Britain is in an uproar over Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposed agreement with the European Union, which would enable her country to make the least disruptive Brexit divorce from Brussels. Within her own Conservative Party, hard-line Brexiteers are denouncing the deal as a sellout and threatening to remove May as party leader; though her cabinet approved May’s handiwork, it did so only to see two members resign in protest. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, under ultra-leftist Jeremy Corbyn, continues to straddle the issue while hoping to exploit May’s predicament to bring down her government and take power in the next national election.
This simply reinforces the point that British history since June 23, 2016, had already amply demonstrated. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Fifty-two percent of British voters approved a Brexit referendum on the basis of false promises by the measure’s advocates that it would get rid of all the encumbrances of EU membership without sacrificing any advantages. Questions, such as the fate of European citizens living in Britain (and Britons in Europe), the re-creation, from scratch, of all the regulatory agencies Britain now shares with Brussels, and reestablishing an international boundary between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, were dismissed as the fretting of an out-of-touch “establishment.”
Most dishonest of all, Brexiteers suggested that other nations would rush to cut free-trade deals with a newly liberated United Kingdom, and that there would be no significant economic dislocations from leaving a customs union and free-trade zone into which Britain began to integrate itself half a century ago.
May’s attempt to negotiate a settlement with the E.U. represents her thankless, and hence courageous, effort to cope with the inherent contradictions of Brexit, in the hope of minimizing its harms to her people. The heart of her proposed deal is to fudge the most intractable issue of all: the border Brexit would re-create between Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, an EU member. Her plan would keep Britain, including Northern Ireland, in a customs union indefinitely with the European Union unless some alternative final arrangement could be struck by the end of 2020.
Her Conservative opponents contend, not implausibly, that this would defeat Brexit’s sovereignty- restoring purposes. What they manifestly cannot do, however, is articulate a plausible alternative plan. Instead, Tory politicians continue to carp, in some cases for personal political advantage. They are irresponsibly setting the stage for a potentially disastrous “hard” Brexit next March, when the already established divorce date arrives.
That may yet be avoided, either because May uses the specter of a Corbyn prime ministership to rally her troops in Parliament or, even less likely, because EU proponents manage to persuade Parliament to stage a new referendum in which the British people can express what polls say are widespread second thoughts.
Until then, the rest of the world must simply watch with concern as this pivotal industrial democracy thrashes about due to a self-inflicted wound. Whatever happens next, it’s doubtful anyone will ever look back on the Brexit chapter of British history and say, “This was their finest hour.”