The bad news is we’re only in Act 4, if that. This British disaster has legs.
It’s chaos out there with two weeks to go until the March 29 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union. This is what happens when English public school boys, nostalgic for Empire, dream up a scheme for the resurrection of British glory based on foisting every little-England frustration on their neighbors across the Channel who started or lost the war.
Delusion is the mother of debacle. Jon Snow, the Channel 4 presenter, lost it with the health secretary Matt Hancock as he tried to express some pious hope. Snow pronounced Britain “completely asunder.” He said that “nobody in the country knows what’s going on,” and that Hancock knew “nothing.”
His verdict on Britain after a week of parliamentary debate that went some way toward indicating what Britain doesn’t want but offered no clue as to what Britain does want: “We are a laughingstock.”
The Brexit vote of 2016 was a fantasy, a case of what’s known in psychotherapy as transference. Somebody called a Brussels bureaucrat, a faceless schemer intent on ensnaring Britannia in his Continental rules, became the feckless foreigner onto whom every irritation — from waiting for help from the National Health Service to all the Polish kids in the local school — was transferred. Lies fed this process. The outcome was self-harm.
All the parliamentary wrangling has amounted to an attempt to turn fantasy into reality — to reconcile a plebiscite with parliamentary democracy (which is what Britain is) and somehow kick the disaster that is Brexit into the long grass. The result was predictable: Even 650 MPs cannot force a square peg into a round hole.
Parliament did reject a no-deal Brexit, the over-a-cliff solution that could see chaos at Dover; all the Brits with their pads in Provence and the Costa Brava and Chiantishire thrust into limbo and forced into the “other passports” line at European borders; and the severing of the multinational supply chains on which British industry depends.
It also voted to postpone beyond March 29 Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Neither of these votes, however, is “meaningful,” if meaningful is taken to mean that the outcomes they stipulate will happen.
May will resurface next week in Parliament in a third attempt to get her “deal” (really a fudge postponing all major decisions) through. She will deploy dire warnings to try to get Tory hard-liners and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party on board. In essence, she will say: It’s my deal or a long extension beyond March 29. And a long extension could well mean no Brexit.
The vote will certainly be closer as maximalist pro-Brexit zealots within her Conservative Party, who want no accommodation with the European Union, realize their insanity could end up delivering the sanity of Britain remaining. It’s still more likely, however, that a deal twice defeated will be defeated a third time — unless May tries this desperate gambit: “Vote for the deal and I will resign March 30.” She won’t do that.
If her deal finally dies an irrevocable death, May will have to negotiate an extension with the European Union. The union will want to know what the extension beyond March 29 is for. It will probably favor a long extension because a short one is likely to be useless, given that nearly three years of negotiation have produced only mayhem.
Personally, I think an indefinite extension might be the solution lurking in the long grass. That way Britain could remain in the European Union forever while professing to want to leave. Brexit could be Britain’s Godot. Everyone would be happy.
That won’t happen in this dour age. But I suspect a long extension will be granted with the reason for it getting fudged. If it’s not, no-deal Brexit looms again as imminent (in fact, it looms anyway as one possible outcome at the end of any long extension).
Once this whole mess goes beyond March 29 (many Brits would now prefer summary execution to more talk of Brexit), all bets are off. Britain could find itself voting in the European Parliament election in May, a surreal exercise. In June, three years will have passed since the Brexit vote. Polls suggest opinion has shifted in favor of remaining. I can’t imagine a long extension without either a general election or a second referendum: This will have to go back to the people.
I told you we are in Act 4, if that. Oh, yes, the Malthouse Compromise: You don’t need to worry, dear reader. It was a fantasy. What’s real is that Britain is better off with more than a half-billion other people in the borderless European miracle that is the union.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.