THE TTALK QUOTES 

On Global Trade & Investment
Published By:
The Global Business Dialogue, Inc.
Washington, DC  Tel: 202-463-5074
 
No. 53 of 2019
MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019

Click HERE for last Thursday's quote from Sergio Gomez Lora.



ON POLITICS AND POSSIBILITIES

 "So let's get one thing straight: nothing is impossible in politics."

Janet Daley
July 27, 2019 (on-line publication date)
CONTEXT
Janet Daley is a Boston born columnist with The Sunday Telegram in the UK. Today’s quote is from her piece on July 27, which ran under the headline “The defeatist establishment has got it wrong – nothing is impossible in politics.”  The article dealt with the question, will Boris Johnson really be able to take the UK out of the EU? We’ll get to that and other specifics in a moment. What particularly struck us was the above insight, which she packaged in this paragraph:

“So let’s get one thing straight: nothing is impossible in politics. There is no equivalent of the law of gravity which cannot be broken or reversed. There are only agreements and disagreements. There are no immovable objects or concrete bodies in permanently fixed orbits. There are just people.”

To state the obvious, Ms. Daley was writing about Brexit, and we’ve been away from Brexit for a while. So before turning to Ms. Daley’s argument, here are a few very recent dates in the tortured chronology of the UK’s efforts to leave the European Union.

March 29    For the third and final time, the British Parliament votes on the withdrawal agreement Mrs. May had negotiated with her counterparts in the EU, rejecting it this time by a vote of 344 to 286.  

May 24    Prime Minister Theresa May announces she will be stepping down as prime minister, pending the outcome of a Conservative Party contest to replace her.

July 24    Having won the contest in the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson is asked by the Queen to form a new government. As the new prime minister, Mr. Johnson promptly names hard-line Brexiteers to Cabinet positions and ramps up planning for a no-deal Brexit.

August 1 – A by-election (special election) in Wales leaves Boris Johnson with a single vote majority in Parliament and something of a muddled message from the electorate.  Jane Dodds, the Liberal Democrat (read “remain”) won, defeating the Conservative incumbent, Chris Davies.  But on the leave-remain scale of British politics (arguably the most import metric these days), the issue was clouded by the over 3,300 votes won by the Brexit party candidate. As one observer has noted,

“If just half of the 3,300 voters who backed the Brexit Party in Brecon had backed the Conservatives instead, Mr Johnson the Prime Minister would have been toasting an unanticipated victory.”

In short the result can be read either as a rejection of a “no-deal” Brexit, which is certainly Ms. Dodds’ view, or as a push in that direction.
COMMENT
Sad but true, it is a commonplace that those who challenge the established order are savaged by it – it being the establishment, including the establishment press as well as the political leaders of the status quo, in this case the UK’s membership in the EU. In her first sentence, Ms. Daley talked about “the acid bath of hatred that the broadcast media poured over Boris Johnson’s election,” and took note of the same media’s conviction that Mr. Johnson’s mission is “impossible.”

For Ms. Daley this was all familiar territory as she recalled the similar treatment that greeted the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Mrs. Thatcher, Ms Daley tells us “was dismissed by the shameless snobbery, which was the establishment wisdom of the time, as a know-nothing ‘green grocer’s daughter.’”

“Politics ain’t beanbag,” as we are fond of reminding ourselves on this side of the pond, and, as things turned out, Maggie could take it. So too we suspect can Boris. But what of Ms. Daley’s assessment of the UK-EU standoff over Brexit. Her very reasonable assessment was this:

"It is quite legitimate for the Brussels squad to express exasperation that the Withdrawal Agreement which they believed to have been settled with the May government was now being called into question. But surely all of the EU heads of government understand the basic democratic principle that the national Parliament would have to approve any such agreement, and given that it had failed to do so a new government taking power would effectively have no realistic choice but to revisit it."

On this issue, we shall not be coy. Our hope is that Boris Johnson will be successful in bringing United Kingdom out of the European Union, either as the leader of the government he has just formed or its successor. We believe Janet Daley was clearly arguing for just such a result when she wrote, “Nothing is impossible in politics.”  A fair reading of that thought, however, means that all the known scenarios -- as well perhaps as some not yet imagined – remain possible outcomes to this drama. 

We’ll try to follow it a little more closely from here on out. We shall do so with an awareness of the fact that there is a range of opinions in the GBD membership and community on Brexit just as there is in the wider world.
SOURCES & LINKS
On Politics and Possibilities takes you to the article by Janet Daley, "The defeatest establishment has got it wrong," that was the source for today's featured quote.

Election Results from Brecon and Radnonshire is the Wikipedia entry on this UK by-election, complete with vote tallies for the participating parties.

A Professor’s Take is an opinion piece on the election by John Curtice, who is a professor of politics at Strathclyde University.
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