Editor’s Picks: UK’s Last 100 Days before Brexit

Local Editor

In case all went as expected, the UK will leave the European Union 100 days from today.

British media, mainly, dealt with issue as a top priority. Respectively, we chose you some related pieces.

To begin with, The Independent’s Editorial Board said “The next 100 days will define Brexit – it will be our job to find clarity in the mess”, adding that “At this very late stage the possibilities remain dizzying in their variety and have radically different implications.”

With 100 days to go until Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union – potentially the greatest peacetime challenge in the nation’s economic history – the only thing anyone can be certain about is that Brexit is a mess.

There is still too much uncertainty. With a painful irony, there is also at least one fact that is incontrovertible – that not knowing what the immediate future will bring is bad for business, jobs and livelihoods.

It is worth recalling exactly how far away we now are from what was once blithely predicted about the “easiest trade deal in history”. Not so long ago, in the days when David Davis was Brexit secretary and Theresa May laid out her defiant red lines, it seemed that Britain expected to have its cake and eat it, and Europe would smother it in cream for us.

This time last year, when the initial phase of the talks about the “divorce” was complete and “sufficient progress” had been made, it was confidently said that the future trade and security partnership between the UK and EU would also be ready for sign off. Hence the catchphrase that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Well, we do now have a UK-EU withdrawal agreement, but the House of Commons stubbornly refuses to endorse it.

Meanwhile, Neal Lawson wrote for The Guardian that “We can break the Brexit deadlock: with a citizens’ assembly.”

Brexit is the rock on which our democratic system has run aground. But really the ship has been holed beneath the waterline for some time.

Some are content to shuffle the deckchairs and simply replace one captain with another – which may be necessary but is far from sufficient. Yet we can’t just stop Brexit and press the rewind button. Nothing will be the same again. And depending on the lessons we draw from the crisis and the actions we take, things will either get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse…

As such, representative democracy will only be buttressed if other forms of democracy, direct and deliberative, are put in place. That is why many people, including myself, have called this week for a Brexit citizens’ assembly. It’s a simple and compelling idea that could break the logjam of a parliament that isn’t built to represent the ways in which the UK now divides, allowing instead for a form of reasoned politics to get us out of this mess.

A citizens’ assembly is therefore a solution to the Brexit impasse. But, just as important, it could lay the foundations for a new form of democracy that allows more meaningful participation. Calm, reflective and empathetic, it is everything our politics currently isn’t. Because this isn’t just about new democratic structures but a new political culture where it’s safe for politicians to say “I don’t know”, “it’s too complex”, or “I need help”. Our awful, adversarial and macho political culture is simply no match for a world that is complex, grey, nuanced and paradoxical.

Additionally, The Guardian’s Anne Perkins wrote “Westminster is so bloated on Brexit, it can’t even manage its bread and butter.”

In the shadow of the immediate Brexit crisis, its opportunity costs – the bills left unprepared, let alone debated and passed – are not often considered. Theresa May insists that she has an ambitious program of social reform she yearns to roll out to fulfil that early promise about a country more at ease with itself. In the aftermath of last week’s confidence vote, it was impossible to miss the real regret in her voice as she confirmed her intention not to lead the party into the next election. She will forever be the Brexit prime minister. And not even someone as motivated by duty as May is without the vanity of yearning to be remembered for something positive.

Brexit is sucking the life out of Whitehall. There is no mental bandwidth, no spare personnel, not even many worked-out ideas that don’t relate to the monstrous project. Every sinew is strained to wrestle against disaster.

May could be crippled by her own political personality, her caution, her maladroit people management. But she is unquestionably restrained by the constitutional absurdity of having to balance two rival remits: on one hand the referendum, and on the other the general election result. Neither of them is in any way an adequate guide to the real question that has to be faced, which is the shape of Britain’s future relations with Europe, and the kind of country Britain itself wants to become. Her determination not to confront the reality of these huge questions, and the reluctance of the opposition to challenge her effectively, condemns Westminster MPs to wade through treacle, and the rest of us to hold our heads in despair.

On the same issue, Binoy Kampmark’s piece for the Counter Punch was entitled “May Days in Britain.”

It is hard to envisage sympathy for a person who made a name as a home secretary (prisons, detentions, security and such) taking the mast and banner of her country before hopeless odds, but inadequate opponents will do that to you.  Vicious, venal and underdone, the enemies from within Theresa May’s own Tory ranks resemble the lazily angry, the fumingly indulgent.

Brexit is the great exercise of imperfection, an experiment that the EU would like to quash just as many in the UK would like to see reversed.  It has been disheartening and cruel; it has divided and disturbed. It has also demonstrated levels of marked mendacity fitting for countries British citizens tend to mock.  Facts have become fictions; fictions have been paraded as exemplars of truth.  The dark spirits have been released, and there are not going to be bottled any time soon, Kampmark concluded.

Source: Al-Ahed News