Super Saturday
By: Shane Boyle
Tags: Brexit, Brexit Negotiations

The following, about the endlessness of Brexit, was written in 2019. It’s about things that happened on Saturday 19 October of that year, so it’s out of date but also not.

It was billed as “Super Saturday,” the day when parliament would cross the finish line and, you know, get Brexit done. Everything in the House of Commons was set. The parties were all on their marks, “Ready for Brexit.” Some ten thousand euro-partisans had made the trip to Westminster to cheer their side on, EU flags in hand. After weeks of rain, even the sun made an appearance, an ersatz spotlight. Pundits predicted that debate over Boris Johnson’s “New Deal” would stretch into the evening, making for a marathon sitting and not a sprint. The papers prepared their puns accordingly. “Saturday Night Leaver,” foretold one tabloid. Alas, history does not follow the pulp headlines that editors write for it. Having vowed “New Deal or No Deal, but no delay,” Johnson delivered another false start.

Theresa May registered our collective déjà vu when she took to the House of Commons floor for the first time since resigning as Prime Minister. The Guardian, predicting a predictable debate, offered a Brexit-themed drinking game to help us through the morning (“Get Brexit Done.” Drink. “Chlorinated chicken.” Drink. “Customs border in the Irish Sea.” Drink.). Even Johnson’s New Deal seemed like something we’d seen before, its novelty hinging on a swap of the Irish backstop for what some call Schrödinger’s backstop (it’s that easy to explain). And so, by lunchtime, Super Saturday had become just another Saturday in the perpetual autumn that is Brexit.

Leading the charge to dash Johnson’s day was a pair of chivalrous eyebrows named Sir Oliver Letwin. A whip-less Tory with an axe to grind, Letwin cut his teeth in service to Thatcherism, rendering up the spirit that kept the Poll Tax alive and the brains behind a memo denying that the 1985 riots had their roots in social deprivation and racism. On Saturday morning he arrived to Westminster brandishing a double-edged amendment to withhold any “meaningful” vote on Johnson’s deal until the full legislation to withdraw was passed. Remainers heralded the knight as their best hope for escaping the day unscathed. Brexit makes the strangest bedfellows. No sooner had MPs voted for his amendment than Letwin himself braved the house floor and smugly announced how much he looked forward to leaving the EU. Unfazed by their hero becoming a heel, the anti-Brexit crowds outside cheered at the news they had won another fool’s gold trophy to add to their overstuffed mantle.

If history remembers Super Saturday at all it will be as a footnote full of petty manoeuvres, such as parliament forcing Johnson request a Brexit extension by post. Breaking his promise to break the law instead of asking to extend, the Prime Minister complied in the most begrudging way he could devise: he refused to add his signature to the required letter, and slipped into the same envelope a second letter (this one signed) telling the EU to disregard the contents of the first. Only time will tell whether Johnson intends to keep his other vow of dying in a ditch when Brexit is delayed beyond October 31.

I am writing this on Sunday, a day I’m calling, for reasons both personal and political, Hangover Sunday. By the time you read my letter, events will certainly have passed me by. But the arc of history will take longer to show itself. Whatever comes to pass — this could be any number of things, from newer deals and renewed delays to a snap election and shock resignations — none of it will be the end of Brexit. We’ve been running this race for years, and we have many more to go before the bell rings for the final lap. Had Saturday actually turned out to be “Super,” no actual departure would have happened before the end of 2020. And even this remains an ambitious end date, probably taking the form of a failed “transition” paving the way for the No Deal coveted by the archest of Eurosceptics. The very prospect that Brexit is more than likely to accompany us well into the next decade is no doubt depressing for everyone. But rather than exhaust us, recognising this reality for what it is should be enough to keep us from joining in every sprint. The sooner we can settle into a steadier pace with regard to Brexit events the more energy we’ll have to give to everything else we need to get done.

“Super Saturday” was a billing meant to confuse a drawn-out process for a single day of glory or horror. Historically, Saturday sittings of Parliament are exceedingly rare, reserved for only the most signal moments of the British Empire’s decay. Since September 2, 1939, the Saturday that Neville Chamberlain announced his change of heart towards Hitler to kick off World War II, parliament has only convened on the weekend a handful of times. The last was some 40 forty years ago, April 3, 1982, just after Argentina seized the British Falkland Islands. Calling the aggression “the first time for many years, British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power,” Margaret Thatcher used the sitting to urge parliamentary flexion of Britain’s atrophied imperial muscles. 1,000 deaths later, the South Atlantic islands with a population of 1,800 (not counting its 400,000 sheep) were restored to Her Majesty’s dominion, and Thatcher’s faltering government received a new lease on life. Almost overnight Thatcherism became a thing, with the “Falklands Spirit” summoned whenever a foe presented itself, be they miners or welfare provisions.

Ahead of Super Saturday, the media made the most of the Falklands precedent; it would be another extraordinary day when the Prime Minister mobilized parliament to fend off a foreign threat to the realm. Super Saturday was supposed to be Boris Johnson’s Falklands moment. Such analogies, of course, get Brexit backwards. Nigel Farage might stir the dead embers of Rule Britannia to drum up support for No Deal, but no one is promising that Brexit will rekindle the fires of empire. Instead, the Brexit pitch always reverses the UK’s colonial role, casting it as the enslaved colony liberating itself from Europe’s imperial rule. Tragedy to farce. We all know the bit.

Another occasion for a Saturday session makes for a more revealing analogy. On November 3, 1956, parliament was called to order to tackle Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, a lost jewel in the British crown. The British invasion that followed, done with France and Israel, resulted in a swift victory. But military triumph transformed into a chastening geopolitical defeat when the combined superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union forced the Anglo-French forces to withdraw, a definitive sign that the glory days of European imperial adventures belonged to the past. While the similarities should not be overstated, surely the historical shape of Brexit will more resemble the Suez Crisis than the Falklands: a technical victory lurching into a humiliating loss.

And perhaps we can find another lesson in the Suez analogy. Upon their defeat, Nasser’s forces did not toothlessly protest the result; they turned instantly to scuttling their ships to blockade the entire canal, rendering the infrastructure entirely useless for British capital for years.