Last week MPs voted for the first time since 1906 to take back control of parliamentary business from the government and hold a series of indicative votes on where they thought Brexit should go. The Commons will do so again on Monday. This move ought to be welcomed rather than cavilled at. The fact is the government has run out of road for its Brexit plan. Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement for leaving the European Union suffered the largest parliamentary defeat in history in January. It has been defeated twice since then. There’s no reason to think that Mrs May will somehow win over the 34 Conservatives from both the hardline leave and remain wings of her party who have rebelled. Her promise to quit if Tory MPs backed her deal emphasised her loss of command over the Brexit process.
There is now a straightforward choice: either change Brexit policy or change the parliament. The latter requires a general election, but the odds are against any party gaining a big majority. The predicament the nation finds itself in is in part a consequence of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. This does not allow for the dissolution of parliament when a prime minister has been defeated on the government’s legislation. The act says two-thirds of MPs have to approve a motion for an early election to be called. The legislation’s unintended consequence in the current parliament is that MPs can rebel without risking the collapse of their own government. It is ironic that the Conservative election manifesto in 2017 pledged to repeal an act which Mrs May now relies on to keep her in office.
Parliament has seized the initiative because the prime minister cannot. MPs are looking to see if a form of Brexit might command most parliamentarians’ support. As in the first round, it is possible that no scheme will. However, two ideas came close to securing a majority: one was for the UK to join a permanent customs union with the EU, the other was that a referendum on any Brexit deal ought to be held. Mrs May should pay attention to the outcome of next week’s votes. She is running out of time to come up with a plan that either parliament or her party and its allies can support. Mrs May needs to tell EU leaders at an emergency European council meeting on 10 April how the UK intends to proceed. The UK must also come up with proposals before 12 April to avert a ruinous no-deal Brexit, which MPs have voted against. Restoring the sovereignty of parliament was one of the major aims of Brexit. Mrs May could honour that by accepting what MPs vote for.
The prime minister cannot much longer dodge the fact we are heading for an article 50 extension that almost certainly will require the UK to hold European parliamentary elections in May. If this were to come to pass, there ought to be no confected outrage from Brexiters. The priority of getting this imbroglio resolved is worth the price of having British MEPs in place while it is being sorted. Like another referendum, such elections ought to be attractive to a political class in search of ways to share the burden for Brexit decisions with the people.
Brexit may prove too complex to deliver in a parliamentary democracy on the current timescale. But the underlying causes of Brexit – economic, cultural and constitutional – will not go away. More than 3 million people voted in the 2016 referendum who don’t normally vote in general elections. A longer spell to consider Brexit could give MPs breathing space to fix Britain’s burning issues. The Cambridge historian Jonathan Parry writes that parliament has a “historic responsibility for ‘educating the nation’ … persuading the people out of utopian ideas, however attractive in theory”. MPs are attempting to do just that. Mrs May erred in thinking Brexit could resurrect a system of untrammelled sovereignty, with little protection against an overweening executive. Instead the 2016 referendum gave no mandate to any form of Brexit. Either that has to be decided by MPs – which, in a hung parliament, must mean working across party lines – or by some deliberative democratic mechanism, or by returning to the voters for more precise instructions. Doing so is not a defeat of democracy but a requirement of it.
