It is now
seven months since the British people voted in a referendum born of the then
Prime Minister’s attempt to placate the Eurosceptics in his own party and the
perceived electoral threat from UKIP. That referendum asked an apparently
simple question: do you want to remain in or leave the European Union?
If the vote
had been to remain then it is a reasonable bet that nothing much would be being
said about it now. Of course, doctrinaire leavers would be continuing to
agitate for exit. Indeed, had the vote been 52-48 to remain then, as
Nigel Farage said before the vote it would have been unfinished business
(how strange, then, that he and other Brexiters now insist that a 52-48 vote to
leave is the incontrovertible will of the people, to which all opposition is
treason?). But the vote was 52-48 to leave and that result is now being held up
to mean all manner of things.
First and
foremost, it is now being held to mandate not just leaving the EU but leaving
the single market. In this post-truth era it is crucial to hold on to truth,
and before the referendum the ‘leave’ side either refused to say whether voting
to leave the EU meant voting to leave the single market or explicitly denied
it. That is clear and on
the public record for all to see. It is important to keep saying this,
because of the dishonest re-writing of history that is now occurring. It is no
defence to say that the remain side said that leaving the EU would mean leaving
the single market since a) this was a rebuttal of the leave claim to the
contrary and b) the Treasury
modelling (and that of others) made it clear that leaving the EU could
imply at least three scenarios, of which leaving the single market was only one.
It is simply untrue to claim that both sides in the campaign said that a vote
to leave the EU was a vote to leave the single market.
Beyond that,
the leave vote is now being claimed to have meant something way beyond what was
on the ballot paper. Thus, today, the government launched its
industrial strategy with a preface from the Prime Minister saying that “last
summer’s referendum was
not simply a vote to leave the European Union, it was an instruction to the
Government to change the way our country works – and the people for whom it
works – forever”. Really? I’ve got no particular objection to an industrial strategy
(and this isn’t the place to discuss this one) but it certainly wasn’t what the
referendum was about.
Then again, the Brexit vote is being universally spoken
of as if it were the John the Baptist forerunner to Trump’s victory and a harbinger
of a far-right European Spring by Marine le Pen, mandating a nationalist
anti-globalization agenda. But the vote did not ask for an endorsement of
Trump, Le Pen or anyone else, and if it meant a rejection of globalization then
how is it that Brexiters
like Liam Fox are taking it as an endorsement of global free trade?
In a more diffuse way, too, all roads lead to Brexit.
Today’s big news story is about the reliability of the Britain’s
Trident nuclear weapons, and those same weapons were invoked by Theresa May
as a key aspect of why Britain mattered in the Brexit negotiations. Again, this
isn’t the place to discuss the pros and cons of British nuclear weapons policy, but if it is to be made central
to what post-Brexit Britain means then it needs to be absolutely clear that it
works. But how did we ever get into the position where our main trade relationship
needs to be negotiated by reference to our nuclear warfare capacity?
It is certainly true that the Brexit vote has swamped
everything else in British politics, probably for decades. But that vote has
not given licence to the government to do whatever it wants. There is much talk
about the need to respect the vote as a matter of democracy. But democracy does
not just occur on one day; it’s not the Cup Final in which one side loses and
another wins. It's a process, not an outcome. Its meaning is, and should be, contested.
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