The Guardian view on Theresa May and Brexit: she is failing to govern

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/17/the-guardian-view-on-theresa-may-and-brexit-she-is-failing-to-govern

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Theresa May’s weakening grip on parliament over Brexit has been humiliatingly exposed over the past 10 days. Her Chequers deal and the Brexit white paper, which were intended to unite the Conservative party behind a compromise negotiating position, have succeeded only in dividing it more than before. On Monday on the customs bill, in which she capitulated to the leavers, and again on Tuesday on the trade bill, when she squeaked home against the remainers by 307-301, a political life-saver, while losing a separate vote to them, Mrs May was the plaything of the Tory factions. Her initial response, a now abandoned attempt to cut the parliamentary session short, was close to admitting that, on the most important issue facing Britain, Mrs May is barely capable of governing.

Her wider failure has two deep underlying causes. The first was the referendum vote of 2016 to leave the European Union, which she is committed to implementing. The second, and equally potent, cause was the loss of her parliamentary majority in the 2017 general election, which makes implementation even more difficult. It is not possible to understand the crisis that is battering Mrs May’s government this week without appreciating the very particular toxicity of the combination of the two together.

As the former education secretary, Justine Greening, observed on Monday, parliamentary party politics was never set up to deal with referendums – and the last two years have proved her right. The 2016 vote was an instruction to a sovereign parliament to do something complex and important that a majority of its members in all main parties did not want to do, either in part or at all. The issue split the two main parties. It also challenged all MPs to navigate between their own beliefs on the EU, their party leaders’ post-referendum balancing acts and the presumed views of their own constituents and the electorate at large.

Mrs May called an election in 2017 mainly because she thought she would win. But she also called it in order to get a mandate to deliver the hard Brexit she offered in the Conservative manifesto. The election was an attempt to force the Tory remainers’ hand. If she had succeeded, she might then have been able to “parliamentarise” the referendum verdict, dragoon her backbench doubters into line to carry out the mandate and carry the Commons with her majority. But Mrs May failed. Her version of Brexit was not endorsed. Backbenchers were let off the leash to follow their own views. And now she had no majority among MPs.

Politics has been living with the consequences of all this for the past year. The combination of divisions within the parties, especially within the Tories, along with divisions between the parties, has produced a Brexit impasse at Westminster. There is no majority for overturning the 2016 Brexit vote – MPs are understandably leery of defying the referendum result. But there is absolutely no majority for forcing a no-deal Brexit either – only a few dozen Tory fanatics want that. Now, after the government majority of six on the customs union amendment on Tuesday, there is only the narrowest of majorities for the muddled middle way Brexit around which Mrs May tried to unite her government and her party at Chequers.

It is possible that Mrs May will find the formula that has so far eluded her for harnessing the soft Brexit majority in the Commons in support of a softer outcome than she has yet embraced. That, though, could split her party. But the other escape routes – a Tory leadership election or another early general election – are not straightforward and offer no certainty either, not least because the clock is ticking down on the article 50 EU withdrawal process.

That is why Ms Greening’s call for a second referendum is politically significant. It may fall on increasingly fertile ground if Mrs May cannot control the crisis in which she is currently trapped. The EU has every incentive to seek that outcome. Ms Greening’s plan is controversial in its detail and in itself. Many will question whether any referendum can be relied on to solve Britain’s crisis in a week in which the very idea of a fair referendum has been called into fresh doubt by the shocking referral of Vote Leave to the police. Yet if the country is to extricate itself from this crisis, it could be that only another referendum can free us from the tangle created by the first one.