Even if there were secret negotiations that have prepared a compromise, it seems that final Brexit negotiations will be decided under conditions in which neither the political classes nor the public(s) have been prepared for the contents of a negotiated outcome. This means that there will be a period of political instability and revisionism. Of course, that may be preferable to a no-deal Brexit, which will be incredibly disruptive economically -- for the UK and its major trading partners I expect it to be worse than the six month period when financial markets froze in 2008/9 --, and will generate enormous immediate human costs, including fear of deportation, loss of economic self-sufficiency, family break-ups, etc.
I hope I am wrong, but after closing a half a decade commemorating the war that caused the collapse of European civilization (so much worse for that the colonial subjects rightly said), European polities are sleepwalking into a new disaster they are unwilling to contemplate.---Eric Schliesser "Sleepwalking into Action." (09/21/2018)
l am often wrong about the politics of my own times. For example, I was firmly convinced (recall) on a certain interpretation of game theory (Schelling) that, despite (recall) getting a very number of the actual votes (42,4%), Theresa May's political weakness (minority government, a good chunk of her own party ready to defect, etc) would translate into political success because it would force her risk-averse interlocutors (the EU, Tory party rivals, Labour leadership) into maintaining her power for fear of opening the door to a new-deal Brexit. It turns out I was wrong about that because the members of the British and European political class have not pursued Minimax strategies.* (I return to that below.)
More interesting, I was wrong -- and here I echoed conventional wisdom -- that the (first past the post style) Westminster style of government is (recall) quite good at delivering decisive government and better than the proportional representation style parliaments .+ Then again, it's been an amazing year. I never thought I would see such a clear example of a Condorcet voting cycle despite the agents (a) being aware of the existence of Condorcet voting cycles, and (b) being able to talk and negotiate (and have side agreements, etc.) and be (relatively) constrained by party Whips.
What I was right to worry about (see the quote at the top of the post) is that Theresa May never figured out how to build a cross parliamentary or national consensus for Maygo. I remain amazed she did not offer Labour a national unity government at the start of her tenure. By letting Brexit be politicized, and subject of party politics, she allowed herself to be a sitting duck. And since this was the defining feature of her tenure she must judged a failure. I am not suggesting anybody would have been capable of doing so; as I have noted before (in 2016), the British political class is imploding. My view is this is a long term development, in part, caused by the migration of talent to the City (where moderately clever people can make obscene amounts of money), and, in part, by a more general toxic inability to think through the alternatives to being a vassal state of the US.
I think part of the problem, which is why I take an interest in it, is a kind of intellectual malaise which is the effect of a certain drift in liberalism that forgets two of the core commitments of liberalism: (i) the embrace of voluntary agency (which is not reducible to market-agency) and (ii) a politics that involves the embrace of the open-ended search for win-win outcomes (the exact opposite of the opt-out attitude toward the EU exhibited by British political culture.) There has been no effort to engage with the EU as the (recall) moral project it is. (I don't mean to deny it falls short in many ways nor that it's not only a moral project.)
And now the illiberal forces within British society have been gifted a golden opportunity to push the gears in reverse, to close the border against people and cosmopolitan ideas and to keep the young inside; to play with fire in Ireland, to encourage the rivalry between English and Scottish nationalism, to stoke the fires of xenophobia and islamophobia, and to be confronted with the looming environmental crisis with a diminished pie.
The good news is that the British party system is imploding. The Tories are not a functional party anymore, and because they were the natural party of government this means that there will be opportunities for new agendas, new coalitions, and new approaches to politics. This, in turn, will elicit a new kind of opposition. For that is the beauty of electoral, democratic politics is that one can justifiably hope no settlement is permanent.
*Of course, what the content of the worst case scenario is, is contestable. And so I don't mean to suggest Minimax has been falsified (and it would be un-falsifiable on certain interpretations).
+Here, too, the claim can be preserved by insisting that coalition government undid the advantages of Westminster style government. I am dubious this really is true, but soit.
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