Why didn't Theresa May consult with Parliament before negotiating a deal with the EU?

Question

The House of Commons will today vote on a series of indicative votes, in order to find out "the will of the house", and thus break the current deadlock with Brexit. These votes come after the deal that Theresa May negotiated privately with the EU was rejected twice by the House of Commons.

The question is, why didn't Theresa May consult the "will of the house" two years ago (i.e. before starting negotiations with the EU), given that any deal had to be ratified by parliament anyway? Why did she choose to go solo and define herself (not even her party) the UK red lines and what Leave was supposed to mean?

Answer 1

After the referendum there was no requirement to consult Parliament on any deal, the government could have simply agreed it with the EU and presented it as the only option on the table - take it or leave with no deal. Given that most MPs are strongly against a no-deal exit, it would likely have passed due to them having no other choice.

However, thanks to legal action by Gina Miller the government was forced to promise giving Parliament a "meaningful vote" on the final deal. In December 2017 it was written into law.

By that point the negotiations had already started and were going very badly. May had set out her "red lines", things she would not compromise on but which the EU had pointed out made the kind of deal she was seeking impossible. The problem was exacerbated by her failure to specify precisely what she wanted (the infamous "brexit means brexit" meaningless mantra), which seemed like an effort to delay giving her MPs any substance to argue over.

So basically by the time she was forced to consult with Parliament instead of just ramming the deal through, it was already too late to do so without tearing the Tory Party apart and staring a prolonged debate during what was supposed to be a negotiation focusing on the detail of the withdrawal.

Her plan thus became to leave everything to the last possible moment, in the hope denying Parliament any real choice again.

Answer 2

Perhaps one thing you may be forgetting is that, when the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU started, the Conservative Party had a healthy majority in the house of commons. Therefore, there was some level of confidence in the UK Government that, as long as they could negotiate a deal with the EU that was acceptable to the Tory Party, they would be able to use their majority to get it through Parliament.

However, in 2017, Theresa May made the (in hindsight, unwise) decision to call a general election. At the time, she was confident that it would boost the Tory Party's majority; however, the result was the exact opposite - the Tory party lost seats and lost their majority (even though no other party gained a majority either, i.e. it was a hung parliament).

As a result of that general election/hung parliament, the balance of power in the UK Parliament shifted. Now the Tory Party lacks a majority and requires the support of the Northern Irish DUP in order to get any legislation through. So, the outcome of this disastrous (from the Tory point-of-view) election has given Parliament considerably more power over Brexit than they had at the time the negotiations began.

In summary: the political situation has changed.

Answer 3

I think the other answers are correct but they (politely) omit two important points:

• The level of ignorance of some of the most senior UK politicians in power about the EU treaties and the Irish border issue, leading to a terrible lack preparation on the UK side.
• The irreconcilable views inside the Conservative Party over what Brexit actually means.

The former lead Theresa May's government to vastly underestimate the challenge ahead of them, assuming that the EU would be rather accommodating even though the EU was not even legally allowed to offer the kind of accommodations that they wanted. Since at the beginning the UK government was hoping to easily reach an advantageous deal, there was little point involving the Parliament: most MPs would vote in favour of a presumably good and consensual deal anyway.

The latter lead Theresa May to adopt a "fog of war" strategy, illustrated by her (in)famous quote: "Brexit means Brexit". By keeping everyone in the dark about the details of the deal her government was pursuing, she was able to maintain the unity of her party. She knew that if she consulted the Parliament about the exact deal the UK should seek, the divisions would appear in broad daylight and she might lose her leadership. So instead she tried to bring a last-minute compromise which was meant to get her majority onboard by fear of the opposite result: Brexiteers would vote favourably to avoid staying longer under the EU rules, Remainers would vote favourably to avoid a no-deal Brexit. Needless to say, this strategy backfired spectacularly.

Answer 4

The original approach perhaps was flawed. Instead of negotiating smaller easy less controversial points and getting those passed early and often, before tackling bigger thornier issues, they decided to cobble everything together into one big bloated deal. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. But as relates to your question, the big disadvantage is that it can quickly get so complicated that it is impossible to keep updating everybody (or anybody eventually) about the details. It's just too much. This is why it appeared from those of us on the outside the May seemed to go 'silo', excluding even her own Brexit negotiators, and traveling to the EU over 50 times in total (24 trips to Brussels alone). She was away from Parliament often and attempting a broad highly detailed negotiation. It wasn't on purpose. It was just a natural result of the scale of what she was trying to do. She simply lost touch.

Answer 5

Comment in The Guardian:

The origins of the current crisis are to be found in the foolishness of the prime minister’s strategic response to the 2017 general election. If a close result in the 2016 referendum wasn’t a clear enough indication that a compromise would need to be found, then the 2017 general election that handed no majority to any party should have made the necessity of a cross-party approach obvious. It is absurd that days before we are due to leave the European Union, MPs are for the first time expressing their preferences in parliament rather than the TV studios and online. Attempting to conclude a process where it should have started is not a recipe for success.

A strategic mistake. Arrogance, perhaps.