As we reach the seventh anniversary of the referendum there is a flurry of assessments and comment pieces, as now happens on each anniversary of a milestone in the Brexit process. I’m not going to review them here, but their profusion, and the diversity of their claims and counter-claims are, in themselves, evidence that Brexit remains deeply divisive and hotly contested. And that is as much evidence of the failure of Brexit as the clear, established and growing public view that it was a mistake. For Brexit was never supposed to be a project of permanent division, a national future constantly contested and with a declining minority supporting it.
Conversely, imagine if Brexit had been a success. We might expect triumphant articles from Brexiters, trumpeting and celebrating this latest anniversary. Perhaps there would be replays of the campaign videos – like the Leave.EU one about the benefits Brexit would bring – ticking off, item by item, each promise that had come true. And, surely, there would be at least some one-time remainers recanting their opposition, swayed by a growing mass of evidence that daily life, and national prosperity and standing, had been improved.
Well, it’s still early in the day and, as I remarked last week, a Friday morning blog can get caught out, so perhaps, later in this anniversary day, we will see all of these things. But it’s not likely, and if it happens then it will be very different from the recent tenor of Brexit discussion. What we see instead is a mixture of defensiveness and blame-shifting and, most striking of all, a growing tendency for Brexiters to focus attention not on Brexit itself but on ‘remainers’.
The disgrace of Johnson
That focus takes various forms, and currently, because this anniversary has coincided with the public disgrace of Boris Johnson, it has also become bound up with that. I wrote at length about the connections between Johnson and Brexit in last week’s post and won’t repeat that, but it would still be worth reading by anyone taken in by claims made by, for example, Robert Tombs in The Telegraph (£), that commentators linking his downfall to Brexit are, somehow, ‘letting slip’ that the agenda behind the Privileges Committee report was not really about lying to the House of Commons.
That is also how the Brexiter press more generally has depicted the report, and this week’s Commons debate and vote upholding it, describing it as a “Remainer ‘show trial’” conducted by “vengeful technocrats” extracting “Remainer revenge”. And, almost invariably, this is seen not just as ‘punishment’ for Johnson supporting and enacting Brexit but as “the first step” (£) to reversing it. Or, perhaps, the outrage isn’t even rooted in such fears but something more visceral, as with former Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips who declared herself “utterly sick with rage” at “all these smug Remoaners lining up to lambast Boris”.
The very obvious counter to all this, apart from the fact that the Committee’s report was unanimously agreed by its members who included Brexiters, lies in the composition of the Commons vote on whether to accept its findings and recommendations. It’s true that, shamefully, some 225 Tory MPs chose to abstain*, including, disgracefully, Rishi Sunak whose weak leadership has been plainly exposed, and another seven voted against. That is a terrible reflection on the willingness of Johnson’s supporters to pervert important democratic safeguards, though listening to some of their contributions to the debate it wasn’t always clear they even understood what the vote was actually about. For example, Lia Nici, holding the report containing all the evidence in her hands, declared that there was no evidence of Johnson’s wrongdoing on the wholly extraneous grounds that she had once been one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries.
Still, 118 Tories voted to support the Committee, suggesting that the Conservative Party isn’t (yet) Trumpified in the manner of the Republicans. Crucially, amongst their number were some very committed Brexiters, including Steve Baker, John Baron, Graham Brady, Geoffrey Cox, David Davis, Daniel Kawczynski, Tim Loughton, Penny Mordaunt and, no doubt, others. The Tory Party is clearly deeply split on this, as it is on many issues, but the split on this occasion wasn’t a straightforward one between pro- and anti-Brexit MPs. For that reason alone it is absurd to depict what happened as a ‘Remainer show trial’ or as a prelude to reversing Brexit.
Picking over the entrails of ‘Project Fear’
But this obsession with ‘remainers’ goes much wider than the attempt to blame them for Johnson’s richly-deserved and far too belated disgrace. Not only do Brexiters no longer make reference to their own promises of seven years ago, but they are fixated on the now totally irrelevant remain campaign. For example, the Robert Tombs’ piece returns to one of his favourite topics in giving a potted history of ‘Project Fear’ claims as a prelude to some cod psychology which purports to explain why remainers and re-joiners continue to oppose Brexit. The rather obvious explanation that the evidence of its failure continues to increase seems not to occur to him.
It's not just ‘Project Fear’ in general that preoccupies the Brexiters. They are also still gunning for particular hate figures within the supposed project, a prime example being former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who reminded them that he had rightly anticipated that Brexit would have long-term inflationary effects – a key issue this week. Cue outrage from his perennial critic Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a dismissive assessment in CapX from, inevitably, Brexit Blob economist Julian Jessop. But whilst Jessop, rightly, accepts that Carney isn’t ascribing all current UK inflation to Brexit, he isn’t able to disprove that some of it is, something independent economists from Mohamed El-Erian of Queens’ College, Cambridge to Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute in the US see as self-evident, and which even the BBC, despite its hyper-caution about reporting Brexit bad news, just about accepts.
A much less predictable piece about ‘Project Fear’ appeared, also in CapX, written by Phil Craig. There has been so much written about Brexit now that it is very rare indeed to find a new take on it, but Craig succeeds, albeit only by dint of almost mind-blowing perversity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was hailed as “a great article” by that fine judge of intellectual quality and coherent argument, um, David Frost.
Normally, two arguments are made about Project Fear by its critics. One is that since some of its worst predictions didn’t come true that means that all predictions of any Brexit damage, then or since, can safely be ignored. The other is that, since some of the predictions were worse than has actually happened, Brexit is vindicated. The first suffers from an obvious illogic (‘some warnings were false, therefore all warnings are false’). The second isn’t, to say the least, compelling defence of Brexit (‘it’s good because it’s not as bad as the worst that some said it would be’).
Whilst there is some validity in criticizing the use George Osborne, especially, made of the Treasury short-term forecast, especially, both versions of the argument typically operate by cherry-picking often de-contextualised claims from the remain campaign. It’s also quite wrong to equate remain campaign forecasts, accurate or not, with actual lies, such as the infamous ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ slogan that Craig gestures towards, which could never have been true. In any case, what the remain campaign said is irrelevant now, given that the leave campaign won and we’ve left the EU: all that matters is how Brexit has actually worked out.
But Craig’s new angle is to suggest that it is still relevant. He argues that ‘Project Fear’ shifted votes to ‘remain’ in the closing days of the campaign, making the ‘leave’ win much tighter than it would otherwise have been. This, he says, means that compared with the 60-40 win for leave that he believes could otherwise have occurred, the 52-48 win was less amenable to ‘losers’ consent’, and more likely to enable “conspiracy theories to flourish”, accounting for the continuing divisions.
This is nonsense at multiple levels (except, perhaps, if the implication is that the referendum should have required a ‘super-majority’), not least because there’s little or no evidence from the pre-referendum opinion polls that a 60-40 vote to leave was remotely likely. The highest level of support for leave recorded in those polls was 55%, in a single survey, and no other poll was anywhere near that.
Moreover, the ‘victim-blaming’ implication that remainers are at fault for what has happened subsequently because they didn’t lose heavily enough is a bizarre one. Even if Craig insists that remainer forecasts were lies, stripping their impact out would only make sense in this context if the impact of the leave campaign lies were similarly removed: does anyone seriously think that would have yielded a 52%, let alone a 60%, vote to leave? And, that being so, whilst Craig doesn’t seek to defend any of the leave lies, it is surely perverse to suggest that “the big lies, the ones that really shifted the dial” were told by the remain campaign.
Losers’ consent
Beyond that, though, is the whole question of ‘losers’ consent’. It’s true that some have focused on improprieties in the 2016 vote, including not just the conduct of the campaign but funding and possible Russian interference, though it’s not clear that a wider margin in the result would have assuaged those concerns rather than magnified them. But that wasn’t the biggest complaint. Far more important was the fact that what ‘leaving the EU’ meant was not specified by the referendum, so what the losers were being asked to consent to was only defined retrospectively. That would still have been a complaint, and an equally legitimate one, whatever the margin of their defeat.
It's also true that there was a demand for another vote. But the campaign for a People’s Vote was never, despite many claims to the contrary, a campaign to re-run the referendum, but to have a referendum with at least some knowledge (albeit not that of the eventual trade deal) of what, by 2018-2019, had become clearer about Brexit was going to mean in practice. That didn’t happen, because Brexiters knew or suspected that they would lose such a vote, and that’s one reason why Brexit continues to be so divisive: it did not, in the form it took, have majority support.
But even that might have gone away in time had the actually effects of Brexit not proved to be so dire (confirming at least some, if not all, of the ‘Project Fear warnings). Again, it is this, rather than issues of loser’s consent, or weird psychological preferences, or vindictiveness, or elite plotting, or any of the other convoluted arguments being put forward, which explains why Brexit is still divisive and still contentious.
Remainer ‘subversion’
For those not sated with Frost’s recommended readings, he praised another “excellent” article this week, this time from the more familiar pen of Graham Gudgin who, with Robert Tombs, co-edits the Brexit Blob's house-website Briefings for Britain, which is where the article appeared. Yet again, the focus is on the perceived sins of remainers, who this time are accused of “becoming increasingly desperate” and suffering “Brexit derangement syndrome”, supposedly because they “pin any and all negative events on Brexit”.
The latter is a typically hyperbolic claim designed to discredit by association in that, whilst I don’t doubt that examples can be found of it, no serious analysis of Brexit proceeds in that way. Certainly, serious analysts of things like travel disruption, trade levels, the labour market or inflation are at pains to try to separate out Brexit from other factors. The real issue is the refusal of Brexiters to accept that, whatever that separate impact may be, it is necessarily an extra burden, uniquely suffered by Britain.
Towards the end of Gudgin’s article is another version of the losers’ consent theme, but this time making one of the most persistent, and the most pernicious, claims within the Brexiter canon, that remainers in parliament “attempt[ed] to subvert the result of a legally-conducted referendum”. It's manifestly untrue. When was this attempt made?
The vote on triggering Article 50? But that was passed with a massive majority. The votes on May’s deal? But her deal was voted against by the Brexiters, on the basis it was not real Brexit, so that can’t have been an attempt to “subvert the result” of the referendum. A motion to hold another referendum (if that would be considered subversion)? But no such motion was passed. The vote on Johnson’s deal? But his Withdrawal Amendment Bill had passed second reading and its passage was only interrupted by his decision to hold the 2019 election. I suppose, for Brexiters, the other possible answer would be the Benn Act. But that was a vote to prevent no-deal Brexit, which was never proposed as an even conceivable version of Brexit at the referendum.
Humiliating remainers
Perhaps the crucial conceit in Gudgin’s piece is that “we always knew that a hardcore of remainers would never give up”, as if “this Remainer fight-back” arises from the eccentricity, if not “some sort of mental breakdown”, of a tiny, declining and deluded minority. Yet the fact is that a clear and growing majority of the public think that Brexit has been a mistake, and not because they are “like Jacobites … still attempting to reverse the Glorious Revolution more than half a century after the event” but because ordinary people, seven years from the referendum, have seen what it means and see it as having failed. As the pollster Peter Kellner wrote this week, “Britain is now an anti-Brexit country”.
Perhaps it is enragement about this which explains why so much Brexiter energy is directed at insulting remainers. Ever since the referendum result some Brexiters have seemed to enjoy the hurt and anguish it has caused remainers more than they do Brexit itself, which in itself has contributed to keeping all the divisions alive. That is even more the case now when, even in seeking to defend Brexit, they do not invite everyone, leaver and remainer alike, to relish its supposed success, but frame their argument in terms of humiliating Brexit’s critics.
A typical example is the recent Telegraph article by Ross Clark, headlined “Remainers predicting economic catastrophe have been utterly humiliated” (£). Before getting too excited, regular Telegraph readers might have recalled how, in March, David Frost told them that Remainers “are about to be humiliated” (£), that time by the agreement of UK accession to CPTPP and the 0.08% GDP uplift it might bring over 15 years. They might also have remembered that, last September, they were assured by Allister Heath that the “declinist remainer elite is about to be humiliated” (£), the reason on that occasion being the Truss mini-budget, which did indeed bring about humiliation – for its architects, and their cheerleaders like Heath.
At all events, any quailing remainer who continued reading the Clark piece might have felt utterly bemused rather than “utterly humiliated”. For it turned out that the prediction in question was made in January, not by ‘remainers’ but the IMF (for some Brexiters, of course, there is no distinction), and it was not of ‘catastrophe’ but, though the article didn’t spell this out, of a 0.6% contraction of UK GDP in 2023. Again not mentioned is that the IMF subsequently revised its forecast in April to a 0.3% contraction and in May to a 0.4% growth (one reason for the upgrade, by the way, was agreeing the Windsor Framework, regarded by Brexit Ultras as a betrayal).
The ‘utter humiliation’ suffered by this outdated forecast was that, according to Eurostat, the UK economy in fact grew by a dazzling 0.1% of GDP in each of the last two quarters. Wowza! Not only that but, to complete the humiliation, the Eurozone has “plunged into” a recession, having “slumped” by 0.1% in those same two quarters. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Clark attaches great significance to this as a justification of Brexit, although it is not at all clear why, since the UK was never part of the Eurozone, and its economic cycle rarely, if ever, coincided with it. Nor it is clear why a Eurozone recession should be good news since it is still such a major export market for the UK.
So all this was bogus as a defence of Brexit, but the present point is that its entire framing, like that of the other articles cited, illustrates Brexiters talking to a (presumably) sympathetic audience in ways suggesting that what is now the most important thing about Brexit is the demonization of remainers.
The problem with Brexit is Brexit itself
This is part of the explanation of why Brexit has failed, at a political level. You can hardly recruit converts to your cause by insulting and humiliating them. But the bigger issue is that the pre-occupation with doing so is an expression of the fact that there is nothing to celebrate about Brexit. The problem with Brexit isn’t anything to do with remainers, it is with Brexit itself.
It is the refusal of Brexiters to accept that which explains how their original obsession with leaving has now shifted to an obsession with remainers. That in turn is part of the attempt to show that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’ or ‘not done properly’ or ‘done in name only’. Taken together, it creates a vicious circle. The more that Brexiters themselves decry the Brexit we actually have, the less reason there is for the public, including leave voters, to support it, and the less the public support it, the more Brexiters turn their ire on remainers.
Rather than pick over the scabs of Project Fear or scratch at the psychosomatic rash of remainer revenge and plots, they would do better to satisfy the seven-year itch by returning to the Vote.EU video I mentioned above, or perhaps the Vote Leave one about the NHS. Not in a spirit of triumph, as they might have done had Brexit succeeded, but in order to recognize how preposterous were the promises they made for Brexit, and how comprehensively they have failed to transpire.
If capable of honesty, they would admit that the fault for what has happened since lies not with those who warned of it and tried to prevent it, but with those who made these promises and persuaded so many to believe them. And if capable of shame, they would hang their heads, as disgraced as their disgraceful leader.
*It shouldn’t be concluded that all the MPs who didn’t vote, including Tories, were registering lack of support for the Committee’s report (for example, Alberto Costa was one of them, although he was one of the Committee’s members). Some may have had legitimate reasons why they couldn’t attend.
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