Parliament is teetering on the brink of total chaos. How did we get here?

On Saturday 19 October the Letwin Amendment to the Benn Act transformed the UK’s Brexit narrative into a Three Act political drama, with the final Act of the script being revised in real time. It bodes ill for political stability in the UK and could even foreshadow a wider political contagion across the EU.

The first Act had Theresa May at centre stage, with the curtain coming down on the failure of her administration to get the politically toxic Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament. And, also, on the EU insisting that the Agreement could not – repeat not – be reopened. 

In Act Two, newly-elected Prime Minister Boris Johnson ratcheted up the tension by committing the UK to exit, ‘do or die’, on 31 October and to persuading Brussels to reopen a Withdrawal Agreement that would avoid a ‘Hard Brexit’. The curtain came down on the seemingly impossible; not only did Brussels do what they previously wouldn’t countenance but, in the process, they endorsed an amended Withdrawal Agreement.

Act Three began to unfold during an extraordinary meeting of Parliament on Saturday last. Enter stage right, Sir Oliver Letwin, accompanied by Hilary Benn. In the original script, the Benn Act insisted that the UK must request an extension if there were ‘No Deal’. Notwithstanding having succeeded in agreeing a revised deal with Brussels, Parliament voted not to approve the amended deal until the necessary implementing legislation was enacted.

The net effect was an unsigned request by the Prime Minister for up to a three month extension – together with two notes indicating that, while he was required by law to write, he wanted no such thing and restated an October 31 Brexit. And these missives were dispatched to the EU, whose President Jean-Claude Juncker had rejected in advance anything other than a brief operational extension. This goes way beyond any prior usage of the term ‘crisis’. It is the nightmare of which Yeats wrote:

Things fall apart/ the center cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..”

It is impossible to anticipate the outcome of the tectonic struggle now unfolding, beginning this week with the Withdrawal Bill being brought by the Prime Minister to the House tonight. 

What we need to reflect on are the root causes that have taken Parliament and, the EU, to the edge of chaos.  

Brexit imposes costs on both the EU and the UK. Important as these direct and indirect costs are, they deflect away from the primordial issue; namely, what impelled Brexit in the first place. Because, for many voters who supported Brexit, the UK was not leaving Europe so much as leaving what the EU has become. It was about the eclipse of national autonomy by the hegemony now established at the core of the EU. This political imperative of exiting a perceived hegemonistic EU came through in subsequent negotiations. Beyond the calamitous contradictions and instability of this Parliament, is the reality of what this instability is pointing towards. Namely, the failure of the EU to reflect on, and engage with the latent tension between autonomy and hegemony.

Like it or not, the EU was unwilling to reform itself in the wake of the banking and economic crisis. Instead, it imposed an extreme form of austerity – Troikanomics. This reflected a mind-set of control, whose consequences continue to unfold across the EU. 

This was the zeitgeist that voters, including those in the UK, picked up on. It didn’t have to be that way. The EU could have progressively rebalanced the axis of hegemony and autonomy: devolved greater responsibility back to member states and acknowledged the importance to the future of Europe of such a rebalancing.

This unresolved tension spawned the multiple crisis that have played out in election results across the EU in recent years. It is playing out in real time on the streets of Catalonia, as it did in Greece and in Paris. The outcome of the 2016 referendum could have impelled a very necessary catharsis, enabling the EU to rethink the latent antagonism towards a continued concentration of power. Instead, Brexit has deflected attention away from the EU’s existential crisis. The UK, fixated on a narrow (mis)understanding of autonomy contributed to the adversarialism that scarred negotiations, right up to last week’s EU Council meeting, where the EU did go the extra mile – and Westminster continued further into ambivalence and chaos. 

It is simply not possible to understand, much less address, Westminster’s collapse into atrial fibrillation without reflecting on root causes and missed opportunities. What has been absent from the Article 50 narrative at every level is an understanding of Autonomy that is relational. In other words, where autonomy is understood as “becoming oneself amongst others”. 

If one doesn’t understand this, it’s not possible to understand the impetus towards Brexit – or the tensions generated by the backstop at the heart of the Brexit process. Why? Because it was perceived as violating the political autonomy of the UK. Hence, by extension, the disenchantment of the DUP with the incorporation of a backstop into the May ‘Deal’ and subsequently disposed of in the amended ‘Deal’.

A resolution of Brexit was always going to be about the backstop – the politically toxic arrangements in Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement that, post-Brexit, effectively kept Northern Ireland indefinitely under the jurisdiction of the EU. German Chancellor Merkel, in her ‘fade-out’ crisis, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his ‘do or die’ test, knew that this gordian knot had to be spliced if the UK were to achieve an orderly exit.

A  no-deal exit was the default outcome that nobody really wanted. Post Brexit, this would have meant the imposition of customs barriers on the Irish/Northern Ireland border to preserve the integrity of the EU Single Market. It was just that no one – least of all Dublin, acting as a proxy for the EU – wanted to issue the contract to build them.

In fact, what both the EU “Team Brexit” and the UK bought into, albeit at the last moment, was the realisation that three into one won’t go. Correction – it won’t go if you start off with a hegemonistic EU and a narrow perception of what autonomy is about. Protecting the integrity of the EU Single Market – and at the same time preserving the integrity of the territory of the UK – and then, on top of that, upholding the Good Friday Agreement, which exorcised violence from the Province. 

Something had to give. And that ‘something’ was the DUP’s fundamental objection to what the backstop represented. Which was kind of tough. The DUP espouse the political virtue of loyalty to a “Union” that is coming apart and, on the island of Ireland, a commitment to a normative Christian morality discarded – and who would have conceived it? – by a now aggressively secularised Republic. So, later this week, the UK’s abortion regime will be imposed on Northern Ireland in the teeth of opposition from the DUP (and, for that matter, other faith leaders and political parties–except the walking political anomaly that is Sinn Fein).

The amended Withdrawal Agreement moves the backstop from a land border wracked with the ghosts of divided identities and loyalties into the Irish sea – at the cost of violating the autonomy of the UK as an entity. It has opened a fissure between the Conservative and Unionist Party. Having propped up two Conservative administrations, a deeply aggrieved DUP voted Nay.

The EU have reason to feel aggrieved too. They were aware that rejecting the outcome of the London/Dublin version of the Backstop meant a no-deal. And that, in turn, meant a request for yet another extension would kick in. For both the EU and Boris Johnson – and how ironic is that – that amounted to the politics of procrastination, kicking to touch when the game was over. Now, having invested in that deal, the EU find themselves back at the status quo ante. 

The pivotal role of impatience in political brinkmanship is greatly underestimated. The Irish government sensed – almost too late – that the new EU Commission, and the Parliament, wanted to move on from the interminable, energy-sapping business of Brexit. And with that, Ireland’s leverage. For all the plaudits directed to the Taoiseach, many in Dublin have for some time felt that the Irish government should have foreseen the backstop ‘Bear Pit’ first time around – and moved to engage directly with London and Belfast. They fumbled it. Having learned the hard way to be good Europhiles, and inexperienced to boot, they ceded the backstop narrative to Brussels.

They had little enough time to come to terms with the reality that Boris Johnson was a better player of The Great Game, than the merely ambitious Theresa May. The Brexit Budget announced by the Irish Finance Minister the previous week was ostensibly predicated on a no-deal. It was good precautionary risk management – long on preparation and interventions but informed by the warning of the Central Bank that a no-deal would push the economy into recession – with a general election just six months or so away.

The direct engagement with Boris Johnson in Liverpool was impelled by Dublin knowing right well the urgent and pressing matters that the wider EU need to address. The German economy is in stasis – every indicator point towards recession, with knock-on consequences for the wider EU – not least highly trade-dependent Ireland. A skewed and asymmetrical Eurozone remains vulnerable. The European Central Bank’s reprise of quantitative easing – itself a sign of incipient economic weakness – has evoked a pushback from influential figures across EU financial institutions. Pressure from France to move towards fiscal transfers and closer budgetary integration have gained traction. That’s just on the economics front.

Dr Merkel is very good at hard sums. That’s why she went with an amended Withdrawal Agreement – that, and her legacy. All of that is now in stasis. 

What is now unfolding in Westminster is not “honest”, albeit bitchy and divisive, politics. It’s gone way beyond ‘Remain’ masquerading as advocating against a no-deal. It’s about a real threat of political instability, beyond anything that confronted Jim Callaghan, or Margaret Thatcher or more recently Tony Blair. The threat comes from the left, empowered by a bitterly divided right and centre right. The mask slipped at the recent Labour Party conference, with criticisms about voting and of the power exercised by the hard-left support base of Jeremy Corbyn.

Political expediency is one thing. But laying a stymie to the functioning of democracy, including the holding of a general election, is classic Marxism – watch, and wait, until a jaded Parliament implodes – and then move into capture and colonise a broken back political system.

A failure by the EU to redress the growing imbalance between hegemony and autonomy and, in the UK, a pathological breakdown in Parliamentary democracy, have turned Brexit into a proxy war for something even deeper and more subversive which could, all too easily, metastasize across the EU.