Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Our traditional party system cannot cope with Brexit – but this new mechanism could break the deadlock

A joint consultative committee would bring together MPs of all stripes to find a compromise that could lead us out of the Brexit quagmire

Sean O'Grady
Monday 25 March 2019 18:58 GMT
Comments
Theresa May says as things stand "there is not sufficient support" to ask MPs to vote on her Brexit deal for a third time

It is rare that setting up a committee is the answer to anything. So I hesitate to suggest it as at least a partial solution for our Brexit mess. Yet these are desperate, desperate times, and what has become perfectly clear is that our traditional party system cannot cope with this crisis. As it happens, that might have happened even had Theresa May not lost her majority in 2017, or even if she had increased it, such are the vagaries of the Europe question and the way it cuts across traditional loyalties.

Either way, she (and we) need a mechanism, a channel, a working group whereby MPs from across the system can advise the cabinet on the best way forward. This would be a cross-party committee of the cabinet (not of the Commons or parliament), linking the Commons and the government properly and formally. It has been done rarely – Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair set one up in the 1990s to discuss constitutional change – but it might just be useful.

Plainly the party system cannot work things out. This is not the same at all as saying the House of Commons cannot do so. The House of Commons merely needs to be offered some channels to do so. Thus far the executive – the prime minister, cabinet and government collectively – has refused to allow it much of a say.

This must now change.

Instead of dragging party leaders into Number 10 for showboating “talks” we need a more practical, less party-oriented approach. We need a group of people with ministers on one side of the table – say David Lidington, Stephen Barclay, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt – and the representatives of the various factions, and parties, represented in the Commons on the other. They are then tasked with coming up with some solutions, based, if they want, on indicative votes in the Commons.

This would be a joint consultative committee, an unusual cabinet committee which has representation of non-ministers and non-governing party personnel on it. Ideally it would have a representative from the European Research Group, from the Independent Group of MPs, from the Labour Eurosceptics and the Labour Europhiles, as well as from the DUP, Scottish Nationalists and Liberal Democrats.

Or it could be more of a coalition or committee of the willing; you’d expect the likes of Oliver Letwin, Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn and Dominic Grieve to be sitting on it, at any rate. They would, with the government whips, potentially be able to assemble a majority for some path forward – referendum, revocation of Article 50, Norway option… whatever. It would mean that Ms May would have to contend with carrying her flagship legislative act with the support of opposition parties and split her own, but she must ask what matters most in the end – party or country. Tories are conditioned to believe those two to be identical. They are not.

That might be asking too much, but a joint consultative cabinet committee across parties and factions would have advantages for each party, and especially for the prime minister. It might just save her career and most of her deal.

First it will lay the blame/responsibility for the Brexit imbroglio across the party and factional divides. So no single party or group can blame another – especially if they just decide to flounce out of the committee at any stage.

Second, it might actually have an impact in trying to find the elusive winning compromise. It would be the equivalent of locking them all in a room until they can agree on something. They would have the full resources of the civil service so that we might finally be able to agree on, for example, the “technological solutions” to the Irish backstop; while the diplomats could explain what the EU is and is not likely to accept, and on what terms.

Or the joint consultative committee would just flop, collapsing in acrimony. If so, then it would be the clearest possible indication that parliament can’t resolve the issue and that it has to go back to the people because there is nowhere else for it to go. We will at least know that, and we can inform the EU accordingly, in which case we will be permitted a longer delay to hold that referendum and resolve matters. It is a choice between that and crashing out with Theresa May. I know which I’d prefer.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in