just weeks ago by a record-breaking majority.
Cameron’s biggest mistake was to call the referendum without understanding the risk he was taking. May’s biggest mistake, having inherited that disaster, was to compound it — first by issuing the Article 50 notice and specifying an exit date without even the vaguest notion of a Brexit plan, and second by letting the clock run down month after month without preparing for the possibility of an acrimonious no-deal separation. Many more errors followed, including one of the most incompetent election campaigns in living memory. Rarely, in fact, did May miss a chance to make things worse.
A short delay is better than just crashing out, but would resolve nothing, as May hoarsely noted earlier. It wouldn’t leave time for adequate no-deal preparations. And even if the EU were willing to revise the withdrawal agreement, which it insists it is not, any deal negotiated under these circumstances will yield an outcome that even a Brexiteer should recognise as inferior to Remain — that is, status as a de facto colony in the EU periphery, with fewer economic benefits than now and less, not more, political autonomy. A short delay would merely prolong the agony.
A longer delay with the express purpose of calling a second referendum and/or a general election is much more attractive, because it would give time for reflection and a fundamental rethink. At some point the decision to proceed with Brexit or cancel it altogether ought to be grounded in a new and better-informed popular mandate. Nonetheless, this fixed-delay approach, even given more time, suffers from potentially lethal drawbacks.
First, the clock would still be ticking down to a no-deal exit, leaving Britain in much the same negotiating stranglehold as now. Second, the EU would have to agree to any such extension. The longer the requested delay, the more likely it would be to refuse. In any event, the EU would set conditions: Like the notorious backstop, these would further tilt the subsequent bargaining and narrow the UK’s options. Third, even now, the outcome of a second referendum shouldn’t be taken for granted — and, hard as this might be to believe, a general election could install a government that’s even more clueless than May’s.

—Bloomberg

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and writes editorials on economics, finance and politics

. He was chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times, a correspondent and editor for the Economist and a senior editor at the Atlantic.