The theatricals of 'deal or no deal' are a distraction

As this supposedly final week of Brexit trade talks ends, the ‘will they, won’t they?’ show continues to play out like an amateur production of an absurdist play or, perhaps more appositely, a Whitehall farce.

At all events, a theatrical metaphor is called for because what we are seeing is a manufactured drama. It is manufactured in the most obvious sense by the fact that the impending end of year time limit, and with that the timescales for agreement and ratification, are entirely down to the UK government’s choice not to seek an extension to the Transition Period. Even more important, the choreography of there being two opposing ‘sides’ going mano a mano until one of them blinks is almost entirely the creation of British Brexiters who have antagonistically constructed the EU as ‘opponents’ to be outwitted in some macho battle of wills.

None of this was necessary. The EU response from the outset has been one of sadness rather than antagonism, and its approach one of dry technical rationality rather than histrionics. It is the Brexiters who have both chosen and needed to make it otherwise, which can be traced right back to 2016 when, far from revelling in their victory, they displayed a sullen suspicion that quickly escalated to bellicosity at the slightest trigger, as with the absurd sabre-rattling over Gibraltar in April 2017. Now, like neighbours from hell with whom all reasonable discussion has been tried, the UK has goaded the EU into starting legal proceedings.

As for who the audience for all this is, that’s a matter of interpretation. Brexiters would claim that it is the EU – to show them that Britain is a ‘sovereign equal’ and will not be pushed around. But of course that is just another line from the play rather than a serious analysis of it. All the signs are that the EU, and the wider world, looks on with bewilderment at the peculiar and undignified conduct of a country formerly seen as rather sensible.

It may, as some think, be the government playing tough for the gallery of the Brexit Ultras as a prelude to letting them down. It may be for leave voters, via the headlines that the government can get in the pro-Brexit press. It may be for the electorate as a whole, softening them up for what is to come – deal or no deal – as being the product of EU intransigence which plucky Britain has fought tooth and nail. Or it may be aimed, again at the whole electorate, as a prelude to a ‘triumphant’ announcement of a ‘great deal’ having been struck at the last minute, much as Johnson did with the Withdrawal Agreement last year.

But even to engage in such speculations is to get sucked into the performance that is being put on, for they are really just another version of the ‘will they, won’t they?’ script. So too are the endless and contradictory predictions of pundits about what the outcome will be, including those who declare that a deal was ‘always inevitable’ and the equal number who declare with equal certainty that no deal was ‘the plan all along’ (whatever happens, half of these are guaranteed their moment of triumph).

Deal or no deal, this isn’t what was promised

What we should be focussing on is that we are approaching the point where all the possible outcomes are hideously etiolated versions of what was promised by Brexiters, let alone of what Britain enjoyed as an EU member. Any deal that is likely to be made, and no deal, and no deal followed (as it probably would be) by some piecemeal deals are all to varying degrees bad outcomes. I’ve argued before (and continue to believe) that a deal of any sort would be the best – or perhaps one should say least-worst – of these available outcomes, but that is all it is.

Thinking just of trade - although that is far from all that matters, as leading security experts pointed out this week (£) -  it is bound to be worse than EU membership. To leave the largest, most integrated, transnational market in the world and the one which is also geographically closest can’t help but be highly damaging, whatever terms on which the UK then trades with it. That’s a truism, but it is worth noting that whenever it is pointed out – as, most recently, by Ursula von der Leyen in January – it is greeted by hardcore Brexiters with paroxysms of fury. So, truism as it may be, it contradicts what some still see as an entitlement.

But what is in prospect isn’t just worse than what we had as members, it’s also far worse than the Brexiters assured us would be the case as a non-member. The words of the Vote Leave campaign documents, repeated with such authority by Michael Gove and others so many times in 2016, should never be forgotten: “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”.

Whether this meant single market membership, as it seemed to imply, and they later reneged on it, or whether they really believed that some other “zone” existed doesn’t matter. It is clear that whatever happens now it will not be this, and it has been for a long time. But, during that long time, they made other promises – of a ‘deep and special partnership’, of a Canada + or even Canada +++ or Super-Canada trade deal. Indeed during the 2019 Election campaign Boris Johnson promised “a super Canada-plus” deal by the end of 2020. All that has disappeared, since the only meaning such terms could have had would have entailed far more extensive integration than the UK is now willing to countenance.

None of this is ancient history. The referendum campaign itself was only four years ago, and voters are entitled to recall that what is happening now flows from, and claims mandate from, the vote. Nor do we have to go back that far, since the groundwork for Johnson’s “super Canada-plus” deal was laid with the Political Declaration (PD) that was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ he was elected on just last December. Yet he immediately repudiated the key elements of that Declaration that would have made a more extensive deal possible, and since then the UK has insisted that it wants no more than a Canada-style deal, with no ‘pluses’ or ‘supers’.

It’s true that even within this there is considerable disingenuity, for two reasons. On the one hand the UK is actually asking for more than ‘Canada’ (e.g. in terms of cabotage rights). On the other hand, the EU has always made it plain, and in the PD the UK accepted but now denies, that any form of trade deal would come with level playing field conditions. But the point holds that all talk of an ambitious deal going well beyond a standard free trade agreement has now been dropped.

One aspect of that is that whereas under the terms of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement (WA) there was the possibility that the trade deal could have had generous terms on ‘rules of origin’, Johnson’s WA removed that option and as a consequence it has just been revealed (though it was not a surprise) that such terms will not be agreed, with significant negative consequences for several industries, including car making. Again, this contradicts what Johnson promised during the election about protecting automotive supply chains.  (Rules of origin are complex but important, see the primer by Alex Stojanovic of the Institute for Government).

It beggars belief that the government should now be contemplating, not as its worst scenario but as its best and indeed preferred scenario, the thinnest of trade arrangements with the EU. It was not entailed by Brexit – even leaving aside the soft ‘Norway’ model, an Association Agreement of the Ukraine type was a possibility, albeit one open to criticism, or some more imaginative hybrid could have been constructed. But Britain has been driven by the implacable extremism of the Brexit Ultras to a situation where the only future relationship options are distance or dislocation.

This is not what was sold to the British people. Nor is it what they currently want, given opinion polls showing that 80% think maintaining a close relationship with the EU is important and that the biggest gap since the Referendum between those thinking leaving is wrong and those thinking it’s right (50% to 39%) has now opened.

Deal or no deal brinkmanship is itself damaging

All this is not just the context for, but is actually more important than, all the excited talk about whether or not – and, if so, when - the negotiators are going to enter ‘the tunnel’ to finalise a trade deal. That matters, but it is the sub-plot to the bigger story and in many ways a distraction from it.

For that matter, the manufactured drama of ‘brinkmanship’ is not just a distraction but itself has serious adverse consequences in terms of the uncertainties facing so many people and industries as a result. For example, for both the UK in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, the present situation calls into question the security of medical supplies, with one Irish MEP saying that “people’s lives are at risk”.

It should be noted that the issues here relate not just to the future terms talks but to the equally important operation of the Joint Committee (JC), charged with implementing the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), which also met this week. For whilst these are separate processes they have become very much linked in recent weeks as a result of the ongoing row over the Internal Market Bill (IMB). This has created a huge trust problem with the EU over the UK’s willingness to abide by the NIP and work through the JC, rather than to make unilateral decisions that flout the Protocol and thereby, on the government’s own admission, to break international law.

At this week’s JC meeting Gove confirmed the UK was proceeding with the legislation and, contemptibly, the Bill passed its final reading in the House of Commons, with the Tory backbench rebellion fizzling out. Even Theresa May, despite her much-vaunted opposition, did not actually vote against it but abstained. It is a new and shameful low, showing the extent to which all constraints and norms are being jettisoned in the name of Brexit. Unsurprisingly, as it had indicated would happen if the offending clauses were still in play by the end of the month, the EU began legal action. However it has given the UK a month to respond to its initial legal notice (it could have been shorter) and is meanwhile willing to continue trade talks.

The IMB now goes to the House of Lords, where no doubt it will be mauled, but as trailed in my last two posts the government has delayed the timetable for this. Taken together with the terms of the EU’s legal action, this means that there is a tiny window in which the trade talks can proceed without the Bill actually becoming law. That creates a theoretical possibility that the illegal clauses might be dropped in the light of a deal being done, according to Simon Coveney, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, and others. Thus by the middle of October, conceivably, there might be a trade deal and an end to the threatened international law breach.

But massive damage to trust has already been done, with the result that the issue of enforcement for the governance mechanism for any trade deal has now taken centre stage in the future terms negotiations. The obvious concern is that the Johnson will once again sign a rushed deal with implementation details to be filled out later, perhaps especially tempting given the ongoing coronavirus crisis, only to backtrack later when it comes to putting what was agreed into practice as has happened with the IMB. Shamefully, thanks to the behaviour of Johnson’s government, our country is no longer trusted to behave honestly.

Deal or no deal, the outlook is unremittingly grim

Meanwhile, all the costs and inconveniences of Brexit, deal or no deal, continue to rack up. Having already lost the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority – inevitably, though Brexiters claimed otherwise (£) – it has now emerged that the UK-based European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), a key body for climate change research, is all but certain to be ineligible to go on hosting EU funded activities and programs. Month by month, Brexit is already inexorably impoverishing and damaging us, in ways small and large, and which, as in these cases, reach deep into the core strategic strengths and priorities of our country. But as Brendan Donnelly, Director of the Federal Trust, wrote in a hard-hitting blog this week, “the worst is yet to come”, and Simon Nixon in The Times was equally forceful in arguing that “business is about the be thrown under a bus” (£).

As a Select Committee heard this week from leading figures in the aerospace, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals industries – again, all key sectors – trade will become “a day-to-day struggle”, with huge new costs and paperwork, reduced investment and some products being unavailable. Each witness was asked if any reason could be given to welcome the impending end of the transition period. None of them could give one.

Separately, a new report (£) shows that leaving the EU platform for electricity trading will cost hundreds of millions of pounds in increased energy bills. The latest figures on the financial services sector suggest that it has moved 7,500 employees and more than £1.2 trillion (yes, that is trillion) of assets to the EU since the Referendum, with accelerating relocations as the end of transition approaches. And Michael Gove officially confirmed the long-touted figure of £1 billion as the cost of regulatory re-registrations in the chemicals industry. It remains unclear whether the new UK regulatory system will even be ready by the end of the year.

An obvious huge change in January will be the end of Freedom of Movement, which is set to cause serious problems for many sectors of the economy, with a particular and immediate impact on care homes, already in crisis because of coronavirus. And those EU nationals living in the UK with settled status face the nightmare caused by the government’s refusal to provide physical, documentary proof of their status. The digital-only system is unreliable and creates horrendous problems for accessing housing and services, heaping further pain on the already shameful way this group of our neighbours, friends, colleagues and families has been treated since 2016.

The adverse effects in prospect – again, regardless of whether there is a trade deal - will touch every aspect of daily life. The RSPCA is warning of shortages of pet foods and medicines (£) and, although it’s not exactly news, the BBC has produced a listing of things that will change at the end of the transition, mainly focussed on individuals and travel. Unsurprisingly, and in line with the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ information campaign, every single thing makes life worse and more difficult. Every single thing.

We are no longer at the point of debates and claims, in which ‘balanced’ coverage supposedly meant pitting a rosily optimistic Brexiter against a ‘Project Fear’ remainer. We are now at the point of news reporting, in which every Brexit story is a bad news story because there aren’t any good news stories.

Nor can this be ascribed to anti-government bias, because if the broadcasters did nothing but read out, North Korea style, every single page of the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ website then it would be an unrelenting diet of misery. And this isn’t precautionary stuff for the event of no deal. Everything on that site is bad news – there’s literally nothing that makes life easier or better - it’s just even worse if there were to be no deal. This all comes on top of the COVID-19 crisis but, unlike the virus, is entirely self-inflicted. Britain is doing this – not just Brexit, but the way it is going about Brexit – to itself.

Deal or no deal, the highest price of all?

The previous section summarised only a selection of stories and reports from the last week. Multiple other examples can be found, not least in many previous posts on this blog, all testifying to the terrible price – economic, political, cultural and even moral – of Brexit largely irrespective of a trade deal. The final example is at first sight more trivial. It was reported this week that the Tory MP Esther McVey has accused teachers of left-wing indoctrination of their pupils and more particularly that “white working-class lads” in Brexit-voting areas would be alienated by having “their family’s beliefs” questioned by anti-Brexit teachers.

Everything about this is obnoxious, not least its evidence-free assumptions about teachers’ beliefs and conduct, the homogenization of whole areas, social classes, and ethnicities in terms of their Brexit stance, its faux-egalitarianism - and, even were it all true, why is it only the ‘lads’ who are so delicate? Worse is the grotesque implication that teachers’ political views be monitored. Whilst only a fragment, it forms part of a bigger picture in which being pro-Brexit is being made a condition for appointment to public bodies, or for being rewarded with ennoblement, or is being used to re-shape the civil service – with supposed remainers within it being described by an ‘anonymous Whitehall source’ this week as “the enemy within” who “will be rooted out”.

The noisy barrage of the ‘enemies of the people’ headline is giving way to the quieter but more lethal seeping poison gas of political loyalty tests conducted under cover of populist rhetoric – populist, but not even popular given that support for Brexit is now a minority opinion. Each example in isolation seems trivial, or can be given some justificatory spin, but their accumulation may end up being the highest price of all that Brexit inflicts.

There is a telling line in Sam Byers’ post-Brexit satirical novel, Perfidious Albion: “Brexit was over, but the energy it accumulated had to be retained. Fears needed to be redirected. Hatred had to pivot” (2018, p.119). It seems prophetic in the light of Farage’s new hobby of hanging about grubbily on beaches looking for migrants to denounce. And it conjures up a country – of which the McVey story provides a tiny glimpse – in which the Brexit divide segues into a wider assault upon immigrants and intellectuals, on ‘woke’ culture in schools and universities, on ‘unelected judges’, on civil service neutrality, and on the rule of law (the latter link is to the first of a three-part blog by David Allen Green, so check the follow-on posts for the full argument).

There’s nothing new in the existence of such ideas, but this is the first time that Britain has had a government that subscribes to them. Governments doing so is the script of a story we know well, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

So as the uncertainty over whether or not there will be a deal continues – and it will for a little while yet – and, for that matter, when that uncertainty ends, it’s important to see it for what it is. Not without any significance, certainly, but a distraction from what is much more significant: the damage, decay and danger of Brexit itself. That drama - of lies told, promises broken, and a country on the brink of calamity - is the etiology of what afflicts us, rather than the tedious theatrics and accompanying breathless predictions which are one of its symptoms.

Updated 04/10/20 to correct misleading phrasing of the story about the ECMWF.

Under cover of Brexit

The most important Brexit event of the week came and went with relatively little fanfare, yet it marks a significant moment. The opportunity to extend the transition period went unused (though, just about conceivably, could be revived in new form). That was not a surprise because it had been so strongly signalled by the government that the UK would not seek, or agree to any request for, extension. Still, it is remarkable for being a further indication of the total lack of pragmatism or good sense with which Brexit is being undertaken.

Without reprising all the arguments, with an already short period for negotiation, ratification and implementation massively disrupted by coronavirus only sheer dogmatism mitigated against an extension. As for the negotiations themselves, this week’s round finished earlier than scheduled, with seemingly little or no progress or convergence of positions. There are differing interpretations of the significance of this (to get the range, see here and here) but, frankly, there’s little point in speculating. The crunch point will come in the autumn.

Remarkable, too, that the Labour opposition did not even in passing set down a marker about the folly of non-extension. It makes it more difficult to reach a deal, more likely that any deal that is reached will be limited in scope – with all that means for businesses already reeling from coronavirus - and leave much still to be decided. Yet, having engineered this very situation, the latest complaint of the Brexiters is of an EU ‘plot’ to trap Britain in a never-ending process of negotiation.

Brexit has consequences that people should have known

That is just the latest version of the longstanding disconnect between the decisions of Brexiters and their understanding of the consequences. Of the many examples that could be picked, recall the first Brexit Secretary David Davis’ belief (£) that there was nothing to stop the European Medical Agency or the European Banking Authority from headquartering in the UK (both have now left as a direct result of Brexit), the rage over the UK being excluded from the 2023 European City of Culture competition, or second Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab’s belated realization of the significance of Dover-Calais freight traffic.

This week, an example was Brexiter MP Peter Bone’s bemusement (during a Select Committee meeting) that mutual recognition of standards between the UK and EU will not be possible when we have left the single market. Bone has been campaigning to leave for his entire political life, has all the resources of the House of Commons Library at his disposal and yet still hasn’t acquainted himself with relatively basic facts.

Further, perhaps even more egregious, examples were contained in the ever-ludicrous Mark Francois’ letter to Michel Barnier. Francois, the current ERG Chair and very much the Brexiters’ Brexiter, if only for his “puerile bombast”, cemented those dubious credentials by combining a gracelessness of its language (“A missive from a Free Country”; “it is possible you may have heard of us [the ERG]”), with an obvious ignorance of key facts. These included his apparent lack of awareness of the provisions in the Political Declaration for the Level Playing Field, and the existing commitments within the Withdrawal Agreement for some continuing role for the ECJ in the UK’s “national life”. One might think the ERG should know this. But, then, just as - as everyone except Norman Tebbit realises - the ‘socialist’ in ‘National Socialist’ was a misnomer, as was the ‘democratic in ‘German Democratic Republic’, so too is the “research” in the partly taxpayer-funded European Research Group.

It’s easy to ascribe all this to wilful ignorance – famously, the day after the Referendum saw a spike in people googling to find out what leaving the EU meant – and no doubt that would not be unfair, and very possibly over-generous, in relation to Bone and Francois. But for some, and especially for leave voters rather than their leaders, it is part of something different, namely a belief that, somehow, ‘nothing really changes’ as a result of leaving the EU or, if it does, that this is due to the EU being unreasonable or even punitive.

Brexit isn’t just ‘symbolic’

That’s partly to do with the taking for granted of the familiar accoutrements of modern life without realising that they are the product of extensive, albeit largely invisible, institutional arrangements. So ‘of course’ nowadays planes fly us to wherever we want without restrictions, as if this were not the outcome of complex agreements such as the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA), and ‘of course’ we can travel, work and live freely within Europe, as if that were not the outcome of freedom of movement rights.

In some ways, Brexiters, who despise EU bureaucrats and rail against extra-national decision making, seem to treat it as an act of nature that there are Europe-wide regulatory systems whereas, when transition ends, British citizens will be excluded from their provisions. The related underlying issue is that for many Brexiters the vote to ‘take back control’, with all its emotional resonance, was not thought about in concrete legal or institutional terms but as a kind of symbolic, feel-good act.

It’s this – along with its counterpart in rejecting all warnings of the practical consequences as being ‘Project Fear’ – which I think partly explains why business and governmental preparedness for the end of the transition period has been so limited. Many people simply don’t understand or believe how radically things are about to change, even if a trade deal of some sort is done. Only as they belatedly come to do so do they realise what they have let themselves in for, as with MP Bob Stewart’s recent bathetic plea for the continuation of pet passports so that he can still take his dogs to France.

Brexit is having consequences that no one could have known

All of the above (and there are many other examples) is about things which those advocating or supporting Brexit really should and could have checked, revealed, or understood before. It is going to be a hard education in the coming months and years as what Tom Hayes of the Brussels European Employee Relations Group calls “the Brexit of small things” is experienced. And it won’t even be an education unless people come to understand that these were the consequences of what they voted for rather than treating them as EU ‘punishment’.

By contrast, much that is unfolding now as a consequence of, and often in the name of, Brexit are things which were in no way entailed by it. I’m referring, generally, to the completely unrealistic and reckless way that Brexit is being done. But I’m referring more particularly to the way Brexit is being used to undertake what has the makings of a wholesale restructuring of the British State and Constitution.

This has been incipient since the very early days after the Referendum and I touched on it in my first post on this Blog. More recently, in February, I wrote about it at length under the title ‘Brexit is going feral’. I won’t repeat that here (most of it is still valid), but this week we have seen the latest developments in the shape of the defenestration of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, and the accompanying desire of Boris Johnson that he should be replaced by a Brexit supporter (£). The appointment of David Frost, who is pro-Brexit but has little experience of security matters, to one of Sedwill’s erstwhile roles, that of National Security Advisor, is part of the same process, and led to remarkably blunt criticism from Theresa May. This comes on top of the announcement of the departure of the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office which is widely understood to be related to his lack of Brexit enthusiasm.

The dangers of these developments for civil service impartiality are profound, as governmental expert Jill Rutter pointed out last October. The loss of impartiality is not merely a violation of ‘traditional principle’ but, as Rutter argues, as does Jonathan Powell writing of the current developments, it entails the danger that civil servants simply give bad or even dishonest advice to satisfy the prejudices of their political bosses.

In this way the particular issue of using Brexit as a pretext for Civil Service ‘reform’ (Reformation might be a more apt term) is indeed an aspect of the general problem – undertaking Brexit in a reckless and unrealistic way – and will make it even worse. As I wrote in October 2018 that is the inevitable consequence of faith-based politics.

A “rolling coup”

But the outrageousness of what is happening does not end there. Powell – the longstanding Chief of Staff to Tony Blair, and not lacking in reformist enthusiasm – described it as part of a “rolling coup” in his article. In a tweet, he went further, raising the prospect of authoritarianism and the need to resist it. Someone of his seniority and sobriety does not say such things lightly, and his having done so should be taken very seriously indeed.

This is not like any of the previous, almost endemic, tussles between politicians and civil servants. For one thing, it is very clearly being driven by Dominic Cummings’ desire to see “a hard rain” fall on the civil service (£). It is the bitterest ironies that having vilified the supposed rule of unaccountable EU technocrats that this unelected fan – and, dare one say, exemplification - of “weirdos and misfits” should wield such power. The braggartly, bullying language of “a hard rain” is, in itself, indicative of the reason why such a person should be kept from all power, let alone that as extensive as that which Boris Johnson has gifted him.

It’s true that Cummings’ long-time ally Michael Gove gives some political cover to this, but his much-touted speech on civil service reform was really no more than has been boilerplate stuff since the 1968 Fulton Report. Gove’s pseudo-polite, pseudo-reasonable, pseudo-intellectual smarminess is only a gateway drug to Cummings’ rip-it-up nihilism; the magic dragon Gove merely puffs is the unmagical one that Cummings chases.

If Cummings role isn’t enough reason to ‘just say no’, the constitutional implications of this week’s developments are profound, as Robert Saunders, Reader in British Political History at Queen Mary, University of London, has pointed out, with particular reference to the fact that David Frost will be neither a civil servant nor (despite being made a member of the House of Lords) a member of the government. If such appointments are at the behest of the Prime Minister, neither Parliament nor the Cabinet are the source of Executive authority. It is a move towards a presidentialisation of British politics, but with none of the accompanying checks and balances of, for example, the US system. (It is worth mentioning that as, again, Jill Rutter pointed out some time ago, Frost’s position as Brexit negotiator was already an anomalous one).

A coup rooted in Brexit

It is important to recognize that all of this is inseparable from Brexit (not because it is a necessary consequence of Brexit, but because Brexit is a condition for it). It proceeds from the same populist logic of a culture war against ‘the elite’ and, more specifically, is conceived of by Gove and Cummings as rooting out “ineffective, pro-EU bureaucrats” (£, my emphasis added).

It is that ‘pro-EU’ part which marks this as quite different to all the previous approaches to civil service reform, for it targets specific (supposed) political beliefs rather than competence or even willingness to change in some general way. It is happening under a government with Brexit as its central purpose and its sole loyalty test, and one in which numerous former Vote Leave campaign team members, including Cummings, hold crucial advisory roles. It is making pro-Brexit opinion the defining qualification not even just for those civil servants delivering Brexit but for posts which have little or nothing to do with that.

Crucially, nowhere, ever, in any way whatsoever was it suggested that the 2016 Referendum was a vote for such a ‘coup’. Nowhere, ever, in any way whatsoever was it suggested that the pledge at the last election to ‘Get Brexit Done’ meant using it as a cover to undertake such far-reaching changes.

In this respect, what is happening is potentially far more serious than the dishonest way in which the vote for an undefined Brexit was repurposed as a vote for hard Brexit or even for no deal Brexit. For, now, it is being used as a mandate for wholesale changes to the British political system which are nothing at all to do with delivering Brexit. That was always a danger - it is part of the Brexit McCarthyism I first wrote about in March 2017 (these and other references to my previous posts are not intended to show that ‘I told you so’, but that what is happening now is rooted in what has developed over these last four years). Yet it is developing in complex and subtle ways, which are all the more insidious for being so.

For, as has recently been suggested, there is actually little popular appetite for a ‘Brexit culture war’ but – unlike the screaming ‘enemies of the people’ headline - it is being prosecuted in a way that few voters will really be aware of or interested in. The way the National Security Advisor is appointed is, for most, uninteresting and arcane. Civil service ‘reform’ scarcely less so. But - as with the institutional arrangements which underpin, say, air travel or international trade – once the scaffolding of the political system is dismantled people may be appalled by, but will have to live with, the consequences.

Nothing is inevitable

I keep being told (on Twitter, the fount of all wisdom of course) that all this was “the plan all along” and is inevitable. It may have been the plan of some, but little or nothing is ‘inevitable’ in human affairs. History is made by what, collectively, people do, not despite anything they may do. Without that, there’s no meaning to politics. How Brexit plays out is no exception.

This is what I was trying to get at in last week’s post. Some read it, mistakenly, as a call to ‘get behind Brexit’ or to ‘make Brexit work’. That wasn’t the point at all. Rather, it was to suggest that we should not acquiesce to the inevitability of what the ERG and Brexit Party hardliners insist that Brexit means. With the referendum mandate now discharged, we are freed forever of the yoke of the 17.4 million and with that freedom can and should challenge anew all that is being done in the name of Brexit, as well as comparing it with what was promised. Manifestly, that includes the specifics of whatever may or may not be negotiated with the EU. But it also includes all of the ways Brexit is being made use of to do things which were never entailed by Brexit itself.

The Brexiters have been successful in getting Britain to leave the EU. That is a disaster in itself. But it does not follow that they now own our country to be played with as they will, or to be re-made in whatever way they want.

Brexit is going feral

In the very first post on this blog, in September 2016, I noted that the complexity of delivering Brexit and the lack of realism of Brexiters meant that in the coming months and years we would hear much more about civil service ‘obstructionism’. It had already begun, only a few weeks after the Referendum, and in the years that have followed it has intensified, sometimes aimed at the civil service in general, other times at particular individuals.

Of these, the most high-profile targets have been Sir Ivan Rogers and Sir Kim Darroch, both of whom were effectively forced to resign. There has also been a swathe of resignations other senior civil servants including Sir Jon Thompson, the head of HMRC, who received death threats after giving evidence about the costs of Brexit to a Select Committee.

Whilst Brexit has increased the overall size of the civil service, there is some evidence of unusually high turnover amongst staff. It is a reasonable speculation, given comments such as those of Sir Martin Donnelly, former Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade, that in at least some cases fundamental differences over Brexit have played a part in this.

At the time of Rogers’ resignation, in January 2017, I wrote that a string of resignations and early retirements from the civil service was very likely, and that the wholesale politicization of the civil service in favour of true believers in Brexit was a danger. The first has proved true and the second seems more of a risk than ever. I mention these earlier blog posts not to ‘boast’ about my prescience – and, anyway, many others said similar things - but to show that what has happened, and is happening, is not accidental, unexpected or just to do with Johnson’s premiership, but is embedded in the entire process of Brexit itself.

The latest attack on the civil service

This week  has seen the intensification of this, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants (£) who the government want to replace because they are not on board with Brexit and related policies. There are numerous reports of more or less open warfare between Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, and her senior civil servants. Meanwhile, former Chancellor Sajid Javid’s resignation speech implicitly criticised the way that political advisors, most obviously Dominic Cummings, are sidelining the civil service as well as undermining ministers.

At one level, there’s nothing new about this. The Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were highly suspicious of the perceived ideological conservatism of the civil service. The Thatcher governments saw corporatism, and capture by special interests, amongst civil servants as a block to their reforms. And New Labour often regarded civil servants as resistant to the managerialization of public services that were Blair’s hallmark.

It may have been less visible, but undoubtedly some senior civil servants were sidelined and eased out, and more congenial ones promoted, within all of these administrations. Moreover, as Geoff Mulgan, who was involved in some of them, them has recently written there are many past parallels for some of the civil service reforms that are currently being discussed. And bust-ups between Chancellors and Number Ten advisers aren’t new, either – recall the resignations of Nigel Lawson and Alan Walters in 1989.

However, there are very important differences between all that and what is happening now. In the past, it was about the perceived ideological and policy preferences of civil servants, either en masse or as individuals. And despite the much-vaunted neutrality of the British Civil Service it would be naïve to deny that such preferences did not exist, that there was an ‘official view’, or, even, that the social background of the traditional civil service predisposed it towards a certain conservatism. Even so, civil servants did and still do pride themselves on carrying out policies that they do not personally believe in. And strong ministers have usually been able to over-ride reluctant officials if they have coherent ideas.

What is happening with Brexit is something different. As I, along with many others with much greater authority and larger audiences, have recorded on this blog, most of the things that Brexiters want are simply impossible to deliver – possibly all of them, when taken in combination - and are often based upon deliberate or accidental falsehoods. This generates a faith-based politics in which what matters is loyalty to the cause and purity of belief. Possessed of such belief, the impossible becomes possible and inconvenient facts disappear.

A government purged of dissent

We’ve now reached the stage where the government has purged from office all those who do not display this loyalty and do not have (or are not willing to simulate) this purity of belief. At the same time, it is a government which must finally deliver on Brexit, not as a matter of promises, slogans and theory but in the cold, hard world of political, legal and economic reality. This is the task with which they have charged the civil service.

This puts civil servants in an impossible position. An individual civil servant might disagree with privatization or nationalization, say, but these are deliverable policies and such an individual can, and should be able to, swallow personal views and deliver them. But no individual can, say, deliver a policy of frictionless trade (£) with the EU once the UK leaves the institutions – the single market and the customs union – that make such trade possible. Nor can a civil servant advise, or undertake, a policy which is illegal.

In the face of this, the government – along with its many Brexit-supporting allies in the media – is rapidly moving to a position where it wants the civil service, like itself, to be purged of non-believers and, in this way, supposedly to ensure the delivery of Brexit. On the basis of recent reports, the particular fault line at the moment is an attempt to find ways around the checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as entailed by the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement (for more on this issue, see my previous post).

This agreement, don’t forget, is a legally binding international treaty. Hence it is also reported that the new Attorney-General, Suella Braverman (a former Chair of the ERG) was appointed partly as being more likely to advise that this would be legal than would her predecessor Geoffrey Cox (who voted leave in the Referendum but is unpopular with Brexiters, going back to his refusal to advise that the UK could legally unilaterally exit the Irish backstop provisions in May’s deal). The legal issues entailed were the agreement to be broken are discussed in detail by Professor Steve Peers on his EU Law blog.

The role of the Attorney-General is a complex one, with a long and convoluted history, being both a government ministerial office and also the government’s chief legal adviser. It is not, of course, a civil service role. But, as reported, the situation parallels what seems to be being asked of civil servants in that the hope is that the new Attorney-General will give advice more conducive to Brexiters’ ears. Yet, even if so, the provision of such advice will not mean that the UK evades any legal consequences of following it (it is legal advice, not a legal judgment) and, perhaps more importantly, the political consequences in terms of the reputation of, and trust, in the UK. That could have important practical implications not just for relations with the EU (£) but also with other countries, including the US.

Closed ears and closed minds

Such consequences point to the crucial issue. There is little merit – in politics, as in private life – of seeking only the advice which you want to hear. And whilst legal advice may often be subject to a legitimate range of interpretations, in many Brexit matters what is at stake are facts or at least best-estimate predictions.

Thus Brexiters may, and do, dismiss almost all economic forecasts of Brexit, including those of the civil service, preferring to rely on those of the small group that used to be called Economists for Brexit. Yet doing so does not make those forecasts reliable, and does not negate the fact that, thus far, they have proven inaccurate nor the repeated, detailed and devastating critiques of that group.  Other things – such as the impact of Brexit on business supply chains, or the tariffs associated with ‘trading on WTO terms’, are even less amenable to alternative interpretations.

All of this has been in play since the beginning. But it is now taking a far more dangerous form because of the nature of Johnson’s government since winning its majority. That could have been an opportunity to ‘stop campaigning and start governing’. Instead, there is a very strong sense that he and his government now want to blank out any advice or viewpoints that contradict those not just of Brexiters but of the most hardcore Brexiters.

This explains why, preposterously, the government is going to consult on the economic and business implications of its Brexit plans – but only after having made them. It also partly explains the current prominence that special advisers have, which is most unusual. Even leaving aside the well-known example of Cummings, consider the fact that David Frost’s lecture last week, treated almost as an official policy statement, was given by someone who is neither a politician nor even a civil servant, but a special advisor.

The report that Johnson wants civil service briefings to be short and simple is not so remarkable – many politicians share that desire – but the suspicion must be that he also wants them to pander to, rather than to challenge, his pre-existing beliefs. It is consistent with the story that, when Foreign Secretary, he reacted to unwelcome advice from civil servants by sticking his fingers in his ears and humming Rule Britannia*. Most significantly, it is consistent with the fact that, both as Foreign Secretary and as Prime Minister he has agreed to things which he later disowned, suggesting that he either did not read or did not understand them.

That goes to the heart of why not taking, or not even receiving, advice you do not like is an untenable basis for political decision making. For reality does not change just by ignoring it. The government could replace the entire civil service with Brexit flag wavers but, still, the economic, political and legal realities of Brexit will remain unchanged. It won’t change the negotiations with the EU (except to make them more difficult), it won’t change the consequences of not reaching a deal with the EU, it won’t change what businesses will do in response, and it won’t change the consequences of that for investment, employment, the tax base, or the value of sterling.

Closing down ‘dissident’ voices

All of this is a recipe for poor political decision making and substantial economic damage (and do read this link to a blog by Matt Bishop of Sheffield University – it’s one of the best things on Brexit I’ve seen). But what is currently happening carries dangers which go even beyond that. For there is now every sign that the government is not just determined to shut out what it perceives as dissident voices, but to close them down. Not just to ignore reality but to seek to redefine it.

This is evident in the latest attacks on the BBC, including the refusal of government ministers even to appear on some of its programmes, and wider attempts to boycott or marginalize journalists perceived to be unsympathetic. Again, this hasn’t come from nowhere. Apart from the longstanding Tory hostility to the BBC, as early as October 2016 Boris Johnson and other Brexiters were calling for an investigation into its alleged ‘anti-Brexit bias’.

It is most worryingly evident in the government’s attitude to the law. That overlaps in part with the issue of civil service advice – as with Home Secretary Priti Patel’s alleged attempts to encourage “behavior outside the rule of law” (£) – as well as with the suggestion, discussed above, that, under cover of legal advice from a fanatical Brexiter, the government might renege on an international treaty. But beyond that it is apparent in the forthcoming constitutional review, to examine amongst other things the role of the judiciary in politically contentious decisions.

With political oversight from the prominent Vote Leave campaigner Michael Gove, the obvious impetus behind this is the Supreme Court judgments that Parliament should have a vote on whether to trigger Article 50, and that Johnson’s attempted prorogation of Parliament was illegal. In that sense, it is the lineal descendent of the infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, although it is important to remember that, in both cases, the judgment was about the rights of the Legislative versus the Executive rather than the rights of ‘the people’ versus the politicians.

Brexit as a gateway to ‘disruption’

As such, it’s partly pure spite – Johnson is notoriously vindictive towards those he perceived to have opposed him, one of the many ways in which his ‘jocular’ persona is a fraud – but it goes much deeper than that. On the one hand, it’s about a fairly traditional political idea, that there are votes to be had by mobilizing resentment against elite institutions. People sometimes talk as if populism is a new thing in British politics, but it has a long lineage and, in recent history, both Thatcher and Blair showed versions of it. It’s no coincidence that both got into major fights with the BBC and the judiciary. It’s also no coincidence that then, as now, such fights occur when the official opposition party is utterly feeble and demoralized.

On the other hand, it’s about something new, or at least distinctive in form. It grows out of the ideology of ‘disruption’ that has swept through business and politics over the last few decades. That was incipient in both Thatcherite and Blairite politics but is now far more potent, partly because of social media. Nor is the connection to business accidental. There’s a reason why this government seems like every bad boss you’ve ever had and it’s that it has taken on, wholesale, the mix of bullying and hubris that has infected much of the corporate world. Dominic Cummings may seem like a novelty in the political realm, but he’s a version of just about every big-league MBA School graduate who has mistaken reading airport lounge books about Silicon Valley and quantum physics for wisdom.

All this should be as alarming to leave voters as to remainers. Brexit is being used as a cover for things that no one ever voted for. That is obvious in relation to the way that Brexit is being done, with all the promises about being part of a “Free Trade Zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey” having been ripped up. It is obvious in the way that Johnson is now seeking to shrug off the ‘oven ready deal’ upon which he was only recently elected (more on this in next week’s blog, once the noise around the publication of the UK and EU negotiating documents has died down).

But, now, it is going even beyond that. Joining in the government’s attack on civil servants, Brexiter journalist Allister Heath announces that “Brexit is not enough” and that “our arrogant overrated civil service must now face a political reckoning”. Joining in the wider attack on the judiciary he, like other Conservative Brexiters, bemoans (and totally misunderstands) the role of the courts in ruling on Heathrow expansion. Presumably he wants, like “Dom … to get the judges sorted” (£), a phrase which shows both dismaying contempt and misplaced arrogance. Meanwhile, the government’s latest statement of its Brexit approach pointedly shifts away from the previous commitment to the European Convention/Court of Human Rights. In these and other ways a powerful alliance is using Brexit as a springboard for a multi-pronged assault on the central institutions of democratic society.

The dangers of hubris

There are deep and genuine grounds for alarm in all of this, ably articulated by Sean Danaher in a recent post on his excellent Progressive Pulse blog. At the same time, it would be wrong to think – and the government should be wary of assuming – that we are set on an inevitable course.

For example, there are already signs of the civil service fighting back against the latest criticisms that are being made of it and against the power that Dominic Cummings and other special advisers are wielding. Journalists have shown that they will walk out of Number Ten briefings that exclude their colleagues from unfavoured news organizations. Businesses and other interest groups are going to get more vocal, as, for example, the opening session of this week’s NFU Conference showed. Hobbling the judiciary will not be easy. And it may well be that the Labour opposition regroups once it has a new leader.

In particular, the government should be wary of hubris. It has a large parliamentary majority, but it is pursuing in Brexit a policy that the majority of the population do not now support – and which is especially unpopular in Scotland and Northern Ireland - and of which those that do support it have very varied expectations. Nor should it assume that its disdain for the BBC, judiciary, civil servants and business is shared beyond a vocal minority. Picking fights with so many groups simultaneously could quickly see the government become very beleaguered.

In riding the tiger of populist sentiment Johnson has set himself up to be bitten back, badly, if things go wrong. For whilst the government’s expectation is undoubtedly that blame will attach to the EU, or remainers, or judges, or civil servants, or immigrants – or all of these - that can’t be guaranteed. Indeed, the existence of a government with a strong majority, full control of the Brexit process and closing down all advice and warnings about that process runs the considerable risk that – if those warnings prove true – it and it alone will be left to take the blame.



*I am sure that there is a reliable source for this story – in my mind, an article in the FT - but all I have been able to find is a passing reference in a Facebook post by Billy Bragg. I’ll make a (modest) donation to the Journalists’ Charity if anyone gives me the source.

A day to mourn

So today it will happen. For some, it will be a day of joy and triumph and celebration. Yet, though those celebrations will be occurring, it seems likely that they will be relatively muted and confined to a relatively small number of the most committed leavers, led by a perhaps slightly underwhelming cast of speakers. There will also be some light displays and a new 50 pence coin.

Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.

But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.

Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.

And, yet, today it will happen.

As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.

Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.

Brexit has created a deeply divided country

Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.

There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.

That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.

That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.

There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.

I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.

Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.

Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost

For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.

I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.

Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.

So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.

Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver

This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.

For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.

That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.

For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.

Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country

More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.

The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.

I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.

In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.

Brexiters have refused to seek consensus

Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.

As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.

Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.

So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.

What can remainers do now?

Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.

This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.

Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.

Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.

As for me …

As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.

But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.

I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.

In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.

It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.

As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.

There may be worse days to come

That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.

At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.

At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.

It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.

So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.



*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….