It has become increasingly difficult to separate out Brexit as a topic from British politics generally, and the politics of the Conservative Party in particular. That has been true for a while, but brought home with force this week with yet another outbreak of the Tories’ long-running civil war. It is a war in which Brexit features as both cause and consequence and, whilst it may have begun with a relatively genteel skirmish between ‘Eurosceptics’ and ‘Europhiles’ in the Tory Party, it has now become a full-blown culture war which has spread way beyond the party, or even Westminster politics.
This has not happened suddenly. It began to emerge early in the Brexit process, and by October 2017 I was writing that Brexit was “becoming a battle for Britain’s political soul”. At that time, that may have seemed like hyperbole, or at least pessimism. Seven years later, it seems almost a truism.
Enter Cameron
It’s a cliché that a week is a long time in politics, but Monday’s announcement of the bizarre resurrection to political office of David Cameron already seems like a distant memory. But it’s still worth dwelling on for a moment. Just from a Brexit point of view, his is a name to conjure with in that, almost uniquely, he is likely to be despised by those holding almost any position on Brexit. Even those not much interested or exercised about it may well resent him for creating this enormous and de-stabilizing storm and then washing his hands of it, with a seemingly insouciant song on his lips as he resigned. For remainers, he is the man who with total irresponsibility gambled and lost the country’s well-being in a miscalculated act of party management. Meanwhile, for leavers, any lingering gratitude they may have to him for having gifted them the referendum is superseded by the fact that he campaigned for remain.
But for hard core Tory Brexiters, the loathing of Cameron goes far deeper than that. Even before the referendum, many of them regarded him as ‘not being a real Conservative’, meaning too socially liberal, too green, too metropolitan, too globalist. Before Brexit, that was still perhaps a relatively marginal view, but the Conservative Party now is very different even to that of 2015 or even 2017. Brexit saw most of the more centrist and socially liberal Tory MPs expunged or marginalized, and Brexit itself has now morphed from just being about leaving the EU into Brexitism or Brexitist populism.*
That is not simply about moving from Brexit to a wider right-wing agenda. As their pet political scientist Matt Goodwin illustrated this week, the Brexitists want to claim that the referendum was not just a vote to leave the EU but a vote to permanently end what he calls ‘Liberal Centrist Dad politics’. Absurd as this claim is – that wasn’t the question asked, so it can’t be claimed to be what the answer meant – it is important to understand how widespread it is. Thus similar claims this week were made by populist commentator Isabel Oakeshott and by Miriam Cates, co-Chair of the ‘New Conservatives’ group of Tory MPs. It enables Brexitists to dishonestly pretend that the referendum gave them a democratic licence for far more than leaving the EU. So they use it as if it were a permanent majority for their entire ideology, even though, as the last seven years have made clear, it was not even a permanent majority for Brexit, and was never a majority for any particular form of Brexit.
Exit Braverman
Precisely the same ‘logic’ was on display in Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak, following her sacking. Amidst her wider diatribe, she too claimed that a whole swathe of policies she has advocated “are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum”. In this, as in much else, Braverman, former ERG Chair and a leading light amongst the National Conservative (NatCon) group, epitomizes Brexitism. She does so with such crudity, venom and extremism that, eventually and belatedly, Sunak could no longer ignore it.
There’s a danger of becoming inured to the shocking growth of extremism in mainstream Conservative politics since 2016, an extremism ranging from the denunciation of judges as ‘enemies of the people’, through the unlawful prorogation of parliament, to a British cabinet minister openly stating in the House of Commons that he proposed to break international law, something which, as Attorney General, Braverman endorsed. So it is worth recording just how extreme her conduct became last week.
In brief, what we saw was a Home Secretary smearing Pro-Palestine demonstrations in their entirety as ‘hate marches’; attempting, against constitutional convention, to pressurize the police into banning their demonstration; suggesting that the police were unfairly biased against far-right demonstrators; and giving rise to at least the suspicion she might want the march to be violent in order to show that she had been right about it and right about her more general thesis that ‘multi-culturalism has failed. At the same time, she at least dog-whistled to far-right demonstrators to take to the streets.
It was a dog-whistle which was heard, with the consequence that far-right thugs despoiled the Armistice Day events that Braverman had falsely claimed the Pro-Palestine march threatened, unleashing what the Metropolitan Police called “extreme violence” against them. As the former Tory MP Dominic Grieve said, “it's impossible to escape the conclusion that some of that [violence] was fuelled by the rhetoric and the incitement of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman.” Grieve, also a lawyer and a former Attorney General, albeit of a very different stamp to Braverman, is hardly a man given to injudicious remarks. So for him to have used the word ‘incitement’ in this context is little short of remarkable.
It is true that, although most of the violence came from the far-right, some of the Pro-Palestine marchers were also violent. It should also be said that some of the marchers used antisemitic slogans and chants that are utterly indefensible. It simply isn’t enough to say that these are being ‘misinterpreted’ when everyone must now know that (to take the main, specific, case) ‘from the river, to the sea’ is open to multiple interpretations. It is a fact that to many Jewish people, including some who are our fellow-citizens, it inspires genuine fear. So to continue to use that chant is to choose to stoke that fear.
Yet neither of these things remotely justifies Braverman’s words and conduct, and in an atmosphere already so highly charged they were all the more disgraceful. It was certainly, so far as I know, unprecedented for a Home Secretary but, and this is a key point, what Braverman said was not a rogue or maverick opinion amongst NatCons. On the contrary, for many of them and their sympathisers what she said was no more than common sense and, at worst, her only fault was, in the words of David Frost (£), to “occasionally express herself imperfectly”.
Thuggish populists and populist thugs
Most crucially, and most dangerously of all, there is now effectively no difference between the kind of things the Brexitist populists say and those that the far-right ‘counter-protestors’ at the Cenotaph say. Indeed, there is even some evidence that that they share sources of funding. They are on the same side at very least to the extent that the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson saying [offensive content warning] this week that Braverman had been “fired for telling the TRUTH”. Compare and, if possible, contrast with “Suella Braverman was sacked for being right”, the headline of a Telegraph article (£) by GB News presenter and one-time Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.
It’s not just the same sentiment, but there is even a certain similarity between Rees-Mogg’s accusation that Sunak is too “effete” to care enough about immigration and Robinson’s cruder description of the Conservatives as “spineless cucks”. It’s not a coincidence. That same theme of affronted masculinity can be seen in former ERG Vice-Chair Andrea Jenkyns’ semi-literate letter of no confidence in Sunak, sent in response to Braverman’s sacking. In it, the MP who sits very much on the Brexitist or populist wing of the party, declared that Braverman had been “the only person in the cabinet with the balls to speak the truth”.
The populist politicians and the thugs certainly share the all too familiar anti-immigration and anti-liberal tropes, and at least versions of the ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. At this particular moment, they also share the opportunism of those who, in Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland’s words, “look at the war between Israel and Hamas, and the grief and fear it prompts in the hearts of Jews and Muslims, especially, and see not tragedy but opportunity – a chance to advance their own interests”. At least part of what, I assume, Freedland means is that we should hardly take it at face value when far-right bully boys and their allies claim to be shocked and appalled by antisemitic language and violence. Nor, for that matter, should we even begin to take seriously the idea that they were defending the ‘sacred monuments’ [offensive content warning] of the war dead, whose memory they in fact befoul.
Perhaps we should be relieved that, even gifted this moment of opportunity, the capacity of the far right to put much of a presence on the street proved quite limited. It seems they could only muster a few hundred yobs, and many of those were, apparently, addled by drink and drugs. They are frightening and intimidating, without question, but we are not – not yet, anyway – at the point of having uncontainable political street-violence.
What is more frightening is the possibility that they no longer need to exert such violence when their views, even if perhaps expressed more smoothly, and by men and women in smart clothes, are becoming so widely prevalent in the mainstream of politics and the media. Indeed sometimes, as with Tory Party Deputy Chairman and GB News presenter Lee Anderson’s “f*** off back to France” remark, even the expression is not notably different.
Reading Rishi Sunak
Given how high the stakes have now become, it is more important than ever to know where, exactly, Rishi Sunak stands. I’ve written at great length in the past about how Brexitism is eating Conservatism, including a post last February about the schism between Brexitists and Traditionalists and, more recently, after the Party’s October conference, about how Brexit has driven the Tories mad. Most of that analysis still stands, and is the context for these latest developments. In that context, a widely-expressed interpretation of Sunak appointing Cameron and sacking Braverman was that he was throwing his weight behind traditionalism, or ‘centrism,’ and against Brexitist populism. That is how many commentators saw it (£) and, perhaps more significantly, how the Brexitists in the Tory Party and in the Reform Party continue to understand it.
Even before the week’s later events, I felt that this was a questionable reading. Sunak came to power on the basis of being competent and offering stability after the Truss meltdown, and he has sometimes kept to that script. That’s especially so as regards Brexit, where agreeing the Windsor Framework and effectively dropping the scrapping of Retained EU Law were pragmatic, sensible steps which, of course, infuriated the Brexiters. The same goes for re-joining Horizon, effectively scrapping UKCA marking, and other decisions. However, he has consistently been inconsistent, if that is not a contradiction in terms, in that in other ways, especially in his prioritization of ‘stopping the boats’ and his de-prioritization of net-zero policies, he has embraced Brexitist populism.
He seems especially prone to doing so when under pressure, most obviously when, during his original, failed leadership campaign, he promised an even speedier shredding of Retained EU Law than Truss was proposing. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that, when Braverman was fulminating against the police last week, Sunak was, if more squeakily, singing a similar tune in his veiled threat to hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘accountable’ for any trouble if the Palestine march was allowed to go ahead. Not should it be forgotten that ‘Downing Street’ backed Anderson over his “f*** off back to France” comment.
So I never felt persuaded when, for a few hours this week, it seemed that Sunak had now made a definitive choice: to stop playing with populism and to make his pitch to the electorate as a competent centrist. Supposedly, the real Rishi Sunak had now stood up and was ready to be counted. One obvious problem with this reading is that there are surely only so many times that self-definition can be attempted. So it is hard to see how appointing Cameron is consistent with his Conference pitch – only a month ago – to present himself as someone offering a ‘new politics’ which would break with the ‘failed model of the last 30 years’. It’s not even clear that Cameron fits the ‘competent Sunak’ model given that his track record, including his role in Brexit, is hardly evidence of sagacious statesmanship or even of tactical nous.
Moreover, if it is meant to be an electoral gambit, to signal to Southern Blue Wall Tory voters that Sunak rejects Brexitist madness, it’s not obvious that it will be a clear enough signal for that purpose, whilst it is very obvious that it will be a negative signal in the newly acquired Northern Red Wall seats. And if that was the gambit, then why did he immediately undermine it by appointing Esther McVey, yet another GB News presenter and populist Tory MP, to attend Cabinet as ‘anti-Woke Tsar’, responsible for “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”? That certainly won’t placate the populists, anyway, so whatever the motivation it just leaves a muddle.
All this is part of a wider mystery about Sunak and what motivates him. That is especially obvious in relation to Brexit. He has, apparently, always been in favour of it, although I don’t recall him taking any part in the referendum campaign, and he has never given any real explanation of what it is about Brexit that he supports. For that matter, as the Brexiters have observed, the impression he gives – his whole ‘vibe’ – is far more ‘remainerish’, if there is such a thing. And it’s the same with other things that he is supposedly motivated by, such as the possibilities of technology on which, for all that he is endlessly described as a ‘tech bro’, he never says anything except bland platitudes, such as that AI presents opportunities and dangers. This is not exactly evidence of a deep interest, still less of deep thinking.
I don’t think that it is possible any more, if it ever was, to regard Sunak as an enigma, or even as a very inexperienced politician still feeling his way. Instead, I think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that his plasticity is not the shiny cover for some deeper core of belief or purpose, it is just all there is to him. It’s not even a matter of the familiar attempt of many politicians to be all things to all people and who end up pleasing no one. It’s just that there is less to him than meets the eye. There are no hidden depths, just a well-concealed depthlessness. He is impossible to read not because of any inscrutability of purpose but because, quite simply, there is nothing to read.
My suspicion about the shallowness of any conversion to centrism Sunak may have had on Monday was amply justified within two days, following Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling that the government’s ‘Rwanda’ policy is unlawful. That created immediate political pressure for Sunak because, whilst it seems unlikely that Braverman, herself, has a great personal following amongst the Brexitists, her views do, and Rwanda is a policy issue for them to rally around.
The fact that the ruling made it clear (£) that violation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) was only a minor factor in the court’s judgment did not stop the more bone-headed of them from immediately proposing their pet 'Brexit 2.0' project of leaving it. Moreover some of them, like Anderson, have already called for the government to simply ignore the judgment, some, like ‘New Conservative’ Jonathan Gullis, have called for the government to just dump asylum seekers back in France, and another ‘New Conservative’, Brendan Clarke-Smith, has resurrected the odious “enemies of the people” line.
Without endorsing the most egregiously nonsensical of these suggestions (though, yet again, refusing to condemn Anderson’s remarks), Sunak immediately buckled to the populist pressure by proposing ‘emergency legislation’ which in effect is a new version of the idea that international law can be set aside by domestic legislation, mentioned above. At the same time, despite its marginal role in the judgment, he again raised at least by implication the possibility of, if not leaving the ECHR, then at least ignoring potential rulings from its associated Court in the future. So, once again, competent technocratic Sunak – who could, after all, simply drop all this Rwanda nonsense and focus on creating a quick and fair domestic system for processing asylum claims – disappeared from view. Whether or not this is enough to contain the Brexitists, who, as ever, will want more, remains to be seen.
Tortured on the Tory rack
So it still an open question whether the Tory Party will blow up now, or not until after its expected loss of the next election. Meanwhile the country is in a kind of tortured hiatus with the electorate having apparently decided they want rid of this government, but have no choice other than to live through its last, decaying months.
That isn’t just maddening, it is also hugely damaging. We are beset by deep, structural social and economic problems, and also face massive international instability and environmental danger. And hovering over all that is the miasma of Brexit with its daily drag on the economy and the still unanswered questions it has created for what post-Brexit Britain is to be. None of this is being addressed. Instead, we have a zombie government with no policy agenda, which is bad enough, but it is also so riven by internal factionalism that there is the ever-present danger that it will do something utterly mad.
This is not just about the immediate situation. It is now more obvious than ever – and Cameron’s return serves as a reminder of it – just how profoundly the entire country has suffered on the rack created by the competing factions in the Tory Party’s civil war. That civil war has now lasted for over thirty years. Cameron papered over it, at least during the Coalition years, and despite, or even because of, the manifesto promise of a referendum, voters in 2015 might have thought that it had been consigned to the margins of politics. But, since then, it has engulfed us all.
It gave us the bitter referendum that was supposed to resolve matters. It gave us Brexit which, apart from everything else that could be said about it, manifestly intensified divisions within the Tory Party and smeared them to every corner of the polity. Yet, at the same time, which makes the whole thing an even bigger tragedy, it failed to satisfy the Brexiters. It has degraded our international reputation, permanently crippled our economy, toxified our entire political discourse – and, still, they want more. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Brexit’. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Conservatism’.
It is tempting to think that because we seem to be witnessing the death throes of this government, we are also seeing the death throes of this entire period of chaotic mis-rule and vicious division. It is certainly of some comfort that the Supreme Court showed this week, as it did over the original Miller case about Article 50 notification and the unlawful Prorogation, that some of the institutional guide-rails are still intact. That’s hugely important. And perhaps, post-election, the Brexitist populists will destroy each other and become so splintered between different parties as to keep them from power. But so much poison has been unleashed during recent years, and it has spread so far, even, now, extending to violence on the streets. Much will depend on whether the expected next Labour government, amidst all the other challenges it will face, will be able to reverse that spread. I am not hopeful, but it is the only hope there is.
*It’s difficult to find a precise name for people who fall under this label. They include those within the Tory Party, Reform Party and elsewhere who are identified with the National Conservatism (NatCon) institute, such as many of those who spoke at its 2023 London Conference, and, within the Tory Party specifically, members of various small groups including the New Conservatives, the Conservative Democratic Organization and the Common Sense Conservatives.
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Friday, 17 November 2023
Friday, 31 January 2020
A day to mourn
So today it will happen. For some, it will be a day of joy and triumph and celebration. Yet, though those celebrations will be occurring, it seems likely that they will be relatively muted and confined to a relatively small number of the most committed leavers, led by a perhaps slightly underwhelming cast of speakers. There will also be some light displays and a new 50 pence coin.
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Wednesday, 18 July 2018
This theatre of the absurd is making another referendum more likely
In the
history of political speeches, there can be few which provoke such ironic, if
painful, laughter as David Cameron’s first address as leader to the
Conservative Party Conference in 2006. Then, he warned his party of the dangers of “banging
on about Europe”. Little over a decade later, not least because of
decisions that Cameron himself took, the entire country has been sucked into
the vortex of what is no less than a political civil war within the party being
played out daily in the House of Commons. And it is dragging the entire country
to the brink of an unprecedented disaster.
The theatre of the absurd
It is difficult to keep up with unfolding events, which have in any case been widely discussed elsewhere. But it is worth pondering their increasing absurdity. First the government produced a White Paper with a plan for Brexit - which few think could be agreed with the EU, and everyone knew would be anathema to the Ultras - but then supported ERG amendments to the Customs Bill which directly, if not fatally, undermine it.
This provoked ‘remainer rebels’ to oppose those amendments precisely on the grounds that they undermine the government’s plan – one of them actually resigning from it to do so, prompting wags to point out that it may be the first case of a member of the government resigning in order to show support for government policy. The rebels then tabled amendments to the Trade Bill which are broadly in line with the thrust of the White Paper, only to lose on the crucial one because the government applied thumbscrews to block it. In which they might not have succeeded had it not been for a few Labour MPs voting with the most antediluvian elements of the Tory Party, thus preventing, conceivably (at least according to the Tory Whips), the collapse of the government and an election which, again conceivably according to the Tory Whips, Labour might win.
So we now have an open, furious conflict between at least three factions – government, ERG, and remainer rebels – the first of which has an unworkable policy, the second of which has no policy, and the third of which has a policy which it is too scared to actually mention. Brexit, which started as a kind of Ealing comedy, along the lines of Passport to Pimlico, has become the theatre of the absurd, along the lines of Marat/Sade. Unfortunately we, who might otherwise be the audience to this spectacle, have been forced to become participants in this weird psychodrama, strapped unwillingly to it like hostages in a plane taken over by criminally insane.
The changing world order
Meanwhile, as Donald Trump’s various visits this week have underscored, the tectonic plates of the world order are shifting at pace. All the relationships within which Britain has been embedded for two generations are being reconfigured. The ‘special relationship’ may have been – apart from intelligence cooperation – a polite fiction for many decades now. But this is the first time that a US President has treated the UK, and our Prime Minister, with open contempt, sneered at NATO, and cosied up to a country likely to have been responsible for using biological weapons to commit murder on British soil (something our closest ally apparently felt no need to mention to his new chum). Brexiters who swoon at the thought of 'regaining our seat on the WTO' might also want to ponder Trump's attitude to that body.
So Brexit now looks as geo-politically reckless as it is economically reckless. There is a serious and growing case against Brexit on national security grounds as well as economic ones. And the economic tectonic plates are shifting, too. Who, observing the new EU-Japan deal, would give much chance for the future of the UK car industry? For that matter, who, observing the febrile British political scene, would think that this made the UK a better rather than a worse place to invest in?
Future scenarios
It remains the case that all kinds of future scenarios are now possible, and these are set out with great clarity in an excellent analysis by Kirsty Hughes of the Scottish Centre for European Relations on the Federal Trust site. But as Federal Trust’s Director, Brendan Donnelly, argues “a brutal and chaotic Brexit in March is becoming more likely”. This is so not least because, as one of the ERG amendments suggests, the Ultras are shaping up to make it impossible for the government to agree the backstop arrangements for the Irish border which, without any doubt whatsoever, will be the precondition of any Withdrawal Agreement and, therefore, any transition period (and, don't forget, was signed up to by the UK government in the phase 1 agreement).
It’s notable that the Ultras have always denied – and Boris Johnson did the same thing in his predictably fact-free resignation speech – that the Irish border issue is a real one, regarding it instead as having been confected by Brussels or by Dublin. That is manifest nonsense: as soon as the UK decided to leave both the single market and a customs union it had to be an issue. Not least because of the Brexiter desire to strike independent trade deals with potentially different tariffs and regulatory standards from the EU. If there were not to be such differences, what would be the point of making such deals? If there are to be such differences, how could they be policed without policing borders? Neither the EU nor the UK - nor for that matter the WTO – could allow such borders to be ignored.
So we are heading in the direction of no deal, and therefore no transition period. That would mean major disruption to travel and to trade including, most immediately and most damagingly, to food imports, and much more besides. Leading Brexiters – David Davis and Bernard Jenkin being examples this week – play this down as, of course, more Project Fear and suggest that, in any case, it would be a consequence of EU decisions and, by implication, punishment. Again, that is manifest nonsense. It would flow directly from the decisions of the UK government and, if it does, it will happen in just eight months’ time.
Another referendum is becoming more likely
It is possible, I suppose, that the government could go ahead and make a deal anyway, but in practical political terms I am not sure that any government could survive doing so without parliamentary approval (the defeat of the ‘meaningful vote’ amendment earlier this year notwithstanding). In fact, for what it is worth, I don’t think that things will get to that point. If no deal comes more closely into view the political crisis would almost certainly result in a further referendum. If the House of Commons as currently constituted could not agree on the necessary legislation for that, then there would be an election. The routes to all this are unclear – and would almost certainly, just because of the time frames involved, entail getting EU-27 agreement to extend the Article 50 period. In the context of a crisis of this sort, such agreement is not inconceivable for all the difficulties (EU Parliamentary elections, EU budget cycle) it would create.
I’m very well aware of all the problems with and arguments against another referendum – the timing, the question, the franchise, and many other things – and I’ve discussed these before. But it can’t be stressed enough that there is no course of action or scenario available now which does not have huge problems. The one thing which another referendum does have going for it is that it if it yielded a vote to remain in the EU (which is very far from certain) it is the only way such a scenario would have any hope of being regarded as legitimate.
At all events, it looks a more likely possibility than a week ago now that for the first time (I think) a senior Tory MP has proposed it, with the result that it is now being reported as, at least, a possibility by the BBC. Moreover, with the Vote Leave campaign now having been fined by the Electoral Commission for financial irregularities and referred to the police, not to mention growing unease about Russian interference, a public sense that the original vote was flawed can only grow. I think it is a racing certainty that the Labour Party will come out in favour of another referendum, probably very soon, meaning probably this Autumn. The logic of internal party management and of party politics itself points ineluctably in that direction, and if it happens it would be a game changer.
A crisis rooted in lies
It is at all times vital to recall – as, surely, at least some leave voters are – that none of what is happening is remotely like what was promised by the Vote Leave campaign. Then, it would all be quick and easy: the fifth largest economy in the world, German car makers, they need us more than we need them. It was promised that we would be “part of a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to the Russian border”. It was promised that Brexit had no implications for the Irish border. It was even promised that the negotiations would be undertaken before the Article 50 process started.
It was all lies. And from those lies the present, parlous situation – fast turning into a national crisis – has followed.
The theatre of the absurd
It is difficult to keep up with unfolding events, which have in any case been widely discussed elsewhere. But it is worth pondering their increasing absurdity. First the government produced a White Paper with a plan for Brexit - which few think could be agreed with the EU, and everyone knew would be anathema to the Ultras - but then supported ERG amendments to the Customs Bill which directly, if not fatally, undermine it.
This provoked ‘remainer rebels’ to oppose those amendments precisely on the grounds that they undermine the government’s plan – one of them actually resigning from it to do so, prompting wags to point out that it may be the first case of a member of the government resigning in order to show support for government policy. The rebels then tabled amendments to the Trade Bill which are broadly in line with the thrust of the White Paper, only to lose on the crucial one because the government applied thumbscrews to block it. In which they might not have succeeded had it not been for a few Labour MPs voting with the most antediluvian elements of the Tory Party, thus preventing, conceivably (at least according to the Tory Whips), the collapse of the government and an election which, again conceivably according to the Tory Whips, Labour might win.
So we now have an open, furious conflict between at least three factions – government, ERG, and remainer rebels – the first of which has an unworkable policy, the second of which has no policy, and the third of which has a policy which it is too scared to actually mention. Brexit, which started as a kind of Ealing comedy, along the lines of Passport to Pimlico, has become the theatre of the absurd, along the lines of Marat/Sade. Unfortunately we, who might otherwise be the audience to this spectacle, have been forced to become participants in this weird psychodrama, strapped unwillingly to it like hostages in a plane taken over by criminally insane.
The changing world order
Meanwhile, as Donald Trump’s various visits this week have underscored, the tectonic plates of the world order are shifting at pace. All the relationships within which Britain has been embedded for two generations are being reconfigured. The ‘special relationship’ may have been – apart from intelligence cooperation – a polite fiction for many decades now. But this is the first time that a US President has treated the UK, and our Prime Minister, with open contempt, sneered at NATO, and cosied up to a country likely to have been responsible for using biological weapons to commit murder on British soil (something our closest ally apparently felt no need to mention to his new chum). Brexiters who swoon at the thought of 'regaining our seat on the WTO' might also want to ponder Trump's attitude to that body.
So Brexit now looks as geo-politically reckless as it is economically reckless. There is a serious and growing case against Brexit on national security grounds as well as economic ones. And the economic tectonic plates are shifting, too. Who, observing the new EU-Japan deal, would give much chance for the future of the UK car industry? For that matter, who, observing the febrile British political scene, would think that this made the UK a better rather than a worse place to invest in?
Future scenarios
It remains the case that all kinds of future scenarios are now possible, and these are set out with great clarity in an excellent analysis by Kirsty Hughes of the Scottish Centre for European Relations on the Federal Trust site. But as Federal Trust’s Director, Brendan Donnelly, argues “a brutal and chaotic Brexit in March is becoming more likely”. This is so not least because, as one of the ERG amendments suggests, the Ultras are shaping up to make it impossible for the government to agree the backstop arrangements for the Irish border which, without any doubt whatsoever, will be the precondition of any Withdrawal Agreement and, therefore, any transition period (and, don't forget, was signed up to by the UK government in the phase 1 agreement).
It’s notable that the Ultras have always denied – and Boris Johnson did the same thing in his predictably fact-free resignation speech – that the Irish border issue is a real one, regarding it instead as having been confected by Brussels or by Dublin. That is manifest nonsense: as soon as the UK decided to leave both the single market and a customs union it had to be an issue. Not least because of the Brexiter desire to strike independent trade deals with potentially different tariffs and regulatory standards from the EU. If there were not to be such differences, what would be the point of making such deals? If there are to be such differences, how could they be policed without policing borders? Neither the EU nor the UK - nor for that matter the WTO – could allow such borders to be ignored.
So we are heading in the direction of no deal, and therefore no transition period. That would mean major disruption to travel and to trade including, most immediately and most damagingly, to food imports, and much more besides. Leading Brexiters – David Davis and Bernard Jenkin being examples this week – play this down as, of course, more Project Fear and suggest that, in any case, it would be a consequence of EU decisions and, by implication, punishment. Again, that is manifest nonsense. It would flow directly from the decisions of the UK government and, if it does, it will happen in just eight months’ time.
Another referendum is becoming more likely
It is possible, I suppose, that the government could go ahead and make a deal anyway, but in practical political terms I am not sure that any government could survive doing so without parliamentary approval (the defeat of the ‘meaningful vote’ amendment earlier this year notwithstanding). In fact, for what it is worth, I don’t think that things will get to that point. If no deal comes more closely into view the political crisis would almost certainly result in a further referendum. If the House of Commons as currently constituted could not agree on the necessary legislation for that, then there would be an election. The routes to all this are unclear – and would almost certainly, just because of the time frames involved, entail getting EU-27 agreement to extend the Article 50 period. In the context of a crisis of this sort, such agreement is not inconceivable for all the difficulties (EU Parliamentary elections, EU budget cycle) it would create.
I’m very well aware of all the problems with and arguments against another referendum – the timing, the question, the franchise, and many other things – and I’ve discussed these before. But it can’t be stressed enough that there is no course of action or scenario available now which does not have huge problems. The one thing which another referendum does have going for it is that it if it yielded a vote to remain in the EU (which is very far from certain) it is the only way such a scenario would have any hope of being regarded as legitimate.
At all events, it looks a more likely possibility than a week ago now that for the first time (I think) a senior Tory MP has proposed it, with the result that it is now being reported as, at least, a possibility by the BBC. Moreover, with the Vote Leave campaign now having been fined by the Electoral Commission for financial irregularities and referred to the police, not to mention growing unease about Russian interference, a public sense that the original vote was flawed can only grow. I think it is a racing certainty that the Labour Party will come out in favour of another referendum, probably very soon, meaning probably this Autumn. The logic of internal party management and of party politics itself points ineluctably in that direction, and if it happens it would be a game changer.
A crisis rooted in lies
It is at all times vital to recall – as, surely, at least some leave voters are – that none of what is happening is remotely like what was promised by the Vote Leave campaign. Then, it would all be quick and easy: the fifth largest economy in the world, German car makers, they need us more than we need them. It was promised that we would be “part of a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to the Russian border”. It was promised that Brexit had no implications for the Irish border. It was even promised that the negotiations would be undertaken before the Article 50 process started.
It was all lies. And from those lies the present, parlous situation – fast turning into a national crisis – has followed.
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