We have now descended well beyond farce and pantomime to despair. With May scheduled to be given a few minutes to make her crucial pitch to the EU 27 tonight in Brussels, begging them to be flexible, we have Donald Tusk (HERE) calling for "concrete proposals" to break the deadlock! What on earth have we been discussing for the last few weeks!! It's crunch night in Brussels and yet, after a year or more we seem to be still at the stage of kicking a few rough ideas about? For Heaven's sake, what is going on?
We are informed that she told the assembled cabinet yesterday, "If we as a government stand together and stand firm, we can achieve this". She was talking to 25 people or so, ministers who cannot agree on anything. The idea of them standing together is laughable. They have at least fifty different opinions on Brexit, and this is even more surprising when you think that some, like May herself and Jeremy Hunt, don't seem to have one at all. Half of them would stab the PM in the back without a second thought.
Yesterday She managed to get away without a rebellion when the cabinet backed her rejection of the EU's backstop proposals. But they had no alternative ideas and apparently neither did the prime minister. We should all be shocked. She seems utterly paralysed, unable to find any solution of her own or explain the immense problems of Brexit to the people who voted to leave or face down the extremists in her party. It looks like she simply wants to occupy Downing Street for as long as possible.
The ultras can't afford to depose her and she is too weak to make any progress. To make matters worse, she is locked into a crazy dance with the EU. They won't even consider trade unless the withdrawal agreement is settled and she says she can't get the withdrawal agreement past her cabinet or parliament unless the future trade relationship is spelled out in detail. Yet far from any detail she can't even get the EU Council to consider trade issues at all! It's a Mexican stand off, each side waiting for the other to crack.
Do the cabinet know what leaving the EU without a deal actually means? Individually and collectively they must know how disastrous it would be for the people of this country. If they don't we are really in trouble. On the other hand, it might be they want to seem like they are upping the ante or engaging in a bit of brinkmanship but will concede everything very soon.
There is something called the risky shift phenomenon. This is the tendency of committees to make riskier decisions where the blame for any adverse consequences can be shared or diluted among other committee members. If this is what we are seeing in cabinet, we may indeed be on the way to exiting without a deal.
