I think there is growing nervousness on the part of Brexiteers about Northern Ireland. And in response, a narrative is developing that it is all the fault of remainers who blocked May's deal going through and thus contributed to creating a need for the NI protocol. Gavin Barwell, not a Brexiteer admittedly, who was Mrs May's adviser, is the latest to attempt to excuse her from blame and place it on remainers. He responded to a tweet from Huddersfield Labour MP Barry Sheerman with this:
How many times did you vote against a Brexit deal that would have avoided these problems, ultimately leading to Theresa May standing down and Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister? https://t.co/nVySpewqtU
— Gavin Barwell (@GavinBarwell) April 8, 2021
Professor Chris Grey who is surely the foremost expert on Brexit (and who has a book coming out - see below) answered with his own Twitter thread:
From all I know and have heard about @GavinBarwell he is a decent and honourable person, so I'm casting no aspersions on his integrity at all, but I really struggle to understand this analysis. Short thread: 1/7 https://t.co/k3ITaQO1DU
— Chris Grey (@chrisgreybrexit) April 11, 2021
What follows is a brutally logical thread delivered as ever with his usual grace and elegance. What Grey says is that IF Mays deal had passed with Labour support in the teeth of ferocious ERG & DUP opposition, what government could actually have enacted it?
I think it's clear she could never have done it and would surely have been "deposed within days" by a VONC (Opposition parties + ERG, DUP). He points out that the only option in that case would be government of national unity under Jeremy Corbyn, again a non-starter.
Next, presumably he argues would surely have come a general election - but who would have led the Tories? May would have been trying to stand on a manifesto with her deal at its centre but which half her own MPs did not agree with. If there had been time to get a new leader in place that would probably have been Johnson and her deal would have been rejected immediately.
And, as he points out, May's Withdrawal Agreement didn't avoid a sea border anyway, that's the whole reason why the DUP opposed it. Gavin Barwell says elsewhere that she'd committed to a "common rule book", but that could only be agreed in the future terms deal, not the WA, and the ERG would never have allowed that, even if TM survived.
Grey says he has chronicled all the twists and turns, and thinks this emergent idea that in 2018 there was a way out of Theresa May's 2017 red lines and ERG extremism if only Lab/ remainers had acted differently doesn't fit the record.
Then comes what I think is the most telling part:
"The chance for compromise, if it existed, was in the first weeks of May's premiership in 2016 to construct a national consultation. It might have failed, but it wasn't tried, and by 2018 it was too late."
I agree with all of this (I wouldn't dare do otherwise - he's the master) but what it means is that virtually everything we are seeing unfold out of Brexit in NI violence and loss of trade, stems from a decision taken not by cabinet but by May and her two advisers, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, alone in late 2016. From then on the die was cast.
I don't believe any of the three fully (or even partly!) understood what they were doing or the consequences for millions of people of the decision they took. May was obsessed with controlling immigration and prioritised that above everything else which automatically meant the UK leaving the four freedoms of the single market.
Johnson put sovereignty above everything as if we could all live off it forever and hence the trade deal with out nearest, richest and largest market is the same or worse than a country thousands of miles away.
Finally, you can preorder Grey's book HERE. It's called Brexit unfolded: How no one got what they wanted.
In October 2018 I wrote a blog post with the title Brexit: Nobody will be happy and I still stand by it. When that sinks in we can begin to reverse Brexit.
