The march of Brexit folly

"Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be."

The historian Barbara Tuchman would have relished Brexit.

As a study in folly, the subject of her great book, it's up there with the best. For connoisseurs of political folly, it's not so much the big brute fact of the UK volunteering for an act of collective self-harm so much as the multiple smaller follies nested within it. There are follies upon follies.

So, which of Tuchman's case studies does the Brexit process most resemble? Montezuma's needless surrender of his well-defended empire? Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia despite having the lesson of Sweden's Charles XII before them? Britain's own relentless provoking of its North American colonists, or perhaps the US's persistent self-deception in Vietnam?

It would be entertaining to cast Jacob Rees-Mogg as the tin-pot leader of a pythonesque gang of conquistadors intimidating Theresa May into deluded submission. It's tempting to see her doomed efforts to extract more concessions from the EU as a Brexit retreat from Moscow to the strains of the Ode to Joy. Her Downing Street ‘I'm on your side' speech had all the political deftness of Lord North's decision to coerce the Boston Tea-Partyers rather than listen to their grievances, and the Brexiteers' own capacity for self-deception is as heroic as the US leadership's in the Vietnam war. (It's also longer-lived).

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a British politician serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Northeast Somerset since the general election of 2010. He proposed a Conservative coalition with the UK Independence Party and campaigned for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. /VCG Photo

Set beside those epoch-making examples the UK's obtuse approach to leaving a political community it's never fully belonged to (by staying out of the Euro) may seem bathetic rather than tragic. But when you look at Tuchman's criteria, Brexit elbows its way into the pantheon with ease.

The essence of folly for Tuchman is the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest, aided by the failure of intelligent mental processes. One can accept that the Brexit process is an argument about defining what the UK's self-interest actually is but still see that, objectively, there is an irreducible component of self-harm in it.

The up-front costs of losing our seat at the EU table, having to rebuild trade deals, find replacement medical staff, recreate diplomatic relationships, and simply pay the EU hard cash are undeniably against our self-interest. Brexiteers can only offer faith that they are a price worth paying which in the long term will somehow pay off.

But it isn't just the outcome we're collectively aiming at that meets Tuchman's folly test. It's the way our representatives have gone about it. It's in the Brexit process that we see intelligent mental processes continually fail, with avowed self-interest the victim.

To count as folly, firstly, a policy has to be perceived as such at the time. May's Brexit approach jumps that barrier with more clear air than an Olympic athlete hurdling a bucket. Given the volume of commentary urging the building of a true national consensus no-one can claim it's just hindsight to accuse Theresa May of blundering by pandering only to the Brexit ultras.

There has to have been a feasible alternative available. Clearly, May didn't have to call the election in 2017 which led to minority government, she could have heeded the calls to build a national consensus even after she disastrously did and she could have delayed triggering article 50.

Here is a YouGov poll which showed support for a cross-party negotiation with Europe in 2017. Here's the petition calling for the same, and here's a list of senior politicians doing likewise. Clearly they all believed it was possible, which it was, thanks in part to a Brexit-sympathetic Labour leader. She also needn't have raised the ultras' hopes of a no-deal, something the Financial Times counseled against in May 2017.

British woman Amy Pollard poses at her home during an interview in London on March 22, 2019. Pollard, who had previously been diagnosed bipolar, said that anxiety over Brexit brought on by compulsive efforts to find solutions and a way forward led to her being sectioned on July 1, a week after the 2016 vote. Around four in ten British adults have been left feeling powerless, angry or worried by Brexit in the last year, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF), a rare point of agreement for voters across the divide. /VCG Photo

Thirdly the folly has to be a collective act rather than simply the product of individual foibles. Theresa May's highly personal responsibility, rooted in her character flaws, might seem to disqualify the Brexit shambles as a Tuchmanesque folly.

But for Tuchman wooden-headedness is often found lurking at the scene of a folly. The historian's judgement on Phillip II of Spain that she quotes would be hard to better as a verdict on May's prodigious myopia: "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence." The self-destructiveness of May's 'Brexit means Brexit' might even be approaching the level of Phillip III, who died of overheating rather than move away from a brazier when the functionary who was supposed to remove it couldn't be found.

In any case the mess we're in meets Tuchman's test of being a collective product created over many political lifetimes. The folly was well into its incubation when John Major damned the ‘bastards' in his own cabinet.

Philip II of Spain. /VCG Photo

It erupted into gleeful life at Cameron's hubristic decision to ask people to vote on an issue few saw as a priority and it fed parasitically off the energy of a general disgust at the political class amplified by the MPs' expenses scandal and the 2008 crash.

It's matured into this ugly full-blown crisis as result of the rigidities, bile and phantasms which are its inheritance and now it's kept going by a compound of multiple smaller, interlocking follies.

May's wooden-headedness perfectly casts her as the wrong person at the wrong time. But she's locked in a tessellated embrace with Corbyn's determined unwillingness to challenge which has given her folly free rein; with the utter self-certainty of Rees-Mogg and the naked self-interest of Boris Johnson who seem to get closer to destroying the thing they desire the nearer they approach it.

Tuchman identifies the rejection of reason as the prime characteristic of folly but traces it back to moral failing rather than incompetence. The moral failing is rooted in the passions - ambition, and lust for power - but finds fertile ground in mental stagnation which fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. As experience challenges the suitability of those principles they rigidify.

Leaders have free will but fail to use it because, as Tuchman says, with egos at stake, ‘to alter course is the most repugnant option in government.' May and the Brexiteers not only refuse to contemplate changing course, they elevate the folly of rigidity to the level of a principle by insisting we can't go beyond the result of the 2016 referendum.

The key test is to recognize when persistence in error has become self-damaging. How can anyone deny that's where the long drawn-out agony of Brexit has taken us, both in our relations with Europe and with each other? Tuchman quotes Edmund Burke's verdict on British colonial policy: "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great Empire and little minds go ill together."

We may no longer have the empire, but we're stuck with the little minds.

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