Mustn't grumble

There is a stereotype about the British, and perhaps especially the English, that we are unwilling to complain, and will put up with quite a bit of privation with little more than a few grumbles or, even, with the observation that ‘oh well, we mustn’t grumble’. We even sometimes seem to recognize this placidity as a characteristic of national political conduct, as when it is observed that if such-and-such ‘was happening in France then they would be on the streets’.

Whether this really is generally true, or more so than it is in other countries, I’m not sure. Nor am I sure whether, if true, it should be regarded as an endearing stoicism or an appalling apathy. It’s not even clear whether it betokens a rather cowardly fear that making a fuss would be an embarrassment or just a resigned acceptance that doing so would be pointless. But, at all events, it does seem to characterize public sentiment about Brexit.

Brexit: plenty to complain about

That, at least, is one reading of the very extensive recent polling conducted for the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre at King’s College London (which is well worth studying in its entirety). It certainly suggests that people have something to complain about. In particular, this latest survey confirms the pattern that has been clear for some time now with only 10% of all voters (and just 18% even of 2016 leave voters) thinking Brexit has turned out well or very well (p.30).

It's true that the beliefs lying behind that are varied with, for example, 61% of leave voters thinking it will turn out well or very well ‘in the long run’, though only 30% of all voters think this (p.32). And there are many more caveats and qualifications to be made about the ‘headline’ finding about the lack of success of Brexit. These include the extent of neutral responses and ‘don’t knows’ within different voter groups, and the variety of reasons given for why it hasn’t been a success. But that headline finding is clear and important. Brexit was, after all, promoted as something which would be an unalloyed success, so the fact that so few think it has been or is going to be is, just in itself, a reason for the public to feel disgruntled.

Of course, Brexit is in some ways an abstract, or at least general, concept and, apart from those with strong commitments for and against it in abstract or general terms, it’s reasonable to think that many people are more concerned with specific issues that affect their daily lives. Yet, if so, then there, too, they have reasons for complaint about Brexit. For example, of the 79% of people who have personally noticed the cost of goods increasing over the last year, 19% think this is entirely the result of Brexit and 41% that is partly the result of Brexit. The 65% who have noticed food shortages are even more likely to think they are wholly due to Brexit (47%), with another 36% thinking them partly so. Travel delays, and staff shortages in the NHS, social care, and hospitality, are also amongst issues where, of those who have personally experienced them, the large majority think they are wholly or partly the result of Brexit. (All figures in this paragraph from p.20 of the UJICE report.)

Taken together, then, there is plenty for people to complain about in Brexit, regardless of whether they attribute it to Brexit in and of itself or only to the way in which Brexit has been undertaken. That is all the more striking considering that other likely candidates for the causes of the problems people experience in their daily lives – Covid, Ukraine, or global factors generally – are less obviously attributable to domestic political choices. For although people may well consider that the government handling of Covid, to take the most obvious example, was defective in various ways it is surely obvious that the virus was something that affected every country, one way or another. Only Brexit is entirely home-grown and entirely unique to this country.

Brexit fatigue

Yet, as Anand Menon and Sophie Stowers of UKICE highlight in their commentary on the report, “there’s a real sense of fatigue around the Brexit debate and high levels of indifference towards the future of the UK-EU relationship”. It may be (the report doesn’t cover this) that, because Brexit is so closely associated with the Tories, complaint about Brexit is manifesting itself, along with other factors, in the government’s unpopularity. But there isn’t majority support for another referendum and, were one to be held, it is by no means clear it would yield a large majority, or even necessarily a majority, to rejoin the EU.

That said, there is clear support (64%) for a “stronger relationship” with the EU, and considerable support (50%) for a “closer relationship” (pp.48-49). What lies behind the discrepancy between the two is not obvious, but perhaps it is because respondents don’t know, any more than I do, what ‘stronger’ and ‘closer’ mean in specific terms, or how they differ. At all events, although there is a degree of support for an improved relationship, in some sense, with the EU, the overall point that emerges is that most voters don’t see Brexit itself as a burning issue, even though they see it as a factor in other issues, like the cost of living and the state of the NHS, which they do see as high priorities.

Some of the reasons for this can be glimpsed in the qualitative research which accompanied the polling data, including the fatalistic one that “we’ve made our bed, let’s all lie in it” (p.28) and the idea that it would be “embarrassing” (p.47) to re-open the issue of membership. These comments both came from leave voters, but even 42% of remain voters wish “we would stop talking about the issue altogether” (p.53). There’s also a widespread sense that it is de-stabilizing and divisive to continue to do so, something which is frequently said by politicians of both main parties.

Trapped by Brexiter blackmail  

All of these things may make some kind of sense, and goodness knows there must be plenty of us – including, I imagine, many readers of this blog – who are sick of Brexit and continue to feel traumatized by the divisions it unleashed. But it is important to understand that such sentiments arise in large part from a trap, or traps, which have been created by Brexiters.

On the one hand, even if they no longer try to claim that Brexit has been a success, some of them now seem to count it as a victory that they have created a situation in which it is too difficult to deal with its failure. So, far from having delivered the ‘will of the people’ for a ‘national liberation’, the Brexiters are now gleeful that the British people are stuck with something they don’t want: not just a bed, but a bed of nails, they have to lie on. On the other hand, the continuing vitriol the Brexiters have poured, daily, into the media ever since their referendum victory is an ever-present reminder that re-opening Brexit would, indeed, be hugely divisive. In effect, it is political blackmail: the constant threat that if the British people attempt to undo Brexit then Brexiters will unleash such extreme toxicity into politics that it will become unbearable.

So, in terms of that stereotype of the ‘uncomplaining Brit’, the situation is rather like being in a restaurant which, having promised a gourmet meal under its new ownership, has provided what most on the table consider to be a s*** sandwich (the asterisks aren’t my coyness, but because certain words create problems for blog feeds and search engines). But why complain? For better or for worse, the meal has been eaten and it’s ‘too late’ to make a fuss now, and anyway it would be ‘embarrassing’. Moreover, the waiter looks distinctly surly and the chef is ostentatiously, and ominously, sharpening knives in the kitchen, so it would be imprudent and possibly dangerous to do so. And, after all, there are at least some of the diners who claim to be delighted with what they have had. All in all, it’s better just to put up with things. Mustn’t grumble.

An ongoing condition

However, one of the ways in which this analogy breaks down is that Brexit is not a finite event, like a single meal at a restaurant. It is an ongoing condition: this is where we will be eating every day for the rest of our lives. A key aspect of how this is now playing out is revealed in another major recent piece of work from UKICE, Joël Reland’s latest version of the UK-EU regulatory divergence tracker which, in general terms, continues to show what is becoming an established pattern of there being relatively little divergence from the EU.

As if in confirmation, the day after that update was published, it was reported (£) that the government would not proceed with its attempt to scrap the ‘nutrient neutrality rules’, environmental protections inherited from the EU which restrict where houses can be built. On the other hand, this week the idea of scrapping EU rules capping bankers’ bonuses has to have been revived (£), having previously been seen as politically maladroit amidst Johnson’s promises of ‘levelling up, then pursued under Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng (£) as part of their deregulatory agenda before being kicked into the long grass of consultation from which it has now re-emerged.

That these developments point in different directions partly reflects the strategic incoherence of Rishi Sunak’s ad hoc approach to Brexit, which I’ve remarked upon before. These particular cases may also derive from attempts to set pre-election political traps for Labour, the first one by suggesting that Labour’s own opposition to axing nutrient neutrality rules is at odds with its promise to cut the ‘red tape’ that impedes housebuilding, the second by challenging Labour to oppose this divergence and risk damaging its attempts to develop good relations with the City.

Such political games aside, Reland, in his accompanying commentary, suggests “that non-divergence is now the status quo” in the sense that it is both Sunak’s policy, even if inconsistently so and not announced as such, and, more explicitly, is set to be Keir Starmer’s default policy if Labour win the next election. Yet, as Reland points out, there is an important difference in that, whilst the Conservatives are undertaking little in the way of ‘active divergence’ (UK changing regulations away from those of the EU), they are allowing far more ‘passive divergence’ (UK not following regulatory changes made by the EU) than, it seems, a Labour government would countenance.

There are very good reasons to avoid both passive and active divergence, which I have rehearsed so many times on this blog that I won’t do so again (see also Peter Foster’s recent book on Brexit, which I reviewed in last week’s post). One particular emerging example, the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), mentioned by Reland and briefly discussed in one of my recent posts, forms part of an interesting analysis in Gerhard Schnyder’s most recent Brexit Impact Tracker blog. He explains that its likely effect will be to reduce UK tax receipts by billions of pounds, whilst correspondingly benefitting the EU. This, he argues, is part of a pattern whereby the ‘benefits of Brexit’ do indeed exist, but are invariably experienced by countries other than the UK.

Thus, increasingly, it is emerging that in ‘taking back control’ of its laws – which according to the UKICE polling data was the biggest motivation for leave voters (p.6) – Brexit means that what the UK loses on the swings it also loses on the roundabouts. That is, the more the UK diverges from the EU the more expensive Brexit becomes, but the less it diverges from the EU the more pointless Brexit becomes*. And all of this is quite apart from the remorseless, crunchingly negative effect of Brexit on GDP compared with what it would otherwise be – an effect exacerbated by any divergence but not ameliorated by non-divergence (and only very slightly ameliorated by greater alignment).

The full absurdity of what this all means can be seen by reference to the various models of Brexit that used to be propounded. Perhaps we could be in the single market, like Norway, gaining its economic benefits but, it was said, losing sovereignty because we would be subject to ‘fax democracy’ – receiving legislative instructions from Brussels**. That always somewhat understated the influence that Norway has but, anyway, it was deemed unacceptable, indeed deemed not to be Brexit at all, by the ‘hard Brexiters’. So we left the single market, taking the economic costs, but, now, we take legislation from Brussels not ‘by fax’ but by the inexorable economic and political logic of non-divergence.

The (ir)responsibility of the British people

It is re-visiting the form of Brexit, quite as much as re-joining the EU, that the Brexiters have made so difficult with the traps within which they have ensnared the British people. But, whilst they deserve to be judged harshly for having created them, I think that voters, and political journalists and politicians more generally, bear some responsibility. Indeed, although no doubt it would be denounced as ‘elitist’ by populists like Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton & Oxford), and is far more ‘unsayable’ than the supposedly silenced ‘debate’ about immigration, I despair of the constant vox pops showing so many voters to be puffed full of self-righteous indignation and galvanized with an invincible ignorance for which they feel pride rather than shame.

As regards Brexit, although there’s not much point harking back to it, the casual irresponsibility with which some voted for it in order to ‘give Cameron a kicking’, or because ‘it was time for a change’, or because they ‘never expected leave to win’ was disgraceful. It is far less excusable than those who were taken in by the false promises about money for the NHS or the rejuvenation of the fishing industry. It’s certainly worse than indefensible for leave voters of the former type to say that ‘we’ve made our bed, and now we must all lie in it’.

More importantly, now, there’s a deeply childish vein amongst the electorate, and the polity, in treating Brexit as if it were ‘all in the past’, ‘yesterday’s news’, from which ‘we should all move on’. It’s a mentality which is not just about Brexit; it is equally evident in relation to Covid, with people and politicians talking and acting as if it were now all over when, apart from anything else, an estimated 1.9 million people are suffering from long Covid. Perhaps politics has always been like that, but I think that the attention span is now even shorter because of the twin effect of the 24/7 news cycle and social media. Perhaps, too, the contemporary culture of victimhood, so central to Brexit but evident more generally, is antithetical to the concept of taking responsibility for choices made.

Yet Brexit, and Covid for that matter, demands a more serious response. After all, it was a major shift of the UK’s entire economic and geo-political strategy, and one which only came into practical effect less than three years ago, when the transition period ended. And this is hardly a ‘remainer’ complaint. Surely Brexiters should be the most disgruntled if their great achievement, their national liberation from ‘the EUSSR’, is now only fit to wrap fish and chips? But the answer to that is all too obvious: so evidently has it failed that they would far rather it just be accepted, undiscussed, as ‘just one of those things’ about which we ‘mustn’t grumble’.

The open secret that Brexit has failed

Of course, there are many who remain keenly attentive to Brexit and vocal in their complaints about it, by which I mean not just re-joiners but the Brexit Ultras. And, of course, it was inevitable that, gradually, the politics of Brexit and British politics generally would become less and less distinguishable. Yet there is a quiescence about the failure of Brexit which, given its centrality to politics since 2016, seems astounding.

In my previous life as an academic I co-wrote a book about secrecy in organizations, drawing in part on the concept in political anthropology of ‘public secrecy’. In very brief, this refers to shameful things which everyone knows and yet doesn’t know, an all but unsayable knowledge, akin to what is often called an ‘open secret’, of which examples can be found in many families, organizations or, as seems to be the case in Britain today, in national polities. The result is that what Schnyder calls “the Un-British Brexit benefits” are met with the all too British response of embarrassed silence.

Writing recently in the Guardian, George Monbiot discussed the political silence around Covid, and especially around its continuing effects on those with long Covid or the clinically vulnerable. His eloquent conclusion is that: “These facts – and these people – are treated as social embarrassments, locked in the government’s moral attic like a relative with a mental illness in Victorian England. They’re the country’s family secret. That coughing noise upstairs? Nothing that need concern you.”

In a similar way, the failure of Brexit and the possible solutions to it are only semi-discussable, publicly known and yet not known. For that we should blame the Brexiters who have blackmailed us into making it so, the media organizations who consider it old news, the politicians who purport to lead and to be willing to make ‘hard choices’, but follow the focus groups which want to avoid such choices. But we should also blame the electorate from which those focus groups are drawn, an electorate which, after all, made a big choice in 2016 but which now, whether from boredom or fear – or, perhaps, in some cases, shame – insists that we ‘mustn’t grumble’ about its consequences.

 
Notes
 

*To this should be added the particular dynamic as regards Northern Ireland, which in some respects is obliged to remain aligned with the EU. Thus, the more the UK (or at least GB) diverges from the EU, the ‘thicker’ the GB-NI Irish Sea border potentially becomes. This poses a particular paradox for those Unionists who are also hard Brexiters, since they desire both increased divergence and a thinner, or non-existent, Irish Sea border.

**Younger readers who may be puzzled by the reference to a ‘fax’ are referred to the Museum of Obsolete Objects. Less frivolously, Norway and its lessons for what ‘sovereignty’ means for post-Brexit Britain is the focus of what looks to be (I haven’t read it yet) an interesting new book.