The middle ground no longer exists over Brexit. It's all or nothing now | Andrew Rawnsl... - 0 views
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Whether she should have looked for a compromise much earlier will be a question that will detain historians. Their judgment will shape a lot of the verdict on Mrs May’s tortured premiership. She has been a member of the Conservative party all her adult life and anyone familiar with the party’s behaviour over the past three decades might have intuited that it would be impossible to unite Tories around any Brexit strategy.
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A leader with more foresight than Mrs May could have worked that out and realised that the only way to manage it through the Commons was by building a cross-party majority. Had Mrs May begun Brexit by going to Brussels with a negotiating mandate pre-approved by parliament, she might have enhanced her clout with the EU as well as her chances of securing parliamentary agreement on the outcome.
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Instead of trying to build a parliamentary consensus and seeking common ground between the 52% and the 48%, she chose to entrench divisions within the Commons and inflame them in the country by taking one side against the other
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When she failed to get the mandate for a hard Brexit that she sought at the 2017 election, she might have switched strategy and attempted to reach out to the opposition at that point. She instead doubled down on her original, fatal strategy and made herself a hostage of the DUP and the Tory ultras on her backbenches.
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She is the product of a political culture that tends to emphasise the adversarial over the consensual. It is expressed in the architecture of a parliament that sits the two sides confronting each other.
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This is especially true of a Tory party that reveres Margaret Thatcher above all its other leaders since Winston Churchill. The Conservative party is in love with the concept of the battling leader and rather disdains the idea of the healing leader.
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Pressure is building within Labour for the party to take an unambiguous stand on the other side of the barricades and become an anti-Brexit party. That pressure will be increased when the Euros see large numbers of previous Labour voters desert the party for the Lib Dems, Greens and Change UK. If a general election hasn’t happened by September, Labour’s party conference is highly likely to force its reluctant leadership to make a no-qualifications commitment to a fresh referendum