The tangled web

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”  Sir Walter Scott

In an article this week the Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik neatly skewered the present political situation in the UK. Referring to Brexit amongst other things, she wrote that “an entire government has been built on fantasy and false promises” and made the crucial point “if your product is a con, you need a conman”.

It will be become more important, not less, to remember this if it turns out that we are seeing the end days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, for despite their close associations Brexit is not Johnson and Johnson isn’t Brexit. It’s true that Johnson has been complicit in creating the catastrophic mess that Brexit has become and told all manner of lies about it, as he has about so many other things. But the mess and the lies were inherent to Brexit. Brexit was the con, and Johnson wasn’t even the only conman.

It’s also important to understand what it means to say that the mess and lies were inherent to Brexit. The point is not simply that lies were told in pursuit of getting people to vote for it, or to defend the manner in which it was executed. That is true, but may not be so very different to other policies undertaken by many governments when, for example, statistics are manipulated in misleading ways or deceptive rhetoric is deployed. It might even be said that the remain campaign engaged in some of that. What’s different about Brexit is that it wasn’t just sold with lies, it actually consisted of lies.

This is the reason why it is not only justifiable but inevitable that, even as years go by, there continues to be outrage about what has been done, an outrage forcefully articulated by political commentator Jonathan Lis last week: “our withdrawal from the EU licensed a specific form of corruption: lying to people’s faces about things they could see before their eyes”. Continued outrage is justifiable because of the sheer scale of the offence, and it’s inevitable because now and for many years to come the consequences of the lies told are with us. More than that, the lies keep being re-told and added to – yes, by Johnson, but not just by Johnson: consider the numerous examples provided by Jacob Rees-Mogg in the remainder of this post. That is why it has proved impossible to ‘move on’ from Brexit.

The Northern Ireland Protocol lies

Nowhere is that more obvious than in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). The immediate crisis that developed last week when the DUP tried to halt Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary (SPS) checks on the GB-NI border has abated somewhat, because of the court ruling which temporarily blocked that attempt pending another hearing next month, but the situation Is far from resolved. Meanwhile, the UK-EU negotiations continue as, it’s worth recalling, they have in one form or another for over a year now, under first Michael Gove, then David Frost and now Liz Truss. So do the UK threats to invoke Article 16, which go back to January 2021, just days after the NIP became operational, and were repeated this week by Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions.

RTE’s Europe Editor Tony Connelly produced an excellent account of the background to last week’s events, and what runs through it is the UK government’s dishonesty about what it agreed to in the NIP and its dishonesty in not implementing it. All of this ultimately derives from the foundational dishonesty of the Brexiters that their project created no need of any border at all (something repeated by Rees-Mogg in Parliament this week). Then, along the way, there was dishonesty about the EU’s short-lived plan to suspend vaccine exports, about the unilateral suspension of grace periods, about what Article 16 means, and about many other things which I’ve summarized elsewhere. The latest dishonesty would seem to be that by unilaterally axing the agreed checks, the NIP can be got rid of, or substantially ignored, without recourse to the Article 16 process.

Lies piled on lies

To emphasise, the dynamic here is twofold: lies repeated and lies added. As a source quoted in Connelly’s report says of the current events “We’re basically back to the trilemma of 2017”. Yet things do change in the repetition and in the new additions for, as the source goes on, “except now it’s worse, because at that time there was more trust that the UK government was actually trying to do something in the interests of Northern Ireland. Now you're dealing with the people who screwed Northern Ireland over and over again, starting with the referendum, starting with Brexit".

One of the consequences of becoming so mired in lies is that it is almost impossible to change course. Like a mendacious child or a cheating spouse, once the first lie is told it leads to the second and the third and then to a doubling-down on the first. Perhaps, early on, there could be a moment to come clean and start afresh, but at some point that becomes impossible. You are living the lie. Perhaps, even, it no longer seems to be a lie any more, and the lie is living you. I think that something like this has happened to at least some Brexiters.

At all events, because the NIP has become so shot through with lies, it has become all but impossible to take the obvious step, which would solve many of the current disputes, of taking up the EU’s offer of an SPS alignment agreement which was made at least as early as July 2021. This would get rid of most of the checks to which the government and the DUP object, has the support of farmers and others including those in Northern Ireland, and at one time was actually advocated by Edwin Poots and the DUP (£).

The sovereignty lies

It's conceivable that Truss will now take, or try to take, this step. But here another feature of how Brexit consists of lies comes into play. Neither the NIP nor any other aspect of Brexit exists in isolation from others. Hence, along with the lies about the NIP, the barrier to SPS alignment is the many lies (or, at best, misunderstandings) about ‘sovereignty’. On this account, to agree to ‘dynamic alignment’ would be to concede sovereignty to the EU and, thus, be a betrayal of Brexit. Again there is a foundational lie, and then a series of additions or permutations.

The foundational lie is that EU membership entailed a loss of sovereignty, something discredited by, amongst other things, the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017 which stated that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU” (paragraph 2.1). Then, like mould spores, the lies about sovereignty spread. It comes to mean that any role for the ECJ is a denial of sovereignty. It leads to false claims about how sovereignty enabled the early approval of vaccines (repeated by Rees-Mogg this week) and many of the other supposed benefits of Brexit. It takes strange and convoluted forms. In relation to SPS alignment these include that this would preclude a trade deal with the US when, apart from the fact that no such deal is in prospect, that implies that setting SPS regulations to suit the US would be fine but doing so to suit the EU would violate sovereignty.

The ’nothing should change’ lie

Even more bizarre is the idea – voiced by former Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers in an interview on Radio 4 last week (starts 40.55) - that the EU should just accept that UK products meet SPS standards because, as yet, our rules haven’t greatly diverged. This is a version of the much older, deeper, lie that current regulatory harmonization would yield an easy and comprehensive trade deal which would be virtually indistinguishable from trading as an EU member. That was the basis of Liam Fox’s “easiest deal in history” claim, which is rightly much-mocked but is rarely examined for the flaws in its underlying reasoning. Those flaws made it irrelevant in the context of the UK wanting to have the right to diverge, just as Villiers suggestion is irrelevant whilst the UK refuses dynamic alignment.

All this in turn is a version of the even deeper, most intangible, strangest and yet perhaps most pervasive of Brexit lies. That, somehow, the UK could have Brexit and yet not be treated like a third country and, from that, the lie that if the UK was treated as a third country it would be ‘punishment’. This was again in evidence in the Villiers interview when she bemoaned the EU treating the UK as it does other non-members, and in this way being unreasonable. It’s also the basis of the lie – also told by Villiers – that Brexit had no implications for the Irish border.

In this way, the sovereignty lies intersect not just with those about the NIP but with those about trade and regulation. In relation to trade, apart from the point just mentioned, the foundational lie was the repeated referendum claims that “there is a free trade zone that stretches from Iceland to the Russian border, and we will still be part of it”. Yet the only realistic meaning of this – that, like Iceland, the UK would be in the single market – was denounced as a betrayal of Brexit as it would not restore sovereignty (e.g. over freedom of movement of people, but over regulation more generally). From this, new lies flowed, such as Johnson’s false claim that his trade deal meant there would be no non-tariff barriers to UK-EU trade, and all the subsequent attempts to downplay damage to trade as ‘teething problems’.

The ‘red tape’ lies

On regulation, the sovereignty lies intersected with the lie that Brexit would get rid of bureaucratic red tape, when the opposite was always going to be the case and has been demonstrated in the last year, as shown in this week’s devastating report from the Public Accounts Committee. It leads, as discussed in last week’s post, to all the current attempts to create ‘independent’ regulatory systems, even though in general these lead to more ‘red tape’.

A new example this week is the suggestion that the UK could “capitalise on our regulatory freedoms” by not implementing new EU car safety regulations – regulations the UK contributed to developing whilst it was a member – even though they would reduce deaths and injuries. Like many of the other deregulatory proposals, it probably won’t happen as it is so patently foolish and because of the fissures within the Brexit coalition, although with Rees-Mogg now appointed Brexit Opportunities Minister (sic) who can say?

Notably, Rees-Mogg’s first act was to ask Sun readers to provide examples of ‘petty EU regulations’ they would like abolished. It was a tawdry piece of populism, ludicrously invoking Lord Kitchener, presumably intended to suggest that this is ‘the People’s Brexit’. Actually, Rees-Mogg is likely to find that ‘the people’ are in practice rather attached to regulation, especially where it stops them being killed. For it is increasingly obvious that the de-regulation (or, more often, as per last week’s post, re-regulation) enabled by Brexit is a solution in search of a problem, rather than a response to any actual problem. Supposedly, just because it would use ‘our Brexit freedoms’ it must be ‘a good thing’.

This reflects the absolutely central flaw in the sovereignty lie, which is that it treats national sovereignty as an abstract notion of unimpeded freedom rather than as a practical tool for doing things with freedom. That is why Brexiters are incapable of seeing that the choice to be a member of the EU doesn’t take away sovereignty but is one of the things a country can do with its sovereignty. Brexit is another such thing that can be done with sovereignty – but it doesn’t make us ‘more’ sovereign, it just means we exercise sovereignty in a different and less effective way. The issue is not, therefore, sovereignty in the abstract, as a ‘good thing’ whatever the consequences (as some Brexiters would now have us believe), but whether the uses made of it have good outcomes (which is the way that, by and large, Brexit was sold to leave voters).

Again, once the basic lies have been told and believed it lodges and then gives rise to new lies. An example this week is the proposal from the Global Britain Commission that the UK could have “a massive post-Brexit windfall” by increasing exports per capita to the same level as Germany. It seems to have escaped the Commission’s attention that Germany has achieved this level of exports without leaving the EU, and so the idea of it being a windfall of Brexit is a peculiar one. It’s just the same old lie about the value of having an ‘independent trade policy’, dressed up in the new – and stranger – clothes that Germany provides the comparator.

The promises betrayed

Whilst a lot of these lies were inherent to Brexit, and were never possible to deliver even in theory, other kinds of lie are about promises that might have been delivered in theory but in practice turned out have been false. The obvious example here is the claim that the centrality of parliamentary democracy would be re-asserted (made again this week in Rees-Mogg’s execrable Sun article).

In fact, we’ve seen the government having to be forced by the courts to hold the Article 50 vote and by backbench rebels to hold the Meaningful Votes, an illegal prorogation of parliament, and a massive grab of Executive power through the use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ which looks set to continue with the forthcoming “Brexit Freedoms Bill”. In a similar way, Brexit has seen erosion of the powers of the devolved institutions. Moreover, the promise that Brexit would mean more parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals and other international agreements than was afforded to the UK as an EU member has not transpired and seems unlikely to.

One reason why such promises have not been kept roots back to the way the Brexit process unfolded under Theresa May (showing, again, that Johnson isn’t the only cause of the present situation) and the wider public discourse which obtained at that time. For she and others consistently represented parliament as being subordinate to and subversive of “the will of the people”.

This morphed into the idea, which Johnson continued and developed, of the government as a pure distillation of the people’s will, and parliamentary democracy as its usurper, in direct contradiction to the earlier message about Brexit and parliament. In this, and many other ways, the lies and dishonesty of Brexit have morphed into the much wider ones of the culture war and of the entire political landscape. Brexit, as Lis observes, was the “original sin” from which the rest flowed.

The multi-Mobius serpo-viral Brexit gaslighting device TM

In the past, I’ve used the metaphor of the Mobius strip to capture the way that Brexit events keep recurring as the same old lies and fantasies keep encountering the same old realities. And that does capture some aspects, such as the constant return to the Irish border trilemma. No answer can be found because no answer exists, so the lies just keep taking us back to the same place. But, as suggested in this post, a better image would be a more complex one of numerous such strips, intertwined and writhing around like snakes, and reproducing and mutating like viruses.

True believers in Brexit may, as speculated earlier, have come to believe all the lies to be true. The even bigger problem is that many politicians who know they are lies, especially if they are in the Conservative or Labour parties, pretend not know this. Admittedly it’s not always easy to tell the difference. For example, does Dover MP Nathalie Elphicke really believe, as she said in Parliament this week in a version of the ‘nothing should change’ lie, that the now endemic lorry queues in her constituency are “not because of Brexit but because of Brussels bureaucracy”? Who knows, but there are certainly many MPs, probably including some of those who cheered her, who know such things are idiotic nonsense but don’t speak out.

That arises from fear of their own parliamentary and constituency parties, of the media and of sections of the electorate, but it is horribly dangerous and corrosive. Dangerous because it means that nothing truthful, and therefore nothing practical, can be done about Brexit. Corrosive because it has spawned a wider dishonesty, as argued forcefully by former Prime Minister Sir John Major in a speech yesterday. Johnson may be the most consummate liar, but his demise will not end that dishonesty.

That is why, referring again to Jonathan Lis’s recent article, we must not give up on talking about Brexit. He is surely right that “the Brexit specialists may be exhausted”. I can certainly relate to that. He’s also right that “everything there is to say on Brexit has been said many times”. I can relate to that, too. And the reason it is so is precisely because of the endless repetitions of old lies and the new ones they spawn. If we stop pointing them out, they easily become ignored or forgotten.

More than that, the weaving together of strands of lies in the way I’ve described here is what enables Brexiters to gaslight the general public. It just becomes totally exhausting and confusing to disentangle the long chain of events that lies behind, say, the ongoing NIP rows and crises. It can be easier, even for the well-intentioned and well-informed, to become disorientated to the extent of wondering if the Brexiters may have a point. However, even if that happens – no, especially if that happens – it doesn’t solve any of the problems all the lies have created, it just takes away any prospect of them being solved.

Of course there is a way to escape the tangled web of lies that Brexit and Brexiters have woven. It is for all those who know them to be lies to start telling the truth, and for all those who tell the lies to be exposed.

 

Many thanks to those who completed the survey at the end of last week’s post (now closed, though if you are part-way through completing it you will still be able to submit your response when ready). As a result, I can say that, certainly for now, I will not be migrating this blog to Substack or any other platform, and I will not be charging for access. For those interested, I’ve written a short discussion of the survey results.

Four speeches and a wake-up call

Speeches have been as plentiful as snow this week and like our snow-blocked roads they lead us precisely nowhere. That was made brutally clear by the publication of the EU’s draft text of the Withdrawal Agreement and the predictably absurd reactions it engendered.

Liam Fox’s is easily dealt with. It was a vapid restatement of claims about the value of an independent trade policy which the government’s own analysis show to be minimal and which his own former Permanent Secretary had earlier the same day analytically trashed.

Jeremy Corbyn’s had a greater political significance in that by opening up a different policy on a comprehensive customs treaty he also created a route for parliamentary defeats of the government and, with that, unpredictable but potentially major implications. How that plays out now will depend on the extent to which Tory remainers are willing to take the opportunity. But, that said, a customs union alone will not solve the Irish border issue nor will it mitigate very much of the economic damage of Brexit. For that, Labour need to shift on the single market, too – and that seems to be their most likely, though still very far from assured, direction of travel.

John Major’s speech was a reminder of the virtue of common sense, which seems to have all but deserted the British polity, and made logical, detailed, and well-informed arguments (although he, too, appears to think that a customs union will solve the Irish border). Beneath the tone of statesmanlike sagacity I thought I detected an almost pleading note to the country and to his party to get real before it is too late. Predictably, it was immediately denounced by the Ultra Brexiters as treachery. There may well still be voters who listen to and are swayed by Major, but alas for him and for us all, a large swathe of the backbenchers in his party have moved beyond common sense, logic and detailed well-informed argument.

And finally the Prime Minister’s capstone of the ‘road to Brexit’ series. At the core of it lay a statement of the ‘three baskets’ or ‘ambitious managed divergence’ approach agreed at Chequers last week. For the reasons I discussed in some detail in my previous post, this is a non-starter. After all these months, she still refuses to understand that although there are different ways of being in or being out of the single market, there is no way of being both in and out. The most depressing aspect of it, as with the Florence speech, was the sub-text that it would be better for Britain not to leave the EU at all or, at least, to do so whilst staying within the EEA. It is a terrible, tragic failure of political leadership that a British PM is enacting a policy which is not only harmful to Britain but which she clearly realises is harmful to Britain. And it’s an insult to the people of Britain to demand that we ‘come together’ to support a Brexit that almost half who voted did not want, and in a form that more than half of them certainly don’t want.

Overall, it seems clear that there is going to be no change of course by the government, unless it is forced on them by parliament, and thus they will have to accept the consequences of having chosen that course. Which bring us to the wake-up call of the EU draft Withdrawal Agreement. There was nothing in it that should really have been a surprise to anyone since it is the legal reflection of what was agreed in the phase 1 talks in December. Those talks agreed that, barring a trade arrangement (option A) or a technological arrangement (option B) that obviated the need for a hard border, then option C would be continuing complete harmonization (in effect, continued single market and customs union operations) across the border. Whether or not that extends to the whole of the UK or just Northern Ireland would be a matter for the British government. There is no ‘annexation’ going on here.

The howls of outrage from the Brexiters were entirely bogus. They arise solely because as the Article 50 period continues it is exposing all of the lies, fantasies and misunderstandings in which they have indulged and which they have conned many voters into believing. As reality bites back, this ceases to be a matter of theoretical argument or political rhetoric but begins to take on a tangible, legal and institutional form. This is what they wanted, but they act as if it is being forced upon them.

In particular, as regards the Irish border, what is being rammed home is that both a customs union and a single market entail, for a different reasons, a border. That cannot be negotiated away because it doesn’t lie within either the EU’s or the UK’s power to do so. A customs union is a particular kind of construct within those WTO rules that Brexiters often say they like so much, but even if that were not so as soon as there are different tariff levels within different territories there has to be a border, or else there is no way of enforcing the tariff. Similarly, with market standards and regulation. Brexiters say they want freedom for regulatory divergence, even, we are told, to set higher standards than the EU. Suppose this happens, perhaps on animal welfare standards: how then will the Brexiters prevent lower-standard EU produce entering the UK without a border? The same goes for every regulatory divergence or tariff divergence, whether upwards or downwards, between the EU and the UK – indeed, ironically, were it not so those independent free trade deals that Brexiters are obsessed with would be impossible. The technical details are fiendishly complicated; the basic principles could be understood by a child.

So if you leave the single market and any customs union you have to have a border. The only question is where. It can’t be on the Irish land mass if the GFA is to survive. It can’t be in the Irish Sea if the United Kingdom is to survive. So the government have to decide which of these mutually incompatible choices they wish to ditch. Howling that it isn’t fair will change nothing.

Of course the government’s position is, still, that these choices can be avoided, either by a free trade agreement so comprehensive that the need for a border is obviated (option A) or by means of a technological solution which makes the border virtual (option B). So far as the first of these is concerned it rests on the pervasive failure of Brexiters to understand the difference between a single market and a free trade agreement (FTA). No FTA, no matter how ‘deep and special’ or ‘bespoke’, can be the same as single market membership. I suppose it is just about conceivable that an agreement could be devised which amounted in all but name to membership but if so the obvious question would be: so why leave? In any case, such an outcome would be completely at odds with the government’s current ‘managed divergence’ plan, and with its existing red lines, as May’s speech made clear.

The idea of a technological fix for the Irish border has gained new impetus in the last few weeks in Brexiter circles because they have latched on to a research paper produced for the European Parliament on this topic. As is their habitual modus operandi, they leap on to things that they half-understand (‘WTO rules’ and ‘Most Favoured Nation’ being other examples) in order to proclaim that there is, after all, an answer to the incompatible demands they make. In the present case, like the devil quoting scripture, the fact that it is a report to (not, as many of them claim, by) an EU body adds to their glee.

However, that glee is quite misplaced. The document in question outlines a series of new and still-emergent technologies which could be used in a combination that has never been tried before and to that extent is highly speculative. But, crucially, even if it could be put into practice (and in any kind of feasible timescale) it would not remove the need for any physical infrastructure at the border and does not claim to do so. Moreover, it would not avoid the need for human interventions at the border, for example to check vehicles which intelligence operations had identified as suspicious.

This latter point was made by Dr Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, who has conducted detailed research on Brexit and the Irish border issue, in an interview on Radio 4’s The World Tonight last Tuesday. Yet the very next edition of the same programme had former Tory leader Michael Howard re-stating that the ‘EU’ paper proved that the border issue could be solved by technology. He was being interviewed by the same person as had interviewed Hayward the day before, yet her points were not put to him. This, in microcosm, is one reason why so little progress is made in debate with Brexiters: they set off false hares that leave everyone chasing around in circles until the next one starts. It was, don’t forget, only a few weeks ago that they were proclaiming with equal confidence and equal inaccuracy that the Sweden-Norway and USA-Canada borders were frictionless.

In the absence of a viable form for options A and B, the EU draft text only provided details of option C, whilst being clear that this would be rendered irrelevant if the UK did, indeed, come up with a practical alternative. Apart from the ridiculous reaction of the Brexiters (including Mrs May’s peculiar response that no British PM could agree to option C when she did exactly that, at least as a potential, in December) some sensible and well-informed commentators suggested that the EU had been undiplomatic and provocative in drafting the document this way.

I strongly disagree with that. The whole sorry mess that Britain has got itself into arises from the inability or refusal to stand up to the Brexit Ultras in politics and the press. For years now, like domestic tyrants whose families try to avoid enraging them, they have been tiptoed around. Cameron did so, May does so and actually, more broadly, pro-EU politicians did so. One of the reasons the Referendum went the way it did was that for decades very few pro-Europeans were willing to make a full-on case for membership – rather than a grudging, transactional case - so that by the time of the campaign it was too late. Instead, the Brexiter narrative was allowed to take hold as established fact rather than being firmly dismissed from the outset as nonsense. As usual with the politics of appeasement, it failed.

There’s no reason at all why the EU should now show any respect for the sensibilities of the Brexit Ultras. During the years of Britain’s membership, endless accommodations were made to those sensibilities (hence the numerous opt outs, including from the Euro and Schengen) but, of course, they could not satisfy the Ultras because, as we now clearly see, they cannot be satisfied. Now that we are leaving, the EU-27 are understandably unwilling to continue trying to work around them. But even if that were not so, the circumstances of Brexit make it impossible for them to do so. What the Brexiters want is fantasy because it contains so many mutually exclusive things and there’s just no way that the EU can pander to this by pretending it is not so or by ignoring it. Britain is still refusing to get real about Brexit, as the speeches by May, Fox and Corbyn, and the reaction to that by Major, showed: that does not mean that the EU will or can do the same. Britain, and the Brexit government in particular, needs to wake up to that.

Brexit McCarthyism

Amidst the growing chaos of Brexit a particularly nasty and insidious development is a kind of ‘Brexit McCarthyism’ in which any reservations, any debate about the wisdom of Brexit lead to accusation of treachery. The most obvious example of this was the now notorious Daily Mail ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, but it runs much deeper than that.

As long ago as 2014 leading Tory Eurosceptic John Redwood threatened “punishment” for firms which spoke out in favour of EU membership. This week it was revealed that “contractors bidding for work with the government are being asked to affirm that they back Brexit”. This may well be in violation of EU procurement rules, to which Britain is still subject, but in any case that is not really the point. Since when have the political views of companies been subject to testing?

This is part and parcel of the extraordinary vindictiveness being displayed by the Brexit government towards the near majority who voted against Brexit. Theresa May’s New Year broadcast, calling for unity after the divisions of the Referendum, appeared to strike a conciliatory note towards those who voted remain, including the passage:

“So when I sit around the negotiating table in Europe this year, it will be with that in mind - the knowledge that I am there to get the right deal - not just for those who voted to leave - but for every single person in this country”.

Similarly May’s foreword to the Brexit White Paper spoke of:

“The strength and support of 65 million people willing us to make it happen … because after all the division and discord, the country is coming together”.

Of course a reasonably unifying form of Brexit would have been perfectly possible, that is, a soft Brexit in which we remained in the single market. It would have honoured the vote to leave the EU, and would be exactly the form of leaving that some Brexit campaigners and voters favoured. It would have given most voters some of what they wanted and some voters all that they wanted. But this is not what May’s government have chosen to pursue. Instead, we have the most divisive of approaches to Brexit and the ‘consensus’ being sought is one in which the 48% who voted remain including (most likely) the vast majority of MPs, business leaders, civil servants, civil society leaders and experts are required to pay homage to what they know will wreck the country.

The former Conservative PM Sir John Major, in a major speech this week, voiced his concerns about this:

“This 48% care no less for our country than the 52 per cent who voted to leave. They are every bit as patriotic. But they take a different view of Britain’s future role in the world, and are deeply worried for themselves, for their families, and for our country. They do not deserve to be told that, since the decision has been taken, they must keep quiet and toe the line. A popular triumph at the polls – even in a referendum – does not take away the right to disagree – nor the right to express that dissent. Freedom of speech is absolute in our country. It’s not “arrogant” or “brazen” or “elitist”, or remotely “delusional” to express concern about our future after Brexit. Nor, by doing so, is this group undermining the will of the people: they are the people. Shouting down their legitimate comment is against all our traditions of tolerance. It does nothing to inform and everything to demean – and it is time it stopped”.

His reward for this plea for tolerance?  To be denounced as a traitor and subjected to vitriolic personal abuse with ever-spiteful Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “a craven and defeated speech of a bitter man” being one of the milder assaults. As with Tony Blair’s speech the week before, none of the critics were able to engage with the actual arguments made by people who, whatever one thinks of them, have, as former PMs, pretty significant experience. Boris Johnson’s response to Major (‘Come off it, sunshine’) was especially risible. A host of others, from Mark Carney to Sir Ivan Rogers to Patience Wheatcroft have received similarly unpleasant treatment, and these are just high profile examples. Day in and day out on social media and internet discussion forums the same narratives of treachery and betrayal are being played out, often in very violent language.

The real point behind the behaviour of the Brexiters is a simple one: they don’t have any idea whatsoever of how to proceed. The bulk of the Brexit movement was based on a supposed victimhood at the hands of the establishment, but now that they are the establishment they have no mode of discourse other than victimhood and so they use their power to punish. But, beyond that, they are simply bemused. From the moment the referendum result was announced, with Johnson and Gove looking like terrified rabbits in the headlights, Brexiters have not known what to do with their victory.

Even now that they have the weight of the British Civil Service (rumoured also to be subject to demands to show unqualified enthusiasm for Brexit) behind them what is clear is that they have no grasp at all of the detailed, practical complexities of Brexit. Every day some new problem emerges, from nuclear safety to fishing quotas, which was either ignored or glossed over during the Referendum. There is even a sense that the Brexiters now regret having run so mendacious a campaign since they seem to realize that, having expected not to win, they are now forever tarnished by it.

This is the reason for the angry Brexit McCarthyism in which any concerns with practicalities become disloyalty. If Brexiters had any serious, coherent ideas about what Brexit meant then, having won the referendum, they would be confidently pushing forward with these. Instead, they still rely on a series of half-baked slogans (‘taking back control’) and economically illiterate claims (‘BMW export lots of cars to Britain’) girded by meaningless ideas about ‘Global Britain’. None of these survive contact with reality and they – kind of – know it. Hence the recourse to a facile but vicious rhetoric of loyalty and betrayal.

The consequence is that Britain is now not only in a slow-burn economic and strategic crisis, but politically and culturally we are drifting into viciousness and – almost as bad – stupidity. As the inevitable disaster unfolds in the coming months and years, the anger of the Brexiters will, also inevitably, grow as they search for scapegoats for what they have done. In the frame will be anyone other than themselves. How long before tribunals are set up to ask a variant of the infamous McCarthyite question: “are you, or have you ever been, in favour of membership of the European Union”?

Update (5 March 2017): as further illustration/support for my argument in this post, consider this extract from an article in today’s Mail of Sunday by Anna Soubry, a Conservative MP who is opposed to Brexit:

“I have never known a political atmosphere like the current one in Westminster. There is a danger that the insidious methods used to silence all criticism of Brexit, no matter how reasoned and measured, will have disastrous consequences for our country … Yet that is exactly what is happening now as a ‘hard Brexit monoculture’ takes hold. Some are determined to stifle all dissent in their zeal to make everyone ‘conform’ to their views. I and others who have done no more than dissent from supporting aspects of the Government’s policy on Brexit have received vile abuse. I received an email from a Conservative-supporting clergyman who told me to ‘burn in hell, evil bitch’.”