This is a big week for Brexit news, with three humongously crucial votes to determine how it's going to happen, spread across three days. Right now, I am 0-2 in predicting how the votes will go.
The first was yesterday, Tuesday 12/3/19, when MPs voted on Theresa May's deal again. The night before, there had been big announcements that the problems with the unpopular backstop had all been fixed, and I started to worry because I still want to Thwart the Will of the British People™ and undo all of this. I really thought the deal was going to pass this time, but then the UK Attorney General said that actually, these changes meant nothing and the backstop would still be in place. Theresa May's deal had already been defeated by 230 votes (a record, remember!), and this time, it was defeated by 149 votes. So that's better, but still catastrophically hopeless.
Today was the next vote, on whether or not to push on with No Deal. Everyone has been saying that No Deal would be the end of the world, apart from a couple of untrustworthy folks who coincidentally stand to make vast sums of money profiting from the collapse of the UK economy, so I wondered how badly No Deal would be defeated by. My guess was 250-300 votes out of the total 650, so like 410-160ish; in actuality,
it lost by four. Four votes. 312-308. I am clearly an imbecile. They tried a couple of amendments, but the will of parliament is clear: No Deal cannot be countenanced, not even as the negotiating tactic supported by those who voted in favour.
(Coincidentally, I agree that we should keep No Deal on the table to strengthen our negotiating position. Imagine if you go into a bank with a gun, and all the employees are behind bulletproof glass, and you point the gun at your own head and say, "Hand over all your money or I'll blow my own brains out!" That's basically where we are now. It's a terrible idea, but you might get some money from people who don't want to clean up blood splatters. Removing No Deal as an option is like handing over the gun, letting the police take it away, and then demanding the bank's money anyway with nothing more than a frowny face. You ain't getting shit. They'll laugh you all the way to the prison).
Tomorrow's vote is the last of the big three, a vote on extending Article 50. This is seen by pretty much everyone as completely inevitable at this stage. But I'm still a touch worried: if the vote doesn't pass, then that basically means No Deal, because we're not getting another deal and there was actually a question in parliament about whether the government was allowed to just keep asking MPs to vote on the same thing over and over again until they vote the right way (hey, that sounds familiar...), and the answer was very noncommittal. And the opposition to extending Article 50, which requires the agreement of the other 27 EU countries (unlike revoking it, which we can do whenever we want) and will probably require us to take part in the upcoming European elections, seems like it has far fewer supporters than No Deal does, and No Deal was only defeated by four votes. We could wind up with the exact "disorderly No-Deal Brexit" that was predicted to obliterate our economy in the Bank of England's absolute worst-case scenario. We could wind up watching MPs vote for a third time on the exact same deal (
or even a fourth time), or we could even ask for an extension and get it refused because we have no plan whatsoever for what to do with the extra time, so why would the EU grant us that extra time? So that's why I'm worried. Honestly, me being 0-2 on predictions this week might actually be a good thing.