Brexit smokescreens

How Britain withdrew from the EU

Ben Wellings

The Parliamentary Battle Over Brexit

by Meg Russell and Lisa James

Oxford University Press

£25 hb, 406 pp

Akey argument deployed by those in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union concerned the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. One of the ironies of Brexit is that some of the leading figures who argued for parliamentary sovereignty during the 2016 referendum tried to shut down Parliament three years later so that they could ‘get Brexit done’. This attack on a representative institution was part of an international pattern of democratic backsliding during the 2010s. For the authors of this new book, understanding the internal dynamics of Parliament during the Brexit years forms part of an effort to ‘defend democracy and its institutions’.

Following the 2016 referendum, the Westminster parliament became the crucible of the eventual form of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. With its shifting balance of forces, unwritten conventions, and arcane rules, the parliamentary arena shaped behaviours and created unintended consequences that a polarised electorate struggled to comprehend. Meg Russell and Lisa James’s impressive and meticulously researched book sets out in fine detail how and why this came to be, and offers a clear chronological explanation and thematic analysis of those difficult years.

Brexit was so difficult because it opened a question that had not been addressed in British politics for a long time: who exactly was in charge? The 2016 referendum ostensibly initiated a three-cornered contest for authority between Government, Parliament, and People, with the pro-Brexit press and the courts playing crucial supporting roles.

It is hard to disagree with the authors’ main contention that what was presented by Brexiteers as an ‘élite’ Parliament attempting to thwart the democratically expressed wish of the UK electorate, was really an internal contest within the Conservative Party over what leaving the EU meant in practice rather than in principle. As the authors state, the ‘primary failure was one of government, not parliament’.

Parliament had been conspicuous by its absence in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. It was more an object of concern than an active player during the campaign. That changed immediately after the referendum because the popular sovereignty implicit in the referendum served to undermine the parliamentary sovereignty that advocates of leaving the EU sought to uphold. The courts intervened in late 2016, trying to bring clarity to the question of who was in charge, ruling that Parliament ought to have a say on the final form of Brexit. For their pains, the judges were branded ‘enemies of the people’ by the non-elected tribunes of the General Will at the Daily Mail.

That the courts intervened at all was unusual. On taking office in 2016, the new prime minister, Theresa May, declared cryptically that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. It was now up to Parliament to read the runes of the referendum and decipher what exactly People and Government meant – an unenviable task.

Crucially, May decided to interpret the 52‒48 per cent UKwide vote in favour of leaving the EU as a signal to negotiate withdrawal in line with the wishes of the most hardcore Brexiteers. The authors suggest that, having voted to remain in the EU, she did so to bolster her pro-Brexit credentials. However, this raised the possibility that the United Kingdom might leave the EU with no trade deal to soften the blow of departure, and entrapped her in her own words when it came to negotiations with the EU.

May’s main tactical error came when she called a snap election in 2017 and promptly lost the Conservatives’ majority. This outcome propelled Parliament further towards the centre of Brexit politics, strengthened the hard-line Brexiteers, and made the Conservatives dependent on the equally hard-line Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, who were concerned (correctly) that their interests might be sidelined in any UK–EU deal.

By now it was clear that May’s government was in charge without being in control. Authority had shifted away from the executive and towards Parliament – or, in reality, groups within it. To deflect criticisms of her statecraft, May began to blame Parliament when in fact the chief malefactors were Boris Johnson and a group of hard-line Conservative MPs who went by the innocuous name of the European Research Group (ERG). May never spoke up about the real political problem between 2017 and 2019: resistance to her plans to leave the EU from within the Conservative party by the self-declared ‘Spartans’ in the ERG.

It was at this point that politics developed its own dynamic, whereby lots happened but nothing changed as Parliament sought, unsuccessfully, to reach a consensus on what Brexit actually meant. In particular, it sought to prevent the increasingly likely option of a ‘no deal Brexit’. The possibility of such an outcome increased when Johnson replaced the broken May as prime minister in July 2019.

Brexit had by now bent party loyalties out of shape. Although the situation carried the most significance among the Conservatives, the political dilemma was no less intractable for the main opposition. In 2016, the parliamentary Labour Party was solidly for remaining in the EU, but many of its supporters had voted to leave. This, plus the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, put many parliamentarians of all parties into a quandary: should they implement a ‘no deal Brexit’, or trust their own judgement that this form of economic self-harm was not what people had

intended when they voted to leave?

The book provides clear explanations of why all these things played out the way they did. But such reasons were not immediately apparent to the electorate. This knowledge gap was an opportunity for those who wished to see the hardest form of Brexit (the ERG, Johnson, the right-wing press) to push the ‘People versus Parliament’ narrative to the extreme. The electorate’s frustration led to radicalisation. A 2019 YouGov poll showed that most Conservatives would sooner see the destruction of their own party and countenance the breakup of the United Kingdom if that’s what it took to leave the EU. A Hansard Society poll from the same year showed that a majority of voters surveyed would be happy to see a leader prepared to break the rules in order to finish Brexit.

And this is what they got. In October 2019, Johnson shut down (prorogued) Parliament as an inconvenience in the government’s attempt to leave the EU. The courts intervened for a second time, ruling this unlawful. Johnson then surprised Parliament with a deal, but one that left Northern Ireland under the EU’s trading rules – something he had said he would never do, but something that the research in the book also reveals he had no intention of honouring in order to bring the ERG onside. The deal set the stage for the 2019 election, which was framed by the Johnson-led Conservatives as one necessary to remove an out-of-touch ‘Remainer’ Parliament. In reality, the eighty-seat majority which the Conservatives won put an end to the party’s internecine troubles by delivering the hard Brexit that the ERG ‘Spartans’ wanted and reducing the influence of its own backbenchers on the government.

The authors reflect on what might have been done differently, but acknowledge the difficulties in this. They suggest that a conversation on the complexities stemming from the referendum vote could have been initiated by May, but her temperament precluded this. Avoiding ‘bluff call’ referendums that gamble with high politics to manage low politics in the first place is another recommendation.

The analysis in this book does not remain in the Westminster weeds or necessarily require specific knowledge of UK politics to be of interest. The overlaps with Australian parliamentary traditions are manifold, and the book includes a helpful glossary.

Ultimately, The Parliamentary Battle Over Brexit shows that, for all their talk of restoring parliamentary sovereignty, this was just a smokescreen for the hard Brexiteers, a political-cultural justification for an ultimately successful but spurious political project to ‘free’ the United Kingdom from its friends, neighbours, and largest trading partner. g