The result of yesterday’s meaningful vote in the House of Commons, much like the first in January, was emblematic of a very striking Brexit reality: that the principal barrier to leaving the EU comes from the very people most desperate to see it happen.
The Tory right have had two clear chances to push Brexit over the line, two clear chances that were squandered in dogged pursuit of a “perfect” vision of Brexit. What makes their intransigence all the more useless is their collective inability to produce any worthwhile negotiating alternative. What we have witnessed is an exercise in prioritising ideology over what is best for the country.
The hardliners, persistent in their belief that the UK would in the end be afforded special treatment by the EU, have served only to undermine the very mandate they seek to protect. They have spent months shifting the negotiating goalposts and conjuring up unsatisfactory plans not worth the paper they were written on.
The failure of the UK’s political system should also not be ignored. We fought a referendum as if it were a general election, with a campaign acting like a potential government. We triggered article 50 without even the faintest semblance of a plan. And we failed to properly understand the nature of EU third country operations and why the Brexit talks were never going to be standard negotiations.
The Northern Ireland issue in particular stands as strong evidence of this. Had we thought more about how we could plan our EU departure around the Good Friday agreement and cross-border relations, we might not have found ourselves so stuck. But the cavalier way the Irish border was dismissed is a symptom of a problem much wider than Brexit.
For years, Britain simply hasn’t paid enough attention to Northern Ireland. It has at times been treated like an unwanted son, with its appalling levels of poverty – some of the worst in the country – not even registering a blip on Britain’s political radar. Brexit’s collapse is in part a manifestation of this very serious problem.
And so the end result of the current parliamentary logjam is that Brexit is pretty much unworkable. There exists no majority for any particular outcome, and neither another referendum nor another general election can claim to be silver bullet solutions to this constitutional crisis.
What happens now is a matter of speculation. It is perhaps possible to imagine a scenario in which the Brexit deadline of 29 March is extended to 22 May, just shy of the date on which the next round of European parliamentary elections will be held. The prime minister may try to bring her deal back, but it is unlikely she will escape the claws of the Commons. Her deal cannot and will never meet with the approval of a majority of parliamentary interests.
All this should be seen as domestic incompetence. The EU has, from day one, been reasonably accommodating and consistent in its vision for where negotiations would lead. Both sides agreed to the sequencing, both sides agreed to the inclusion of a backstop within the withdrawal agreement. Both sides tried their hardest to obey referendum-induced red lines, which in the end proved impossible to square.
The cold, hard fact of Brexit is that the hardliners poked and pushed so hard that they eventually rendered their dream unrealisable. Any and all leave voters ought to feel let down and disappointed by their actions. When opportunities for leaving presented themselves, hardliner MPs blocked them off.
In the end, the hard Brexiteer perfectionists bedazzled by cake and unicorns proved to be the obstacle that Brexit itself could not hurdle.