Brexit is still alive – and nothing is resolved

One plausible description of what happened in the British House of Commons on Tuesday night is that it was one more step into the delusions of lunacy. The Tory Party in Parliament united behind the idea that there is somewhere – perhaps over the rainbow - an acceptable way to square the circle of the Irish border question, other than by the notorious backstop. It did not know what that way might be, but it sent Theresa May off to Brussels to search for it.

It did not seem to worry them that Brussels has repeatedly said it does not exist. What mattered, apparently, is that Mrs May’s team had at last found a formula that brought together the many dissident elements over Brexit policy that the party now contains. Once Mrs May returns empty handed from begging the European Union to help her out of a hole she has dug for herself, those disparate constituencies will head off in their different directions once more.

  Another description, however, might be that what Mrs May sorely needs now, to build on her success of Tuesday night, is a thoroughly good fudge – a smoke screen, to change the metaphor, to hide the absence of any logical solution. With no revised agreement to put to Parliament, the UK will leave the EU at the end of March without a deal because it is the default outcome. But in that event neither the British Government nor the Irish Government has the slightest intention of erecting customs sheds on the border between north and south, nor of rushing hundreds of officials in blue uniforms to occupy them, so they can stop and inspect the traffic.

  Both sides have sworn on all they hold sacred that no hard border will reappear, come what may. That is both highly honourable and deeply self-interested. Brussels needs to contemplate what this means. Does it send Italian or Danish officials to the border area, in place of those that Dublin will not provide? Does it fine the Irish Government for every day its writ is not obeyed? Is Brexit lunacy that contagious? Or does it turn a blind eye, muttering to itself “That’s the Irish for you,” and return to dealing with the Polish crisis?

  But somewhere ahead there may be a chlorine-washed chicken wanting to cross the border, and both Dublin and Brussels will want to turn it back. The independence that London seeks from EU trade agreements is so that it can strike deals with, say, the United States, were beef cattle are fattened with hormones (banned by the EU), and chickens prepared for the supermarket shelves with a sterilising bath of chlorine, (also banned by the EU). At that point, something will have to give. But meanwhile Mrs May can pass her deal through Parliament, the European Union swallows hard and signs up, and Brexit duly happens as promised.

  Other options are still in play. It is plain, for instance, that the House of Commons has little appetite for a second referendum. But as Sherlock Holmes says on The Sign of Four, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” – or in this case, the one remaining way forward. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely Mrs May can pass her Withdrawal Agreement into law by the March 29 deadline. She will need an extension to the Article 50 timetable. The EU may well not agree, unless she promises to agree to a People’s Vote on it. And it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that such a referendum - not a “second” one as the choices would be different - would go her way.

  So Brexit is still alive. And it is no clearer than it ever was, what it means. Nor what could stop it.