Mrs May as a dominatrix? Some Tories buy it, but Europe won’t
Her big speech on Brexit had a superficial firmness and clarity but was constructed from illusions and hollow threats
Source: Theguardian.com.
UK – LONDON – Statecraft is often an exercise in deception – and arguably has to be so. Leaders spend much of the time frantically paddling to keep their heads above the water in swirling seas of uncertainty. This is the truth that they try to disguise from themselves and their publics. Self-respect and voters demand that leaders sound as if they are in command of events.
By this measure – at the level of projecting herself as a woman of robust purpose in charge of her country’s destiny – Theresa May’s big speech on Brexit can be counted a performative success. She has a plan. The delineation of her objectives has silenced those who had started to ridicule her as Mrs Maybe. She threatened to walk away from negotiations if she doesn’t get what she wants: “No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal”. That stimulated the erogenous zones of those parts of the British media that love to hear the slap of firm leadership, especially when the slapping is directed at the chops of johnny foreigner. The rightwing press has rewarded her with the most orgasmic headlines of her time as Tory leader. The adulatory gush about a new “iron lady” at Number 10 compares with the reception enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher in her pomp while conveniently forgetting that it was Mrs T who was instrumental in creating the single market that Mrs M wants to walk away from.
The speech was also a hit in terms of short-term domestic political advantage. The Labour party is dazed, confused and divided about how to respond while a large part of her own party pants with pleasure that they are going to get the hard Brexit they want. It was implicit in her previous statements that Britain will leave the single market, because continued membership is incompatible with ending freedom of movement. We could deduce that because Mrs May has been signalling for some time that control of immigration trumps any other consideration in her Brexit calculations. It could also be inferred that Britain was likely to be out of the customs union as well. The unconfined joy of the hard Brexiters is because she has now been explicit about this in language that leaves no wriggle room for later compromise.
Her speech was commensurately depressing, desperately so, for pro-Europeans in the Tory party. Despite the mounting indications to the contrary, they had been clinging to straws of hope that Mrs May would steer them towards one of the less stark forms of Brexit. Now they know differently. They should be in no doubt that Mrs May is setting course for a hard Brexit, or “clean Brexit” as the prime minister has taken to calling it, adopting the language of the fundamentalists in her party.
Yet for all its superficial firmness and clarity, this was a speech constructed from illusions. The overarching fantasy was that Brexit is a process over which Mrs May has complete control. She does get to decide when to pull the trigger. She has chosen the end of March, this week’s judgment from the supreme court and events in parliament permitting. But from that point on, her fate, and with it Britain’s future, is in the hands of many other actors, some of whose identities are not even known yet. To please her domestic audience, the prime minister presented herself as someone who will be a demander, not a supplicant, at the negotiating table. Once she is actually facing the 27, she can demand all she likes, but ultimately she will only get what they are prepared to concede.
About that, Mrs May was heroically optimistic. She says she wants to preserve “the greatest possible access” to the single market with special privileges for key industries such as car manufacture and financial services; she seeks zero tariffs and frictionless supply chains, along with release from the jurisdiction of the European court of justice; she will pay only a peppercorn contribution to the EU budget while also securing freedom for Britain to strike separate trade deals with other parts of the world. She believes – or hopes to make the rest of us believe – that this can be achieved in the two years which start counting down from the moment she triggers Article 50.
I am tempted to ask: what has the prime minister been smoking?
The EU does not have to talk about a new trade relationship at all, not if they want to be bloody-minded about it, or the atmosphere is poisoned by more boorish remarks by members of the British cabinet comparing continental leaders to Nazi prison camp guards. There is a widespread misperception that Article 50 triggers the start of trade negotiations. It does not. Article 50 has nothing to do with trade. It is about the terms of the divorce: settling the bills and dividing the assets. Mrs May avoided that topic in her speech, perhaps not surprisingly when some in Brussels have been suggesting the commission may ask for up to €60bn. Michel Barnier, the EU’s lead negotiator, has said repeatedly they want the divorce settlement agreed before they will start discussing the future.
“It can never be in the EU’s interests to grant Britain the advantages while releasing it from the obligations”
In place of membership of the single market and the customs union, Mrs May says she will seek a comprehensive free-trade agreement. That will mean negotiating terms sector by sector. I can find no one who knows anything about trade negotiations who thinks this is do-able in 24 months. It took seven years for the EU to negotiate its trade deal with Canada. Mrs May’s speech made the habitual mistake of British politicians when talking about Europe, which is to forget that other countries have interests to protect and other leaders have parliaments to face and voters to answer to. There may or may not be a desire in some parts of the EU to “punish” Britain for leaving. There is certainly no appetite for handing Britain a sweetheart deal that says to everyone that it can be more profitable to quit the club than remain part of it. It can never be in the EU’s interests to grant Britain a continuation of most of the advantages of being a member while releasing it from all the obligations.
The installation of Donald Trump at the White House has made the path to a successful agreement even more difficult. Some British diplomats had hoped that the United States might take the edges off the negotiations with the EU by encouraging the 27 to play nice and keep close to the UK. That notion has been turned to ashes by the arrival of an American president who ridicules the EU as “a vehicle for Germany” and forecasts that the organisation will disintegrate as other members copy Britain’s example.
Mrs May’s answer is that the EU will want to strike a rapid and accommodative deal because their economies would also suffer if there isn’t one. It would be “an act of calamitous self-harm” to wreck their trading relationship with one of the world’s larger economies. She rehearses the familiar tropes about the Germans wanting to be able to sell their cars to Britain and the French their wine. True enough. But what is even truer is that a car-crash Brexit would inflict asymmetrical damage because a lot more of Britain’s economy is dependent on exports to the EU than vice-versa. Threatening to walk away if you don’t get the deal you want is a negotiating tactic that can be effective when bargaining in a souk. It works because the other party knows that you can go elsewhere. It is not such a clever threat when the other side knows that walking away will hurt you a lot more than it will hurt them.
Mrs May probably understands that her hand is nothing like as strong as she pretends it is. This could explain why she attempted to compensate for the weaknesses of her position by menacing the EU with this notion: “If we were excluded from access to the single market, we would be free to change the basis of Britain’s economic model.” That was meant and perceived as a threat to turn Britain into an ultra low-tax, low-regulation magnet for multinationals, sucking jobs and investment out of the EU. Britain as a kind of Singapore-in-the-Atlantic has always been the vision of some of the Brextremists. But it has never been a component of the Toryism that Mrs May has enunciated. It runs entirely contrary to everything else she has been saying about globalisation since she moved into Number 10.
Her other big speech of the week was to the gathering of the financial elite in Davos. There, she delivered a rather powerful critique of business behaviour. She told the assembled plutocrats and potentates that it was time they woke up to the levels of anger about the uneven impacts of globalisation and “heed the underlying feeling that there are some companies, especially those with a global reach, who are playing by a different set of rules to ordinary working people”. That is entirely incompatible with turning Britain into a tax haven-cum-sweatshop for footloose corporations.
I conclude from these hollow threats that they didn’t play all that much poker when the young Theresa was growing up in her reverend father’s vicarage. If she is going to make a success of bluffing, she is going to have to get a lot better at it than this.
See larger photo: www.theguardian.com.
