What Theresa May’s confidence vote reveals about the state of Britain

Last night, Conservative members of parliament voted by a margin of 200 votes to 117 to express confidence in their prime minister. The vote ensures that Theresa May will, at least for now, remain as the Conservative Party leader and prime minister, although the sizeable 117 votes against her will raise doubts about her longer-term prospects. Under official party rules, Prime Minister May cannot now be challenged for one year.

The vote of confidence had been announced only a few hours before, when Graham Brady MP, Chair of the influential 1922 Committee, announced that he had received 48 letters from his fellow Conservative MPs requesting a vote. The Conservative Party rule-book states that a vote of no confidence in the leader must be held if at least 15 percent of the party’s MPs submit these letters. When that line was crossed, the confidence vote was on.

The root of the dissatisfaction with May lay in the opposition of some of those in her party to her proposed Brexit deal. Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, and large swathes of the Conservative Party membership, had long complained that the prime minister had misjudged the Brexit negotiations, steering the United Kingdom towards a ‘soft’ Brexit deal that kept the UK too closely aligned to the EU and did not respect the result of the 2016 referendum. They argued that a ‘Remainer’ such as May could never deliver a project that was voted for by ‘Leavers’.

This opposition reached new levels when the prime minister released her plan for how to resolve the so-called ‘Northern Ireland backstop’ issue, an insurance policy that is designed to prevent a hard border between Ireland (which is in the EU) and Northern Ireland (which would leave the EU as part of the UK). 

Many Conservatives feel that the possibility of subjecting Northern Ireland to different rules undermines and threatens the integrity of the United Kingdom, and that keeping the whole UK in a customs union without any clear exit mechanism would also represent a ‘betrayal’ of the vote for Brexit.

May tried to fend off the internal rebellion by making three arguments: that a new Conservative leader might not be in place in time to conclude the negotiation with the EU and meet key deadlines in the Brexit process in early 2019; that a new leader would similarly not have time to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement and so would have to either extend or rescind Article 50, which most voters do not want to do; and that a change of the Conservative Party leadership would, ultimately, not change the arithmetic in the House of Commons, which ever since the general election in 2017 has been in a state of deadlock, with no Brexit model having a clear parliamentary majority. 

In the end, these arguments proved to be sufficient to win a majority of MPs’ support.

Nonetheless, this now leaves the Conservative Party, and the United Kingdom generally, in a precarious place. We are living through the most volatile and unpredictable moment in the United Kingdom’s post-war history. The direction of Brexit remains unclear, as does the direction of Britain’s domestic party politics. What is likely to happen next?

The prime minister will now return to the EU to try and extract legally-binding concessions around the Northern Ireland backstop, although these look unlikely. She will then, at some point, have to present her Brexit deal to the House of Commons. If this is rejected, as the last vote was widely expected to be, then May will once again find her authority diminished and will likely face new calls to resign. She may well try to resist such calls by arguing that the log-jam in parliament means that she has to return to the people.

This is where a second referendum becomes likely, although if there is such a vote, key questions remain unresolved. What will be on the ballot paper? A re-run of the 2016 ‘Remain versus Leave’ question would not resolve the basic problem that voters have not supported a specific model of Brexit. 

Alternatives, such as ‘Remain versus No Deal’ or ‘Remain versus May’s deal’, would divide the Leave electorate and no doubt fuel the claim that the process was rigged. Though many people in Britain expect that Remain would win a second referendum, such an outcome is far from guaranteed. 

According to the latest average of all polls on this question, Remain has 53 percent and Leave has 47 percent, while the margin of error is typically around 3-4 points. While the result would be unpredictable, what does appear certain is that the country would remain a very divided nation.

The Conservative Party also finds itself in a fragile moment. Conservative Party voters are typically very supportive of leaving the EU; around seven in ten are ‘Leavers’. Moreover, at the last general election in 2017, the Conservatives performed strongly among working-class voters, people without degrees and former supporters of the populist UK Independence Party (UKIP). 

These facts matter because they point to a Conservative electorate that is more supportive of Brexit, and more supportive of a ‘clean’ break from the EU than many of their Conservative Members of Parliament. Indeed, Brexit more generally marked the first moment when a majority of people outside of Parliament asked for something that a majority of those inside Parliament did not want to give. It is because of this underlying tension that Brexit was perhaps always going to divide the nation, though in particular the Conservative Party.

Voters, too, seem to be modifying their views. When asked whether the 2016 vote for Brexit was the ‘right or wrong’ decision, in the two years since the referendum people’s views remained remarkably static, with only a few points separating the two sides. But this could be starting to change. 

In the latest poll, 49 percent of people think the decision was ‘wrong’ compared to 38 percent who think it right ‘right’. The British people have, since the vote, also become a little more pessimistic about how they think Brexit will impact on the economy and more critical of the government’s handling of the negotiations.

The United Kingdom, therefore, is heading into a crunch moment, with the events that unfold likely to determine not only the future of the Conservative Party but also the future of the country. Put on your seatbelts because the next few weeks and months look set to be a rocky ride!