Brexit: Johnson makes his move

Shock! Horror! Johnson prorogues parliament! End of democracy in Britain! The speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, says he was not even consulted, and calls it “a constitutional outrage”.

Or, to put it a little less dramatically, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has cut the amount of time that parliament will meet before he crashes the United Kingdom out of the European Union in a “no-deal” Brexit on 31 October by six working days.

Johnson will face parliament for the first time as prime minister on September 4, but they will all go off on holiday again on September 10, not on the 13th as scheduled. And then parliament will not meet again until October 14, not on the originally planned date of October 9. So no need to panic, and a rather small constitutional outrage.

Great commotion in the media, of course, but the reports that zombies will roam the streets of London eating the children of Remainers after Britain’s “no-deal” departure from the EU on Halloween are absolutely untrue. There have, however, been some werewolf sightings in the city.

Johnson is an accidental prime minister. Few people even in his own Conservative Party thought he was fit for the job, but they panicked after the Conservatives came fifth, fifth!, in last May’s European Union elections.

The British only voted in those elections at all because Theresa May’s government still had not managed to leave the EU after three years of trying. It lost so badly because a lot of Brexit-backing Conservatives defected to Nigel Farage’s single-issue Brexit Party in exasperation, and to win them back the Conservatives had to change leaders.

So out goes May and in comes Johnson, who may be a liar and a clown but is popular with Conservative voters. And this new prime minister, chosen only by a vote of Conservative Party members, inherits the task of keeping the Party’s promise to take the UK out of the EU. Alas, the parliamentary arithmetic to do that still does not work.

The Conservative government has only a one-vote majority in parliament, but that is the smaller part of the problem. The bigger part is that Conservative members of parliament are so split on the question of Brexit that there is no-exit deal that all of them will vote for.

Theresa May did actually negotiate a realistic exit deal with the EU late last year that allowed for a smooth continuation of trade and avoided the danger of re-creating a “hard” border in Ireland. Unfortunately, that enraged the extremist “head-bangers” on the far right of the Conservative Party so much that they voted May’s deal down three times.

The alternative is simply to leave without a deal. That means accepting a huge hit to British trade, half of which is with the EU, a crash in the value of the pound, and a great many lost British jobs. Johnson himself is no head-banger, but he is a chameleon who will change colour if it serves his purposes, and he has adopted the no-deal policy in order to become prime minister.

This still does not end the Conservative Party’s civil war over Brexit, because a small number of moderates on the other wing of the party will rebel and vote against a no-deal Brexit rather than see the country dragged into economic ruin. They may be as few as a dozen, but that might be enough to bring the government down.

So where are the opposition parties in all this? All over the place, is the answer. There are four of them, and they cannot agree on the time of day, let alone on a common strategy for stopping “no-deal”.

Given time they might, because it is really their duty to avoid economic disaster in Britain, avert a new war in Ireland, and hold the United Kingdom together. Scotland will probably secede if there is a no-deal Brexit. But they are taking their own sweet time about it.

That is why Johnson thinks it is worth taking flak for cutting down the number of days parliament will meet between now and October 31. The fewer days the opposition has to work on the problem, the less likely they are to get all their ducks in a row. It’s as simple as that, and it’s entirely legal.

So what are the odds that Britain will really commit this massive act of self-harm? About the same as they were last week, actually. On learning of Johnson’s new move on Wednesday morning, analysts at the Royal Bank of Canada raised the probability of Britain crashing out of the EU without an exit deal to 44 per cent. Last week it was 41 per cent.

Small crisis, not many hurt.