Unpicking the defences of Brexit

Bemused by the ‘mysterious silence’ of the government about the benefits of Brexit, last weekend former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley bemoaned (£) that “the consequence of that silence is that the narrative about Brexit is being written by its opponents”. The mystery is easily solved: the benefits of Brexit are effectively non-existent and the failure of its promises is self-evident. And the formidable attempts by Brexiters to proclaim a narrative of success have foundered not because its opponents’ voices are louder but because the public, without much leadership but seeing the evidence accumulating before them, have seen that failure.

But it’s true that, as a result, Brexiters have increasingly found themselves having to defend their project rather than get away with airy promises, or bullish assertions of it being ‘the will of the people’. These attempts have become ever-more desperate and convoluted, and their very variety is, in itself, one of their most important defensive weapons. In the hands of the more adroit, or perhaps just the more opportunistic, Brexiters it enables them to continually shift from one line of argument to another, deliberately creating a swirl of disorientation.

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments currently used to defend Brexit, and especially those about sovereignty and democracy, which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial

These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has either ‘never really been tried’ or that it has fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path of purity.

Slightly more optimistic versions of the same thing are that ‘it hasn’t been done properly yet’, or that it ‘hasn’t had enough time’ for the benefits to be obvious. These claims are, by definition, impossible to refute, placing the utopia of Brexit in sight but always out of reach, like a mirage oasis. But one obvious rejoinder is that it wasn’t suggested before the referendum that the benefits would be long in coming, let alone the 20, 50 or even 100 years that some Brexiters have since spoken of.

Still, perhaps it is reasonable to apply the ‘David Frost test’ for what would constitute failure for Brexit. He suggested one piece of evidence of failure would be “if we are still debating this in five or six years’ time in the same way”. That was in June 2022, so the jury is still out, but there is no sign at all so far that Brexit is not going to be a failure in these terms.

One thing which all the defences of Brexit in this category share, albeit to varying extents, is that they render nonsensical attempts to make claims about the benefits of Brexit. That’s most obvious if Brexit has been comprehensively betrayed and is ‘Brexit in name only’ for, if so, how could there be any benefits? Even the much weaker defence that Brexit will take time to deliver benefits has an obvious circularity, whereby any sign of success shows it was right, whilst any absence of signs of success doesn’t show it was wrong. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Bathos and deflection

This category includes what is emerging as a favourite Brexit defence, that which does not necessarily deny that Brexit has been damaging, but constantly invokes the most extreme forecasts of how damaging it would be (or, often, garbled versions of those forecasts) so as to defend it on the bathetic grounds that it ‘hasn’t been as bad as the warnings’. It’s a line which can be traced back at least as far as David Davis’s 2018 assurance that Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” and its obvious flaw is that Brexit was meant to be something positive and desirable, rather than ‘not being cataclysmic’ or, even, ‘not being too bad’.

A related defence is to admit the evidence of (especially economic) damage that has occurred since Brexit, but to deflect blame for this away from Brexit to, typically, the pandemic, the Ukraine War or, more recently, conflict in the Middle East. This can readily be run alongside the ‘more time is needed’ line of argument, and has a similar circularity in enabling any supposed successes to be celebrated but any damage or lack of success discounted.

However, it differs from that line in that, whereas the promise of future success can never, strictly speaking, be disproved, the argument of damage being down to other factors can be, by reference to the specific effects of Brexit which have not been experienced by other countries. Thus, for all that Brexiters dismiss them, counterfactual economic models do, at least approximately, strip out Brexit effects from those of other factors.

Whataboutery

Such counterfactuals seek to answer the real question, which is how does Brexit Britain compare with Britain had Brexit not happened. That question is evaded by another defence, that of the ‘whataboutery’ which makes comparisons with other countries, especially other EU countries, or with the EU as a whole.

The narrow version of this is to compare, especially, GDP growth so as to show (especially if the ‘right’ time periods are cherry-picked), that the UK is doing no worse than some such comparators. Again, this doesn’t meet the objection that Brexit was promised to be a positive. Moreover, when these comparisons show, as they sometimes can, the UK outperforming its comparators it doesn’t address the real question. At particular times, even when an EU member, the UK performed better than other members. So if there are times, now, that it does so this tells us nothing about Brexit, at least in the absence of a plausible explanation of how Brexit is responsible for it.

The Brexiters do not have such an explanation, since the things they claim for what would be explanations – regulatory divergence and major new trade deals – have, as they constantly complain, scarcely happened. On the other hand, anti-Brexiters can plausibly explain why the UK performs less well than the counterfactual of Brexit not having happened, primarily in terms of the increased barriers to trade with the EU and the loss of freedom of movement of people.

The broader version of whataboutery is to point to events in the EU – not just in terms of economic performance, but actual or alleged crises over things like irregular migration, or Hungary, or, currently, the farmers’ protests – to say ‘look what a mess they are in’. This in turn links to the endless predictions, both before and since Brexit, that the EU is about to collapse entirely.

This kind of whataboutery is nonsense at multiple levels, as well as being incompatible with the idea that the EU is a powerful bully that is able to ‘punish’ us. Firstly, it’s nonsense because few of those who oppose Brexit have ever believed that the EU is some kind of nirvana. Secondly, even if the EU were in crisis, or collapsed, that doesn’t make Britain any better off. Indeed, given geographical proximity, and economic and political connections, any instability and suffering the EU endures are likely to have a profound negative impact on Britain, whilst Britain no longer has any influence upon what happens within and to the EU.

Lies, half-truths and exaggerations

This category could be expanded to fill a whole post, so here I will only give a few of the commonest or most egregious examples. Some are plainly ridiculous, such as Kemi Badenoch’s recent claim that “we have used our Brexit dividend to get the NHS more than a £1 billion more every single week than it had before Brexit” [emphasis in original tweet, where it was denoted by ‘*’ symbols]. Of course, there was no such dividend, and the NHS budget is, as it always was, purely a decision of the British government. The same applies to the similar, and more frequent, claim that the NHS has now received the £350 million a week proposed at the referendum, so Brexit has fulfilled that promise.

Equally untrue, although probably much more widely believed, are the claims that Brexit allowed the early roll out of vaccines (it didn’t: the UK was still operating under EU laws and regulations at the time) and that it allowed the UK to give support to Ukraine (it didn’t, and the UK had begun to do so ever since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when still an EU member).

Other things in this category are more difficult to unpick, as they may contain some element of truth. Many of the Brexiter claims about trade deals are of this sort, because it’s true that neither CPTPP nor the Free Trade Agreements with Australia, New Zealand, and any which may follow, could have been done by the UK as an EU member. The half-truths and exaggeration relate to the benefits, which are paltry. In other cases, the claims are lies in all but name, most obviously the description of non-binding Memorandums of Understanding with individual US states as ‘trade agreements’, which they aren’t in the standard use of that term (plus they have little or no economic value, and could almost certainly have been made as an EU member anyway).

Likewise, most claims of regulatory independence are overblown, since they either aren’t practical to exercise, or make little difference, or are things which would be likely to have happened at some point as an EU member. I’ve written so much about these things before that I don’t have the strength to do so again and, for regular readers at least, probably don’t need to.

The last redoubts: sovereignty and democracy

What does warrant more attention is what have become the last redoubts of the Brexiter defence, and in some ways its strongest if only because they are the most intangible. Sovereignty and democracy are not, of course, the same thing, as sovereign states can be undemocratic. As regards sovereignty itself, Brexiters routinely deploy this as the central defence of Brexit, the more so given the evident lack of benefits and the mounting evidence of costs. For if sovereignty ‘has no price’, then these inconvenient truths can be ignored.

There is a particularly specious version of this defence, a recent example being furnished by Julia Hartley-Brewer, which argues or implies that people voted for Brexit knowing the damage it would cause, because the remain campaign told them (that this is the meaning of Hartley-Brewer’s tweet is borne out by her previous remarks). The obvious flaw is that the leave campaign thundered assurances to such voters that every single one of these warnings was part of ‘Project Fear’, and it defies belief that many voters believed the warnings but voted to leave anyway rather than doing so because they accepted the assurances that the warnings were false.

Indeed, more generally, it’s worth recalling how Brexit was sold. Yes, the slogan of ‘taking back control’, which may be taken as a proxy for ‘regaining sovereignty’, was central to the leave campaign, but it was proposed not as an abstract virtue but as a means of delivering concrete benefits, most obviously control of immigration to those who wanted that, but also benefits to the economy and, more expansively, to the totality of policy, which Brexiters said had been ceded to the EU. So it is dishonest now to propose ‘sovereignty’ as the justification of Brexit, detached from whether it has delivered these concrete benefits.

Flawed ideas of sovereignty

Alongside that dishonesty lies another, or, at least, an ignorance. Sovereignty has probably never meant untrammelled national freedom of action, and certainly doesn’t nowadays. This is why the regulatory independence of Brexit has proved so illusory. In practice, countries operate within a framework of international standards, whether they be derived from the EU or other trans-national bodies. More broadly, countries pool and/or cede sovereignty for purposes of defence, as with NATO, or for a whole variety of non-economic reasons which give rise to international treaties, conventions and, indeed, law.

Of course, Brexiters are constantly straining against those limits but, in doing so, are simply repeating the same flawed idea of sovereignty. The flaw isn’t just that countries can’t escape external constraints, it’s that to the extent they can do so it has negative consequences which they choose to avoid. That choice is, itself, an expression of sovereignty. Thus the idea that Spain, or Denmark, or Germany do not have sovereignty because they choose to be in the EU is as preposterous as the idea that the UK has gained sovereignty by leaving. Indeed, one of the most arresting moments in the entire Brexit process was when the government published the first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. For it contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” (para 2.1).

Interestingly, the hollowness of the sovereignty argument was again unwittingly revealed by Rees-Mogg just this week, when he was questioned by Lewis Goodall of the News Agents. He was asked about the PopCons’ ‘anti-institutional’ agenda for changing the structures and systems of government, and why, if this was so necessary, the Conservative government in which he had served had not done so. Rees-Mogg replied, “we had no ability to change the system until we left the European Union”, but went on to say that “they [structures and systems of government] were changed very effectively by Tony Blair”. To spell out the obvious: when Blair was Prime Minister, Britain was in the EU.

Flawed ideas of electoral democracy

It is here that the Brexiters very last line of defence comes in, emphasizing not just sovereignty but democratic sovereignty. It echoes the line that Tony Benn took to justify opposition to EEC membership in the 1970s in saying that ‘at least, now, you can vote out the politicians who make the laws that govern you’ (although it’s notable that Benn didn’t share the Brexiters’ naïve view of sovereignty). It was wheeled out by Rees-Mogg (in his interview with Tyrone) as if it were a sort of dialectical checkmate. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To the extent it works at all, it rests on the premise that Britain is more democratic than the EU. How democratic Britain is can be debated, given, amongst other things, its arcane uncodified constitution, non-proportional voting system, unelected upper house, and extensive executive power underpinned by Royal Prerogative. So, too, can the democracy of the EU be debated. Perhaps it should indeed be constituted as a Federal State, with a constitution and an elected government, a United States of Europe, but such ideas were anathema to Brexiters, as they are to Eurosceptics in many EU states. There’s much more to be said about both debates than I have space for here but, at best, it’s a shaky premise.

Beyond that, the idea that, unlike before Brexit, British electors can now exert control over the policies and laws that govern them is fallacious. First, as with sovereignty, it ignores all those internationally derived regulations which, necessarily, continue to apply despite Brexit. Something similar could be said of the way that - as Liz Truss found, just as Harold Wilson did in the 1960s and James Callaghan in the 1970s - with or without Brexit ‘the markets’ put as much constraint on UK economic policy as, say, the EU did on that of Greece, and for much the same reasons. More generally, it massively overestimates the impact that EU membership had on Britain. We know, because of the extent of Retained EU Law (or what is now called Assimilated Law), that plenty of rules came from the EU, but these turn out to be rather dull and uncontentious things that few people care about or want to see scrapped. They aren’t the stuff of political controversy.

By contrast, the most controversial political issues of recent decades, from privatization and trade union restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s, to Iraq in the 2000s, to perennial battles over the extent of public spending, had little or nothing to do with EU membership (other, of course, than that of EU membership itself). Likewise, the big political issues of post-Brexit Britain remain similar to the big political issues of pre-Brexit Britain. So inflation, unemployment, tax rates, interest rates, the NHS, crime, education, defence, housing, immigration, and so on were and are what people vote about. But Brexit makes little difference to the policy options offered by political parties in these areas, and even if it may expand some options (certain taxes, perhaps) it reduces just as many (security data-sharing, say).

That’s even true for immigration policy because, although the UK has ended freedom of movement, the question of its overall total level was always subject to domestic choices as the government controlled non-EU immigration. Moreover, when an EU member, it was the UK’s choice not to use the controls on freedom of movement available to it, just as in 2004 it chose not to restrict free movement from newly acceded member states in Eastern Europe. On the Rees-Mogg argument, British voters could have changed both those things, so either they didn’t care enough or the idea of voter control of policy is flawed. On the other hand, as regards irregular migration, post-Brexit Britain no longer has the benefit of the Dublin regulations, and British voters can do nothing at all about that, even if they want to.

This also begins to show how the argument that Brexit gives electors control frequently rests on an entirely unrealistic idea of how electoral democracy work. Very occasionally, a single big issue may be defining, swaying large numbers of voters, but it has to be a very big issue. Even then, it doesn’t necessarily determine election results, or even change government policy (recall the Iraq War). For the most part, voters choose on the basis of the overall package of a party’s policy offer, their perceptions of its leadership and values, and similar ‘broad-brush’ considerations. Likewise, the record of an incumbent government is typically judged in the round, over many years and in relation to many issues. So when, to use the Rees-Mogg/ Tyrone clip again, Rees-Mogg says “if you didn’t like a tariff introduced by the EU, you had no means of stopping it” it is irrelevant. Elections aren’t fought or won at that level of specificity.

To be fair, presumably Rees-Mogg didn’t literally mean a single tariff, but trade policy generally. However, as an EU member, the UK could have held parliamentary votes on the ratification of EU trade deals, as other member states, or even regions, do (recall the Walloon vote against CETA), but it waived that right. On the other hand, parliamentary oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals is limited and lacks a statutory basis. Perhaps, if voters really cared about it, they could pressurise politicians, or even vote in elections, to make this oversight more rigorous. But, by the same token, they could have done the same to force pre-Brexit governments to hold votes on EU trade deals, and, indeed, to vote those deals down if they did not want them. In fact, voters were not interested in making this an electoral issue any more than, until the referendum, voters saw EU membership as a contentious or important issue. The underlying point is that a parliamentary democracy doesn’t give voters overarching control of policy any more than sovereignty bestows unconstrained freedom of action.

Flawed ideas of parliamentary democracy 

However, it's also doubtful to whether leading Brexiters understand, or are even committed to, parliamentary democracy at all. It was, after all, Johnson and Rees-Mogg who instigated the Prorogation of parliament in 2019. And just this week David Frost (£), recalling that period, wrote that “the problem there was Parliament deciding to act independently on Brexit, as if it were itself the government”, a reference, apparently, to the Benn Act, and perhaps to the Indicative Votes process.

So, apart from the irony of a placeman lawmaker, especially one of a distinction either nugatory or inordinately well-disguised, lecturing about democracy, it seems that Frost doesn’t understand the most basic fact of parliamentary democracy, which is that the government governs to the extent that it commands a majority. But it’s not actually a lack of understanding, it’s one of the dirty secrets at the heart of Brexit that, even as the Brexiters spout about democracy, what they have done is to substantially increase the power of the Executive at the expense of parliament, most obviously in the growth in the use of Statutory Instruments and ‘Henry VIII powers’.

There must also be more than a suspicion that when Brexiters rail against ‘unelected’ judges and civil servants they don’t grasp that whilst elections are central to democracy and its institutions they cannot and should not completely define them. Or, again, they do actually grasp this, and hate it, partly because of the constraints it places on the Executive and partly because what defines Brexiters, and populists generally, is not a commitment to parliamentary democracy but to a mythologised idea of ‘the will of the people’, mystically distilled and enacted by their leaders. 

For a brief period, the referendum result empowered them to use that slogan as a battle cry to bully and scarify their opponents. Now, with Brexit, in any form, so self-evidently unwanted by the majority of the people, and, in its actual form, so unloved by the minority who still want it, they are forced to ever-more contorted and untenable justifications.

Moving forward

At issue in all this is not a re-litigation of Brexit itself. Brexit has happened, so the real point is to set out and challenge at least some of the extraordinary array of arguments, some contradictory, some illogical, some dishonest, some just wrong, which Brexiters are still deploying.

With some exceptions, they have had to just about accept that Brexit has had many costs and no benefits, but they still seek to excuse that and still fall back on the more intangible claim to have restored sovereignty and democracy. But that too is flawed, not least because, apart from everything else I’ve written in this post, the very fact that Britain could and did vote to leave the EU shows that doing so was unnecessary on those grounds. Stripped of that final conceit, the Brexiters have nothing to protect them from the hard facts of their abject failure.

Exposing the many ways they try to conceal or deny that failure matters, not because of the past but because of the future. Having wreaked so much damage on our country, the Brexiters now want to do it one final disservice by preventing an honest appraisal of what they did, thus preventing us from finding any real solution to it.

A preview of the blame games

No one knows if there is going to be a UK-EU trade and other future terms deal, and nothing has happened this week to make that clearer. The last two months’ talks, despite Johnson’s call to put some “oomph” into them, have shown that no more progress can be made at a ‘technical’ as opposed to a political level. Hence it was announced this week that Brexit will be taken off the agenda of next week’s EU Ambassadors’ summit due to a “completely wasted” summer. In this relatively quiet limbo-period we are seeing the outlines of a series of blame games and recriminations in the UK which are only likely to intensify in the coming months.

Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU

Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.

The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.

That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.

That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.

Who would get the blame for no deal?

This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.

Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all.  Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.

That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.

It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.

That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.

The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.

So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.

Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?

There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.

We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.

On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).

Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.

I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.

What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.

That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.

This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.

So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.

Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?

Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.

This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.

Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.

Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.

Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?

A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.

This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.

None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.

Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.

Why does any of this matter?

It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.

Much of what is now happening  –  and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’  –  can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.

Brexiters are running away from the consequences of what they have inflicted on Britain

During the Referendum, Brexiters offered a political message which took a traditional and familiar form: if you vote for us then various (supposedly) good consequences will follow.

It is easy to imagine what they would be saying now if any of these were evident; if companies were announcing new investments because of (not despite) Brexit; if foreign direct investment were booming in anticipation of Brexit, rather than tanking; if countries, especially Commonwealth countries, were champing at the bit to make new trade deals with Britain; if ‘German car companies’ had ‘within minutes of the vote’ to leave demanded a fantastic ‘cake and eat it’ deal and if the EU had rolled over to give it; if the Irish border was unaffected, as Brexiters had claimed it would be; or, even, if the negotiations were proceeding as smoothly and easily as they had promised.

But of course none of those things has happened and so, since winning the Referendum, the Brexiters’ message has changed in a very fundamental way. The new message takes several forms but each has the same dialectical structure: to decouple the vote to leave the EU from the consequences of leaving the EU.

It’s too late now

The first, and simplest, form is that the vote has now been held and so we must just live with the consequences. In that narrative, all debate and discussion ended with the Referendum. Remainers must get over it, leavers must be happy whatever happens. It’s a position exemplified by a recent tweet from the pro-Brexit journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer in response to being sent data about foreign direct investment since Brexit: “Mate, I really don’t care. This question was asked and answered two years ago. Move on with your life”.

Simple as it is, it’s also naïve. Politics doesn’t work like that, as Brexiters should appreciate not least since on the night before the 2016 Referendum Nigel Farage declared otherwise and, on the night after the 1975 Referendum, so did Enoch Powell. In this if in nothing else Enoch, to coin a nasty little phrase, was right.

Not only does politics not work like that in general, but it especially does not work like that in this case because, much as Brexiters dislike it, winning the vote was just the first and easiest part of a process which, in one way or another, will last for years. Hence they make a second claim.

It’s not up to us

The second version is a denial of responsibility, with the central idea being that leave voters and their leaders have done their part simply by delivering the vote to leave. It is up to the politicians and the experts to now make it happen. This, too, is misguided. As I have written elsewhere, their victory was in many ways a disaster for Brexiters in that it meant that they are now responsible for whatever happens. Not just responsible, but uniquely responsible. They were warned over and over again of the consequences and insisted that these warnings were not just wrong but malevolent, self-interested fearmongering. So, now, they and they alone, own the consequences. Remainers have absolutely no responsibility to try to ‘make Brexit work’ or to ‘get behind Brexit’ (whatever those things would mean in practice).

It hasn’t been done properly

That denial of responsibility feeds into the third emerging Brexiter narrative. It is that there was nothing wrong with the decision, but that the way it is being delivered by the government is what is causing the problems. This is evident in, for example, Daniel Hannan’s recent attempt to deflect blame for the policy he advocated for so many decades. It has many variants, from the outright mad (‘we should just have walked away the day after’) to the more sophisticated complaints about specific decisions, such as the timing of the Article 50 notification. It is fair comment that the government have approached Brexit in an inept way, making what the respected (and by no means anti-) Brexit commentator David Allen Green of the Financial Times has called numerous ‘unforced errors’.

Nevertheless, there are two obvious objections. First, that no one – not least the Leave campaigners – has ever specified a way of undertaking Brexit which does not damage the UK, whether economically, politically or strategically. Second, that every mis-step the government have made has been as a result of pressure from, and has been cheered on by, the Brexit Ultras. That includes the dogmatic ‘red lines’ laid down by the government, the premature triggering of Article 50, and, for that matter, the subsequent calling of a General Election to ‘crush the saboteurs’.

This narrative is a familiar one in business, where any and every failed management fad is defended by its advocates on the grounds that all would have been well but for ‘inadequate implementation’. It’s equally familiar in far Left politics, where each failed attempt to implement communism is explained away by saying that it wasn’t ‘proper’ communism.

But in this case it goes further, and links back to the second narrative, in that Brexiters continue to claim victimhood at the hands of the elite, refusing to accept that having won the Referendum and having a government now pursuing what they voted for, they are the elite, and they are the ones implementing Brexit.

It’s the Remainers’ fault

The fourth excuse is that all would have been well but for Remainers who are accused, variously, of sabotage, treachery and of talking Brexit down. Often, it’s a variant of the paranoid idea about the elite – meaning the Civil Service, Judiciary, BBC, CBI, IoD, House of Lords but not, mysteriously, the ex-public schoolboys, millionaires and hedge funds that support Brexit. Sometimes it’s the entire 48% of voters who didn’t back Brexit.

There are daily examples of this claim, but taking just one, that of Leave means Leave co-Chair John Longworth in August 2017, is instructive. The usual suspects are named, in this case for their “pretence” that Britain must pay a “divorce bill” (i.e. settle its outstanding commitments to the EU). But, of course, it wasn’t a Remainer pretence, and four months later the payment was agreed.

The more general issue is that, if Brexit were the self-evidently great idea its proponents claim, it would hardly matter what Remainers did or said. For that matter, within minutes of the vote, before Remainers had had time to engage in any of their nefarious sabotage, Sterling suffered a catastrophic collapse (which in any other circumstances would have led to a political crisis) as the currency markets priced in their prediction of what Brexit would mean.

It’s the EU’s fault

The fifth narrative is possibly the most dominant of the post-Referendum excuses made by Brexiters. It is that the problem was not with the decision to leave, and not solely (or even primarily) with the British government or with Remainers, but with the EU who have decided to ‘punish’ Britain for leaving. Such claims are invariably nonsense since they ascribe to the EU the consequences of having left the EU (and, in this sense, are another denial of responsibility). To take just the most current of numerous examples, Brexiters claim that the border controls, especially in Ireland, are something being threatened by the EU rather than being ineluctable, legal consequences of leaving the single market and any customs union.

There are many things that could be said about this punishment narrative (see here), but the core difficulty with it for Brexiters is that they repeatedly promised that Britain held ‘all the cards’ and that ‘the EU needs us far more than we need them’. If that was right, then no punishment would have been possible. If it was wrong, then the vote did indeed have consequences embedded within it, consequences which were concealed from voters by the Leave campaign.

It’s not about practical consequences, it’s about philosophical principles

Alongside these five narratives – and perhaps in recognition of their paucity – some Brexiters run a sixth. Here, the attempt is to claim that those who voted leave did so on the basis of a commitment to ‘sovereignty’ in the abstract. So consequences don’t matter, since this was a purely philosophical vote. I can (just about) imagine that this might be true for a few leave voters, though I would argue that they are wrong, but it clearly wasn’t what was proposed to the British people by the Leave campaign, which instead made arguments about immigration and NHS funding, and made claims that leaving would be easy precisely because they knew that if voters thought otherwise then would be disadvantageous to their cause. A pure sovereignty argument would not have needed to make such claims.

As the practical consequences of leaving the EU mount up, and can no longer be dismissed as Project Fear, what Brexiters are trying to do is to counter the argument that ‘no one voted to be poorer’. This is the real meaning of the claim that the vote was about the principle of sovereignty and not practical consequences since, of course, if it was about principles it can be claimed that leave voters accepted that it meant they would get poorer. And it’s probably true that some did. But it certainly isn’t true of the majority of leave voters, even as regards immigration.  Yet not only do Brexiters deny this, but some even claim that impoverishment and hardship will be desirable, in some way creating a national renewal by returning to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’. But, again, there are good reasons why this was not put on the side of the Leave campaign bus: almost no one would have voted for it.

Why does this matter?

Precisely because the vote to leave the EU was the beginning of a process – the process of Brexit – rather than the end of something, the way that Brexiters are now attempting to decouple the vote from its consequences is crucial.

Brexiters are trying to use the Referendum vote, close as it was, to mandate as the ‘Will of the People’ anything that they say it means. This is most obviously true in terms of the ‘Global Britain’ agenda of free trade deals around the world. There is much that could be said about that (how does exiting the FTAs that the EU has help it? how does leaving the single market help it?) but, those things aside, how does the Referendum mandate it? For, given that in some, perhaps large, part it was a nativist and protectionist vote it mandates the precise opposite.

In this sense, there is a massive political fraud underway at the moment, and, actually, it isn’t remain voters who are primarily its victims but leave voters. They are being told that their concerns about immigration and globalization are going to be ignored. I happen to think that their concerns about immigration were misplaced and their concerns about globalization irrelevant to the Brexit debate. But I am not so dishonest as to pretend that the vote was not about those things, whereas many Brexiters are.

Thus the day after the Referendum Daniel Hannan said that the Leave campaign “never said there was going to be some radical decline” in immigration, and last March David Davis said that immigration might even rise. Both pretend that all that matters to voters is that Britain decides its own immigration policy – that all they care about is ‘sovereignty’ – rather than actual numbers. As for globalization and free trade, it’s notable that just about every Brexiter now talks as if having an independent trade policy were the main rationale of Brexit. That was mentioned during the Referendum, but it certainly wasn’t presented as the central argument for Brexit – whereas immigration was – and it certainly wasn’t explained that such a trade policy will entail the relaxation of immigration controls.

That is only one aspect of the even greater dishonesty of Brexiters. What they are really trying to argue is that the vote mandates them to do anything they want. That is an even bigger, and even more dubious, proposition than that the Referendum vote set in stone the ‘will of the people’ with respect to EU membership. Precisely because leaving the EU has such far-reaching ramifications not just for economics but for geo-politics, it can be claimed that anything done post-Brexit is mandated by the Referendum result.

So this is where Brexiters are now. All the pre-Referendum swagger has gone, all the promises made have evaporated. In their place are a series of absurd and indefensible arguments. But it is important to understand that these arguments, even if they are often run together, contain two fundamentally different claims. One is that whatever happens now is not the fault of Brexiters. The other is that Brexiters have been given a blank cheque to do whatever they now want to do. These claims are linked in that both treat 23 June 2016 as a frozen moment, denoting either the end of their responsibility for the consequences or the beginning of their freedom to define the consequences. Whilst different, they are linked in their boundless dishonesty, since neither claim was entertained, let alone endorsed, by the Referendum.

But they are also linked in another – probably more important – way. They are profoundly unrealistic. For politics did not stop on 23 June 2016. On the contrary, it began a period of political dislocation that will last for many years, perhaps decades, to come. Brexiters seemed to imagine that by winning the vote that would be an end to it. It’s already obvious that this is not so. If Brexit does go ahead, the Brexiters will, rightly, be held responsible for every consequence that flows from it. That is the significance of the narratives they are already putting forward to deny that the vote had consequences: it’s not simply that they don’t want to take the blame, it’s that they don’t want to take the responsibility.

The ultimate truth about Brexit is that through a series of accidents a protest movement with wholly unrealistic and disastrous policies unexpectedly and unwillingly became a government set upon delivering them. The Brexiters are now running away from the consequences as fast as they can. The tragedy for our country is that, in one way or another, we are stuck with having to deal with them.