After Article 50

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Government cannot trigger Article 50 without consulting Parliament. This is good news - not because it will stop Article 50 being triggered - I think that's vanishingly unlikely - but because it confirms the supremacy of parliament in deciding the future of our country. Parliament decided that the Referendum result was not binding, that it should come back to Parliament, and it would be extraordinary if the Government could unilaterally flout the law. I also think it is good that a vote must be taken, because it means there will have to be a debate about Article 50. In a context where the country is so divided, where the referendum campaign was so poisoned by lies and even murder, structured debate can only be a good thing.

But this isn't the most interesting or important legal judgment on Brexit. Jolyon Maugham QC is launching an appeal through the Irish High Court that will ask the European Court of Justice to deliver a ruling on whether, once triggered, Article 50 can be un-triggered. That is, is there a way back? Or is it a one-way street?

This is really important.

If we trigger Article 50 and there's no going back then Brexit will, of course, happen - however disastrous the consequences for us. If the EU decided to play hardball and give us a dramatically worse deal than we have at the moment - and, let's be honest, why wouldn't they? - then we have to accept it or we are thrown on the mercy of the default WTO rules; and nobody seriously believes that will be anything other than hugely damaging for our economy. It means that neither parliament nor the people have any say again. A parliamentary vote or a referendum on the deal is between whatever David Davis et al. come back with (however rotten it is) or WTO rules. It's no real choice at all.

But if we trigger Article 50 and it can be rescinded, the situation is very different. The choice then becomes between accepting the EU deal, WTO rules, or rescinding Article 50. And note: this doesn't mean stopping Brexit; it means not having to accept a Brexit to the EU's timetable. If we don't like the deal, we can rescind Article 50, go back to the EU, negotiate another deal. It hugely improves our negotiating hand: if we can rescind Article 50, we can potentially keep the Brexit process going on for ages, which the EU certainly don't want, so it would offer a real incentive to offer us a better deal.

But we have a problem. It looks unlikely that we will get a ruling on Jolyon Maugham's question for months, possibly not even for a year. And Theresa May has said she wants to issue the Article 50 Bill in the next few days. This means MPs will be voting on triggering Article 50 without having the slightest idea what triggering it actually means. Is it the first stage of a negotiating process? Or a one-way ticket to who-knows-where?

Of course, we know why the Brexiteers are so keen to press ahead. The longer this process goes on, the more apparent are the deep problems that we will face outside the EU. They want us to leap before we look. But this is why the Supreme Court ruling today is good news. Parliamentary debate is part of the system of scrutiny, part of the checks and balances that should allow a nation reasonably to assess the decisions it wants to make. We should look before we leap.

The Remain camp has an advantage over the Leavers. The Remain group are broadly in agreement that the EU isn't perfect but we are better in and sitting round the table than out and without a voice.

The Leavers do not agree on very much. The Ukippers (Nigel Farage et al.)just don't like immigrants and they think getting us out of the EU will be the beginning of being able to stop foreigners coming into our country. The free-marketeers (Dan Hannan et al.) don't like the regulations and harmonisation of workers' rights across the EU, but would like to stay in the single market or customs union without it. The ultra-free-marketeers (John Redwood et al.) think outside the EU we will become a buccaneering, entrepreneurial low-tax, low-regulation freebooting international tax haven, nipping nimbly around the world making bilateral trade deals with the world's grateful nations. The Lexiteers (seemingly Jeremy Corbyn et al.) like the workers rights, but don't want the single market. I guess there are some constitutionalists like Michael Gove who think Britain should not be subordinated to the European Parliament. And there are some tabloid readers for whom the EU is a bunch of bureaucrats who want to straighten our bananas and who think leaving will make very little difference.

These visions of a Britain outside the EU are incompatible and the Leave group will start to fragment (it's already clear that Farage is detested by all the other wings and indeed 100% of his parliamentary party). At that point, the pell-mell race to dive over the Brexit cliff will lose the patina of majority. It will be clear that this is less the will of the people and more the will of Farage.

It's why we must insist on parliamentary scrutiny. Not because it will stop Brexit, but it will stop Brexit-at-any-cost. It may even get us a better Brexit.

Tired Beasts

I've been working on Maeterlinck, the poet, playwright, and cod-philosopher. Maeterlinck was a massive deal in the 1890s, probably the most talked about writer in Europe. He got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 and his early experimental plays were perhaps the greatest dramatic achievement of the Symbolist movement. But after the first world war his reputation went into decline to the point that at his death in 1949 few people realised he was still alive. He more or less stopped writing poetry and plays after the mid-twenties (and what plays he did write didn't get produced) and instead concentrated on a series of mystical works addressing metaphysical themes (death, god, the afterlife, fate) but from a broadly agnostic position. These were taken tremendously seriously for a while but as the Second World War approached, his airy mysticism seemed dated and ill-suited to the urgencies of the time.

But his early plays are wonderful and hugely influential. Of the longer plays, Pelléas and Mélisande survives particularly in the Debussy opera (to which, initially, Maeterlinck was bitterly opposed, less because of aesthetic differences than Debussy's refusal to cast Maeterlinck's lover, Georgette Leblanc, in the lead) and The Blue Bird is a charming fairy story, still revived. But it's the shorter one-act plays that are so astonishing. The Blind, Interior, Intruder, The Death of Tintagiles, The Seven Princesses use the simplest of language and setting to create experiences of intense otherworldliness, of dread and anxiety, of metaphysical anguish and terror. His influence is there in Chekhov, in Jarry, in Pinter and Beckett. He opened up space for silence and stillness as fully dramatic devices and is one of the giants of early Modernist theatre.

What I'd never properly read before are his poems. There's not many of them, several chansons and one substantial collection, which was actually the first book he published, a sequence of 33 poems called Serres Chaudes [Hothouses] which first appeared in a limited private edition in May 1889. I've been reading them recently and I am surprised to find how great they are. They are suffused with a listless melancholy; Maeterlinck (or perhaps the implied speaker) talks of his soul as a kind of hothouse, unhealthily humid, producing distorted overgrown plants that stifle his happiness and desire, looking longingly out of the glass, longing for rain. Odd images pulse through the poems, ships passing on canals, hospital windows, soldiers not at their posts, the mortally ill struggling with the elements, desire stifled and impotent, action and engagement with the world frustrated. Some of the poems are traditionally formal, rhymed, organised in regular stanzas. Others show the influence of Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn in their long lines of free-verse, their inward-looking intensity, their sense of the nausea of everyday life.

The wonderful poet Richard Howard has produced a lovely set of translations published by Princeton University Press (though, note, it has some annoying typos). I've translated one of the poems here:

Tired Beasts
    
On the narrow paths of my passions,
With howls and sighs.
Sick and with shuttered eyes,
Over fallen leaves:

The yellow dogs of my sin,
The dark jackals of my hate,
And on the pale flat plains
The crouching lions of love.

In the impotence of dream
Lazed beneath a lazy sky
A dismal drab sky
They dully see

The lambs of my temptations
Wander singly from the meadow, leaving
Beneath the unmoving moon
My unmoved wants.

Fauves Las

Ô les passions en allées,
Et les rires et les sanglots!
Malades et les yeux mi-clos
Parmi les feuilles effeuillées,

Les chiens jaunes de mes péchés,
Les hyènes louches de mes haines,
Et sur l'ennui pâle des plaines
Les lions de l'amour couchés!

En l'impuissance de leur rêve
Et languides sous la langueur
De leur ciel morne et sans couleur,
Elles regarderont sans trève

Les brebis des tentations
S'éloigner lentes, une à une,
En l'immobile clair de lune,
Mes immobiles passions.