Could Blair Block Brexit?

Love him or hate, nowadays you probably can't afford him

I don't think that Tony Blair has any plans to do anything remotely like this, but I did wonder if he might be able to use his rather unique position in British politics to do the apparently impossible and actually stop Brexit.  This is how I think it could be done.


First step - form a new political party.  A good name for it would be the Stop Brexit party.  Ideally he'd join up with some grandees from other political parties.  John Major and Paddy Ashdown would be the first choices.  All three of them would of course have to resign from the parties they are currently associated with.  They'd get thrown out if they didn't anyway as one thing that you cannot do in any party is openly advocate voting for any other party.  But as they would be making clear that Stop Brexit intends to dissolve as soon as Brexit is indeed stopped, they should be able to get back into their parties are some point in the future.

The constitution of the Stop Brexit party would need to be an unusual one in other ways as well.  It would be very much a single issue party whose sole aim would be to prevent that one policy.  This would make it diametrically opposed to UKIP, but wouldn't make it a mirror image as it would have no aspirations to build a local branch network or to contest seats in any other forum than Westminster.

Westminster is the only body that matters when it comes to Brexit and the only place where Stop Brexit could achieve its goal.  The initial problem is the familiar one that under the first past the post system, a new party finds it very hard to break through.  The two big parties have perfected the art of combining an offer that is made up of promises of what they are going to do with highlighting the risks of the other lot.  Voters have to weigh up the risk of letting in people they don't like if they deviate from their regular choice.  It is a tough nut to crack.

So on the face of it Stop Brexit would be a non-starter.  And indeed would be if it chose to fight every seat in Parliament.

But there is a strategy that might work.  If it decided to fight not every seat, but only those of MPs who are actively working to make Brexit happen then it might have an influence out of all proportion to its likely electoral success.  This indeed was exactly what UKIP were threatening to do at one stage.  And even though they never actually did so, it was something that made their impact much greater than it at first seemed.

So Stop Brexit's tactics would be to identify enough pro-Brexit Tory MPs that its intervention could be enough to deprive them of their seats and therefore their party of its control of the house.   It wouldn't require a huge level of support to do this.  Conservatives will remember the 2010 election where if you added all the UKIP votes to the Conservative votes then the Tories would have won an overall majority.

The Stop Brexit party does not need to do very much at all to have a big influence.  If an MP has a seat that is at all vulnerable they are going to be very careful to avoid getting listed as a Stop Brexit target if they can help it.  Few of them have enough of a personal following that they can risk losing a few thousand votes to a rival.

For this to be successful Stop Brexit needs to be very clear about some things and rather opaque about others.  It needs to be clear it is a one issue party that is not about the careers of the people involved.  It needs to be clear that it has no objectives other than stopping the Brexit process.  It needs to be very opaque about its tactics.  MPs need to be kept guessing about what exactly it would do in the event of a general election.  They need to be scared for their seats, and the less information they have about what that means the better.  All that they need to know is that anything they do to promote Brexit might end up being used against them later.

If that meant that large numbers of back benchers were going to sit on their hands then the government might simply not be able to get through all the legislation it needs to make it work.  It would also mean that the EU would be able to take a hard line knowing that the UK's negotiators might not be in a position to deliver on any deal they were offering.

This is all the product of my imagination.  There is no actual plan to do any of this.  If it were tried, the prospects for it working are not very great even if Blair and a team of similarly impressive names could be recruited to it.  But then, UKIP's mission to get Britain out of the EU seemed pretty unlikely to work.