<nettime> Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party

More from the Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party (Alice not Boston OK)...

Across Britain a confused populace on all sides of the Brexit debate have a tendancy to respond in the same way when journalists ask them for their oppion in those annoying Vox Pops. One and all declare with an angry voice “why don’t they just get on with it”! If you respond by saying well its more complicated than that then you sound like a patronising “mansplainer” from the remainer elite. But last week I heard a useful piece of “mansplaining” by the BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson on this informal podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p073k9z3

In his story Robinson is confronted with a guy in a local shop who recognises him and asks him to explain "why we can’t just leave”. After establishing that the man genuinely wanted to know and wasnt just looking for an argument Robinson noticed from a log on his shirt that he was and adapted his explanation so that it would make sense.

He went on to explain that most people had assumed that the EU is basically a ‘club’ that got too big for its boots and that like any club you could just walk out of it. But in fact the EU is much more like one of the boxes that sits at the end of your road and occassionaly the door swings open and we see a forest of different colour wires…all interconnected.. and its as if you as an electrician had been coming down the road once a week for more that 40 years and every time you just stick in a new wire. That does the job you are trying to do. You never have any reason to un-wire it much less have a plan for how it can be unwired. And that explains why when the box flies open its just baffling for anyone looking from the outside. That assers Robins is our relationship with Europe and we never really bothered to explain that to ourselves or anybody else.. even in the course of the referendum where we dealing in abstract nouns (sovereignty etc) without taking much account that pretty much everything about the standards of our goods, the way we trade things.. the way we set environmental standards. This is like all those wires going in and therefore it really is a lot more complicated than simply snipping the wires and saying there! we’re out now.

That is the gist of Robinson's explanation of course that in itself is (inevitably) an over simplification as this makes the EU sound like its just a regulatory regime for fasciliating trade and trade standards. Without emphasising that it is also became and in fact always was a deeply *political project* that has long harboured federalist ambitions. And for the left these ambitions also include the further embedding of a neo-liberal (Macronist) agenda which is one reason why the Labour Party remains conflicted.

But whatever way you cut it we cannot avoid the fact that the political and the regulatory have become deeply entangled for 40 years and so however much we may dislike the EU any program of either reform or withdrawl cannot be enacted by just snipping the wires.. It will take a generation if we are to do it without the economic and sociatel equivalent lights flickering out, the food going off in the freezer and the Netflix account being cancelled.

*Intruiging surface froth*

Of course the ‘black box’ of the EU as regulatory regime is boring compared the Monty Pythonesqe shenaningans in parliament (or is it Faulty Towers) as the government voted against itself and lost. The Labour party voted against the policy of a people’s vote it was supposed to be supporting and a parliament that was supposed to want to take control away from a failing government failed to get the majority required.. The terrific Guardian journalist Marina Hynde described this as the "brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis enacted by the Teletubies!"

Not withstanding it could be argued that Theresa May ended the week on a high. Perhapse even scoring a strategic victory. Six weeks ago the Civil Servant Olie Robins (one of perhaps THE architects of the May deal) was overheard in a Brussels bar describing the scenario in which the Tory Brexit Taliban and the DUP would (in the later stages of the process) be confronted by a binary choice. Parliament he reasoned would take *no deal* off the table. They would be left with the binary choice: either hold their noses and vote for the PM’s deal or be stuck with a long extension in which anything could happen. It has proved to pan out exactly as Oly Robins predicted suggesting some method in the madness.

It all enhances her chances of getting her deal across the line. There are as I write definite signs that this is happening.. key ERG figures are crumbling and the DUP are negotiating in a more positive frame of mind. She may not get the numbers to get her deal accross the line next week but she will come back on the 25th (with days to go) and have one last try.. she could well still snatch snatch a fiasco from the jaws of a catastrophe. Who knows not me.. I am used to being wrong but remain as entranced as a rabit staring at the head lights coming towards me.

From my Brexit Central Sofa

David Garcia