Tony Blair: Don’t just give Theresa May the free hand she is seeking over Brexit

While the PM can expect a clear victory on June 8, voters need to consider what mandate it will give her
Taking control: Theresa May addressing the House of Commons, where a big majority will be crucial to her talks
Reuters
Tony Blair21 April 2017
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Whatever may be desirable, the polls appear to be definitive on the election and the respective polling positions of the Leaders of the Government and Opposition.

There are many great Labour candidates and MPs and I will be fully supportive of them. But the fact is that if the polls are right, Theresa May will be PM on June 9 with a large majority.

But with what mandate? The British people have to navigate a way through not just choosing a government but working out what they want the governing mandate to be.

Unless there is some clarity around that mandate, a re-elected Tory Government could do what it wants. But is that what we want? The PM says she wants her hand strengthened in the Brexit negotiations. This is plausible as a headline but requires greater interrogation. What she really wants is a free hand — but to do what?

Some say it is to defeat the Tory Right so that she can go for a “softer Brexit”. This is naive. The opposite is true. At present, if she wanted to face down the Tory Right she has a Parliament with a majority to do so. What she doesn’t have is a Parliament that would vote for Brexit at any cost.

Her current position is: Brexit will happen, there’s no turning back and no deal is better than a bad deal. What for her is non-negotiable, is that Brexit will not happen.

Tony Blair: 'She is choosing to hold the election now because, as of now, we don’t know the terms we may be offered'
PA

Therefore she wants a landslide majority so that there are sufficient numbers of Tory MPs who will vote to leave Europe even if the deal does not deliver “exactly the same benefits” as membership of the single market and customs union. Or there is no deal.

The Daily Mail front page “Crush the Saboteurs” tells you exactly what the aim of the election is — and the saboteurs it has in mind are not, I think we can safely say, the Tory Right.

Of course the PM’s preference, correctly, is for the best deal for Britain and, she genuinely hopes, one giving us maximum access to the single market and customs union.

But for her it is the best deal for Britain that is consistent with Brexit. Excluded from the “best deal” concept is giving the people the right to change their minds on Brexit.

“Brexit means Brexit” was mocked at the time as a vacuous statement. In fact, it was a plain encapsulation of the mission of the Government. Brexit comes first, foremost and paramount.

Theresa May is a reasonable person pursuing an unreasonable policy. In so far as this election is about Brexit, there is one question that should dominate every interview, course through every husting, enlighten every debate — a question for the PM and for every other candidate.

It is: would you still go ahead with Brexit, even if the deal did not deliver substantially the same access to the single market and customs union we have now or was one that carried long-term risks to our economy or there was no deal? In other words, are there any circumstances in which having looked at the “best deal” we can get, we conclude that it isn’t good enough for Britain?

She is choosing to hold the election now because, as of now, we don’t know the terms we may be offered. She is therefore in the benign position of claiming there is a “best deal for Britain” in prospect. And no one can irrefutably claim otherwise. But she will also now have a much more detailed analysis of the difficulties of this negotiation. And they are formidable.

Essentially, and never forget this was an original achievement of the Thatcher government of the Eighties, we created one supra-national market which was a vast facilitation of economic activity. It became easier to do business, to criss-cross supply chains in manufacturing, to have London as Europe’s financial centre, even for the euro when we weren’t a member of it, to have service industries serving the whole of Europe not just the UK. It was something hugely superior to an ordinary free-trade agreement. It was unique.

What we’re now embarked upon is the strangest exercise in trade negotiation the world has seen.

We’re going to unravel our participation in that one market, and then try to renegotiate a free-trade agreement that gives us back its benefits.

Most trade negotiations are about straightforward trade liberalisation. This one will be about de-liberalisation followed by re-liberalisation. The technical complication of this is obvious.

But politically, the choices are now pretty clear: either something effectively like the single market and customs union but which would require accepting the rules of both — and that is inconsistent with the political declarations of the PM. Or something less than that, with reduced market access and probably a lot of bureaucracy around things such as “rules of origin” etc. Or going out with no deal and trading under World Trade Organisation rules.

Some of these deals are comparatively good for the economy, some bad, some ugly. She will try for good but she has ruled out staying in the single market. The likelihood is therefore a choice between bad and downright ugly.

We need to add a new dimension to this election, a movement of informed voters who can ensure that a re-elected Tory party cannot claim a mandate for Brexit at any cost.

I propose that the organisations that want to keep open the right of people to change their minds on Brexit, depending on the outcome of the negotiation, come together to mobilise voters to demand from candidates a clear statement of their position on Brexit; in particular, whether they would refuse to support a deal that substantially diminishes our access to the single market or a “no deal” outcome.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who are still highly active on this issue. There are several organisations, each with a contact base of more than 200,000 people and one with more than 500,000. Would-be MPs need to know that for significant numbers of their constituents an open mind on Brexit counts.

We don’t know what size majority Mrs May will get. But we can determine what mandate she can claim.

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