Our politics is incapable of responding to the failure of Brexit

A few weeks ago I wrote about how, with public opinion now firmly settling to the view that Brexit has been an economically damaging failure, Brexiter ideologues were out in force to claim that this was just a new ‘Project Fear’. Typically this either came from, or drew upon the analysis of, the small group of economists who have always been, and no doubt always will be, pro-Brexit. So far as the vast majority of economists are concerned, the debate is over except, as the Financial Times set out in a summary this week £), over just how large the economic damage is.

Although Brexiters will undoubtedly continue to churn out denials of this, they are increasingly putting forward a different defence of Brexit. This arises partly from the implausibility of the economic defence, but also as a way of reconciling defending Brexit with Brexiters’ own frequent laments that the ‘opportunities’ of Brexit haven’t been delivered.

Most notably, what is increasingly emerging is an acceptance by Brexiters that they have indeed lost the battle for public opinion, and that the idea that Brexit has failed is now firmly, possibly permanently, the dominant narrative. Rather than contest the evidence for this, they now propose that it is based on a false criterion of Brexit success and failure.

Brexit has worked!

So the latest line is to say, as Daniel Hannan did in the Telegraph (£) last weekend, that “Brexit has already worked”, the reasoning being that the only actual meaning of Brexit was to leave the EU. We’ve left the EU, so it has worked. Questions of what is then ‘done’ after Brexit are secondary, and not relevant to that of whether or not it has been a success.

In a similar way, towards the end of a typically paranoid and frankly weird article by Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Online it is asserted that:

“[Brexit] wasn’t about trade deals or economic boosterism. It was about democracy. We voted to leave the EU in order to strengthen British sovereignty. We made a constitutional demand, not an economic one. Brexit is working just fine, thanks. We are no longer beholden to laws drawn up by distant institutions over which we have no direct democratic control. That’s what we wanted. Brexit is a success, a brilliant, historic one.”

It is an idea that is now found all over social media with, for example, former Brexit Party MEP Belinda de Lucy tweeting that “[People] who say Brexit is failing are lying. They know full well Brexit is not an economic policy it is simply the act of a nation self-determining its own laws. It can no more fail than the act of any other country governing itself outside the EU.”

In one way, there’s nothing new about this strategy. Brexiters have always segued opportunistically between claims about sovereignty and claims about the supposed economic benefits of Brexit. But this latest iteration takes a particularly hard line in trying to completely decouple Brexit from its effects. Doing so has the particular consequence that it not only enables them to say that Brexit has ‘worked’ and been a ‘success’ simply by virtue of having left the EU but also, conversely, that there is no possibility that it has failed because Britain has, as a matter of fact, left the EU.

A bogus argument

It’s a bogus argument, for at least two reasons. One is that it is such a peculiar, and certainly limited, concept of sovereignty, whereby it is simply something to ‘have’ and is entirely separate from what is done ‘with’ or ‘by’ sovereignty. It is a purely hypothetical concept. Secondly, it is an empirically fatuous understanding of sovereignty. Whether in or out of the EU, a country has to exist within all kinds of international regulations, systems and bodies, which is one of the many reasons why Brexiters are finding it so hard to actually do anything meaningful with this sovereignty. Moreover, countries typically need the agreement of others to do some of the things they want to do. An obvious example is the current so-called ‘small boats crisis’, where the ability of the UK to ‘do what it wants’ turns out to rest upon the agreement of other countries, such as France or Albania. So even in its hypothetical form, this sovereignty doesn’t exist.

If the Brexiters’ response is that what Brexit meant wasn’t just sovereignty but democracy, so that the things that affect British people are voted on by them, or by their elected representatives, then the same issue remains. Like it or not, British people are affected by decisions made in other countries and within international bodies, from NATO to the WTO. And if the response to that is that Britain is represented in, and able to influence, those bodies then the same goes for being an EU member.

Dishonesty and incoherence

It's also, of course, a dishonest argument. Brexit was never presented to the British people as simply being an end in itself. It was always presented as allowing Britain to do certain things and to have certain things. Many of these were, indeed, economic, such as making trade deals or having more money for the NHS, or they were in other policy domains, such as immigration and border control. But they were all to do with the supposed benefits flowing from sovereignty, not just ‘sovereignty’ in the abstract. The stated aim wasn’t simply ‘to leave the EU’ but to do so because leaving the EU would make people’s lives better in various ways.

So it is wholly disingenuous now to say that the sole definition of Brexit being a success is to have left, as if, to coin a phrase, ‘Brexit means Brexit’. It is also completely incoherent, given that Brexiters also oppose, for example, aligning with large parts of EU rules, as proposed within a report by Anton Spisak of the Tony Blair Institute this week. Responding to this proposal, leading Brexiter and former Brexit Minister David Jones “said that aligning with EU rules would defeat the point of having left the bloc” (£). But how can it, if the only test of Brexit is having left the EU? And how can it violate the democratic principle, if alignment is what an elected British government chooses?

It's equally dishonest and incoherent to say, as O’Neill does, that Brexit wasn’t about things like trade deals given how Brexiters trumpeted these as a huge triumph. If they are more coy now, it is only because the Australia and New Zealand deals have been exposed as damaging and of little value, whilst the amended rollover deal with Japan has just this week been revealed to have been followed by a slump in trade with Japan. Yet previously it was regarded by Brexiters as a vindication of their project.

But of course this whole attempt to re-write what Brexit success means is so transparent that a three-year-old could see through it. We know full well that if the figures showed these trade deals to be a huge success Brexiters wouldn’t just shrug and say that Brexit was never about trade deals, they would be saying that this vindicated Brexit. We know that not least because of the way they have constantly made the entirely false claim that the vaccine rollout programme was proof of the success of Brexit. No mention then that the only proof needed of success was to have left the EU.

It’s not even necessary to dig back into the past to show what nonsense this all is. Because, even now, Brexiters are totally incapable of agreeing on what Brexit means. Hannan, in particular, purports to speak with authority on the basis of his own long-standing support for Brexit. Yet, on the very same day as his article was published, an editorial leader in the Spectator, also stressing that magazine’s Eurosceptic lineage going back to the 1975 referendum, came up with a completely different “defence of Brexit”. This one acknowledges the economic problems that have been caused, but makes the familiar argument that the success of Brexit will take years to be judged, and emphasises that “above all, Brexit was a call to abandon an economic model based on low wages and unskilled labour …” [My emphasis added.]

That characterisation can itself be challenged, but the present point is: so which is it? Was Brexit simply about leaving the EU, and the fact of having left means it has now succeeded, as Hannan claims? Or was it about creating a new economic model, the success of which can’t be judged for decades, as the Spectator insists? The answer, of course, is neither. These are not arguments made in good faith, they are opportunistic deployments of incompatible claims in order to wriggle out of accountability, and to deflect public recognition of the abject failure of Brexit.

Politics in limbo

At one level, all this is just about the fading battle for control of the narrative of whether Brexit has been a success or a failure. As I suggested at the time, this battle started in earnest from the end of the transition period, when ‘economic Brexit’ began, and it has gradually been lost by the Brexiters. So, whilst it won’t go away, it is now in substance over, unless something dramatic and unexpected happens. This, as again I’ve suggested before, is the reason why it’s still only the usual cast of diehards who try to defend Brexit, and that they have been forced to adopt ever-more contorted and absurd arguments to do so. It is a mark of having lost that there are so few, if any, new recruits. If anything, amongst many of those who supported Brexit – and I think Rishi Sunak is an example of this – there is a sense that the defence they now offer of it is half-hearted, unconvinced, and unconvincing.

At another level, what is important about this battle is that, to the extent it is settling to the view that Brexit is a failure, then, in principle, it becomes possible to address the political question of what follows from it. But, as it is turning out, this now leaves us in a limbo, because our politics is incapable of dealing with the failure which the public clearly recognize, as do many, possibly most, politicians. In an interview this week, Tony Blair put his finger on this, saying “people think there’s a problem and it needs fixing” but that there is a political fear of addressing it because of the toxicity of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

Labour’s strategy

That does not look like changing any time soon barring, again, something dramatic and unexpected happening. As I said last week, the Tories can’t deal with the mess, so it will come down to whether Labour can. Since then, Sunak, who seems increasingly like a schoolboy actor struggling to play the part of a Prime Minister, has made his first foreign policy speech, but the mentions of the EU within it were bland and vacuous. To be fair, perhaps that is the furthest departure from outright antagonism that his party will allow him to get away with, but that is just another way of saying that the Tories can’t deal with the failure of Brexit.

As for Starmer, he has now made an unequivocal statement against freedom of movement of people and with it, not for the first time, ruling out single market membership, as well as a customs union. He must know that going back on this in government would be virtually impossible. That still leaves scope for some progress. Judging by his interview, Blair thinks Labour should, and could, implement the proposals of his thinktank’s Spisak report. These proposals fall short of seeking single market membership “just yet”, but, even so, it’s not clear that Starmer is willing to go even as far as they do, for example and in particular, on extensive regulatory alignment.

Perhaps, as Gaby Hinsliff of the Guardian argues, he intends to do so without trailing it too loudly before the election, but that will cause problems later and hardly constitutes the kind of honesty and seriousness which Brexit requires. It may also be that, as Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia group suggests, he is planning on the basis of having two terms in government to deal with Brexit but, if so, he is also accepting that for the first term he will preside over an economy carrying its drag weight which, in itself, may jeopardise achieving a second term.

Clearly at the heart of all this is electoral strategy, rather than issues of political principle or economic rationality, and that isn’t in itself reprehensible – if it is a good strategy. Writing on his Brexit Impact Tracker, Gerhard Schnyder suggests that:

“Possibly, [Starmer] feels that people left of the centre of the political spectrum are so disgusted by the Tories that they will vote Labour no matter what. Hence, catering to the right wing of the Tory party using anti-Union, anti-immigration, pro-Brexit rhetoric will allow him to reconquer the pro-Brexit former Labour heartlands in the North and Midlands of England without hurting their electoral appeal in the liberal urban centres.”

Schnyder questions the wisdom of this, pointing out that voters on the left might not vote for Labour, or vote at all. In a sense, Starmer is replicating the Blair approach of running from the centre-right, and assuming that everyone to the left will tag along with this. It has some logic, and worked for Blair, but in the process began to lose Labour its traditional votes in its Northern England heartlands, and ultimately completely eviscerated Labour in Scotland. It is an approach which really only consistently works in a wholly two-party system and in which turnout is high.

In any case, Starmer’s version of this strategy is a different one because, to put it at its most basic, rather than going to the centre-right to court centrist voters in the South of England, and hoping to keep traditionalist Labour northerners on board, his approach is to go to the centre-right to court traditionalist Labour northerners, and hoping to keep centrist Southerners on board. This clearly relates to the ways that Brexit has both revealed and created a much more complex political landscape than existed in, say, 1997, the year of the first Blair victory. Within that landscape, ‘the centre’ no longer sits on a left-right axis (perhaps it never really did) and possibly doesn’t even sit at a single location at all.

The risks of caution

It’s not at all clear that Labour strategizing has caught up with this new landscape, although it has been obvious for a while. Of course, it's entirely understandable that Starmer is cautious, though it is telling that a politician as astute as Blair, in his interview, whilst recognizing the reason for that caution, still believes it is politically viable to be bolder. I think that’s right, for two reasons. One is the importance of providing honest and mature political leadership, especially after the dishonesty and, often, infantilism of the last few years. That would be good in itself, and could be an electoral advantage in itself, but the second reason is more narrowly electoral.

For from a purely calculative perspective, Starmer’s excessive Brexit caution is actually rather incautious in a post-Brexit, post-left-right context, given how many Labour voters were remainers. If the opinion polls continue to give Labour a large lead going into the election, there will be a strong incentive for Labour remain voters, in all constituencies, to register their dissatisfaction by voting for robustly anti-Brexit parties, or by not voting at all. They will be emboldened to do so by the assumption that a Tory government is very unlikely. If they do so in sufficient numbers, then any Labour majority will be reduced or, possibly, not materialise at all. The fate of Theresa May in the 2017 election, which she began with such a commanding poll lead, provides a precedent.

However, if, as is more likely, the opinion polls are far closer by the time of the election than they are now, then there will also be a strong incentive for such Labour voters in marginal constituencies to vote for whichever of the more robustly anti-Brexit parties is best placed to win there, in the very real hope of a hung parliament in which a Labour minority administration could be forced to drop Starmer’s red lines. The election of 2010 provides a precedent of sorts. This scenario, in fact, is now the best hope the country has of addressing the failure of Brexit.

An unpredictable future

Having said all this, I’m not sure that there is much value in trying to second guess political events. It’s a fool’s game at the best of times but especially now, when the defining truth of post-Brexit politics is instability and unpredictability. That has been compounded by an almost unprecedented pandemic as well as and ever-more complex and unstable international polity, but both of those could have been accommodated within ‘normal’ politics. It is Brexit which lies at the core of the instability, rearranging political identities, and swallowing up and spitting out four very different Prime Ministers in six years. Sunak’s regime already seems flaky, with multiple rebellions on diverse issues, and a major blow-up over Brexit, perhaps in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, an ever-present possibility.

One way of understanding this ‘unleadability’ of the Tory Party is, as with the Labour Party’s agonizing over positioning, to see both as part of the same post-Brexit re-alignment of politics generally: what now constitutes a stable coalition of interests that can hold together a political party and provide it with a deliverable policy agenda and a sustainable electoral base? For this reason, it’s possible there will be an election earlier than expected but, for the same reason, it’s also possible that the result of the next election, whenever it comes, will resolve little, and the sense of crisis and instability will persist.

Regarding Brexit, specifically, that is particularly frustrating because there is actually the basis of a consensus to, at the very least, soften Brexit, and a growing impetus to re-join the EU across all social, age, and regional groups (though with much variation as to the extent of the growth), which has demographics on its side. Most people know one or both of these should happen, and most probably expect that one or both of them will eventually happen. But, for now, there seems no way of joining the dots between that and the political system we have. So we drift on, directionless, declining, decomposing. Something will shift, eventually, but when and what is impossible to know.

For now, our politics is incapable of responding to the failure of Brexit. Indeed, one of the many failures of Brexit is to have left us with a politics lacking that capacity.

Forty years of failed political leadership

Political leadership since the Referendum has been weaker and more inept – even at the basic level of administrative competence – for a more sustained period than at any time in modern British history. This applies most obviously to David Cameron blithely walking away from the mess he created and of course to Theresa May. As catalogued on this blog, her numerous mis-steps include a complete failure to seek and develop an even vaguely consensual approach to Brexit, a refusal to be honest with the public and perhaps herself about the choices and consequences entailed by Brexit, and the botched General Election in which, amongst other things, she refused to discuss Brexit in any serious or detailed way. Most egregiously, as almost all sides of the Brexit debate agree, the manner and timing of her triggering of the Article 50 process was probably the worst political decision of any British Prime Minister since the Second World War.

Nor does the buck stop with the Prime Minister. Tory Cabinet Ministers and backbenchers have signally failed to provide the kind of collective leadership which the gravity of the situation demands, and many of them persist in pursuing fantastical and nonsensical ideas. Those most committed to Brexit, having been given by May the largest part of what they wanted, have done all they can to undermine her. That partly reflects her own failure to recognize that they could never be placated, but also their refusal to take responsibility for their own policy. The Labour Party has been just as poor, failing to define a clear position, riven by internal conflict and with a leader who seems barely interested in, and supremely uninformed about, Brexit and what it means. And if invoking Article 50 was a mistake of historic proportions, let’s not forget that Parliament – having been given the chance through the heroic efforts of Gina Miller – voted to do so.

However, what has happened since 2016 should be understood as just the latest manifestation of decades of failed leadership in Britain with respect to its EU membership. That could probably be traced back as far as the 1950s, but certainly to the 1975 Referendum confirming Britain’s membership. That vote was overwhelming and as a 10 year old primary school pupil at the time I remember it being greeted with a kind of joy by our – in every conceivable meaning of the term – conservative head mistress. We wrote our ‘summer project’ on the wonders of the EEC*, and even sang a song about the ‘European dream’ at the end of year pageant devoted, that year, to Britain’s European membership. In what was, generally, a rather dismal political decade it was a rare moment of optimism.

It was certainly not the case, as Eurosceptics later claimed, that the British people had been deceived into joining a political project having been told it was only an economic one of ‘the common market’. That is easily confirmed by reference to documents and speeches from the time. Yet it is true that, almost from that time, virtually no attempt was made by British political leaders to build deep support for, or understanding of, what the EU meant in itself, or for Britain in particular.

The Labour Party at the time were deeply split on Europe – this, indeed, was why the 1975 Referendum was held – and so were hardly likely to engage in such an effort. At the 1983 General Election Labour’s policy was actually to leave the EU. By then, the Tory Party although far more united in favour of the EU – how strange, now, to write those words – was in full post-Falklands, Union Jack waving mode. So no narrative of Britain in Europe was going to be built by them, since what it would really have amounted to would have been a fundamental re-appraisal of Britain’s place in the world post-War and post-Empire.

Thus in those crucial years, there was a complete failure of leadership from pro-EU politicians to develop any kind of narrative of the sort that existed, and exists, in other member states which was positive, let alone enthusiastic, about membership. Instead, and especially after the botched joining of the ERM and the Black Wednesday fiasco, what developed was an entirely transactional, grudging and often sour approach to Europe. The British media, so enthusiastic for European membership in 1975, rarely reported on European politics and, when it did, the reporting was almost invariably negative. The Sun’s 1990 ‘Up yours Delors’ headline, if not typical, was archetypical.

From about that time, the Tory Party began to change in its approach to Europe. That can perhaps be dated from Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988 – although reading that text now one cannot fail to be struck by how far it is from the Euroscepticism of those who became Brexiters (e.g. “Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community”). At all events, the Maastricht turmoil of the 1990s began the long civil war within the party that continues to convulse it to this day and which, in very large part, explains the present, parlous situation of Brexit.

The Labour Party also changed, in the opposite direction, partly because of the fall of the Berlin Wall but mainly because British social democrats began to see that the EU offered protection from the excesses of Thatcherism. Tony Blair was undoubtedly the most pro-European Prime Minister since Heath but, even so, did not really use the 1997 moment to recast the British narrative about the EU. And whilst the Blair governments did successfully promote eastwards expansion of the EU they never really communicated what a triumph that was, both for Europe and for British strategic interests. Moreover, largely because of Gordon Brown’s opposition, Britain failed to join the Euro. Had we done so, Brexit would surely have become all but impossible.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of the failure to build and communicate a positive narrative about EU membership was in relation to freedom of movement. The reasons for that are complex, relating to the wider issue of immigration, which in turn relates to that of Britain’s changed place in the world and its confusion about its post-Empire role. At all events, immigration was invariably configured in, at best, economic terms, and freedom of movement was subsumed within immigration in ways quite different to how it is understood within the rest of the EU.

This was alluded to by Sir Ivan Rogers in his February 2017 evidence (p.10) to the House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee:

They [the rest of the EU] genuinely do not understand a UK debate in which the two are conflated at all. They do not understand why a Government would have a migration target covering migration from within the European Union, which for other people is not migration. They do not call it migration; they do not call it immigration. They call it free movement… [t]hey said, “But one is migration, which is external to the European Union, and the other is free movement of people, which is not at all the same thing”.

Indeed, within a single market it makes no more sense to talk about immigration between member countries than it does to do so between counties in Britain. And free movement embodies much more than the transactional economic cost-benefit analysis found on both sides of the Brexit debate, for all that ending it will, indeed, entail massive economic problems for Britain. Rather, it connotes a much broader set of cultural and social possibilities. Moreover, these possibilities also exist for British nationals, who also acquired and will now lose rights of free movement, something occluded when it is only thought of in terms of ‘immigration’.

The issue, then, is not the habitual cliché of the political Right that ‘we aren’t allowed to talk about immigration’. For as long as I can remember the British have talked constantly about it. The point is that the terms of that talk were always negative whether explicitly (it is undesirable) or implicitly (it is a necessary evil to be borne for economic reasons or, semi-jokingly, for culinary diversity). Absent was any appreciation of the possibilities, excitements and joys that freedom of movement brought, something now vividly and poignantly illustrated by the In Limbo testimonies of EU nationals in Brexit Britain**.

The economistic narrative about immigration and freedom of movement has as its counterpart a fundamental misunderstanding about the single market, ironically since Britain was in large part its architect. The core of that misunderstanding is to regard the single market as an economic entity or international trade area whereas, in fact, it is more precisely a regulatory entity and area. It is this which has enabled the EU to dismantle non-tariff barriers to trade, including trade in services, in a way that goes beyond anything that exists anywhere else in the world. But, inevitably, this entails a shared legal and political infrastructure. How else can market-wide rules and regulations be made and enforced? The failure to understand this basic definitional fact, allied with the ‘in 1975 we were told it was just a trade bloc’ myth, gave rise to all of the ‘bendy banana’ type stories that ended up with the ‘take back control’ slogan of 2016.

So in all of these ways, political leaders since 1975 failed to undertake perhaps the key task of leadership: the provision of a coherent and compelling story of what is being done and why. Overall, there was no attempt to develop an account of Britain’s changing place in the world and how EU membership facilitated and allowed it. Within that, there was no narrative about how Britain was, through the EU, facilitating a post-Soviet Europe; a pan-European regulatory space; and a new set of freedoms and rights for British people along with all other Europeans. Nor was there a narrative explaining how, both in shaping the EU and securing its numerous exemptions, Britain was getting exactly the kind of European Union and exactly the kind of membership that it wanted. Instead, a wholly negative view of Britain as put upon by the EU, and a wholly transactional view of its membership, was able to take root almost unchallenged.

Thus by the time of the 2016 Referendum it was far too late to offer anything other than a transactional argument for continued membership. It was an argument epitomised by the supposed (though who would have known it?) leader of the official Remain campaign, businessman Stuart Rose. Politicians like David Cameron and George Osborne, who for years had had little positive to say about the EU could hardly be expected to wax lyrical about it now. And Labour’s erstwhile commitment to the EU was blunted by having a leader whose views on Europe were forged in the heyday of 1970s Bennite Euroscepticism and who had joined the Maastricht rebels in the votes of the early 1990s.

As for the substance of the issues, the terms of debate had already been set in the ways described above. Immigration, the leitmotif of the Leave campaign, had only ever been defended as a distasteful economic necessity. The single market had never been explained as anything different to a trade area, and, as such, could supposedly easily be replaced by some kind of trade agreement and discussed almost entirely in terms of tariffs, which are almost entirely irrelevant. Britain’s place in the world had never been the subject of a proper public conversation, and so pre-industrial fantasies of Buccaneering Britain and post-imperial fantasies of Commonwealth links could be put forward as plausible futures.

More than anything else, it was firmly established in the public mind that the EU was in some way an external, antagonistic constraint upon Britain rather than an entity of which Britain was not only a member but a dominant member, and through that dominance had secured both the kind of membership and the kind of Europe that it wanted. Indeed, all of these same tropes have been evident since the Referendum, most obviously in the suspicious, paranoid and often hostile way that politicians – and the pro-Brexit media – have approached the negotiations. That has been apparent in everything from the early, ludicrous talk of how Britain could go to war with Spain over Gibraltar right through to the latest row about the EU supposedly ‘excluding’ Britain from the Galileo project.

Thus for forty years pro-EU politicians (whether ardent Europhiles or pragmatic Euro-realists) almost completely failed to provide the political leadership which would have cemented Britain’s EU membership in the aftermath of the 1975 Referendum. If only by default, they, along with the wider political class, allowed Eurosceptics to define what that membership meant. But those Eurosceptics – or, as we would now say, Brexiters – themselves conspicuously failed to provide any kind of leadership at all as to what Britain outside the EU would look like. Indeed, it is becoming ever-clearer that most of them preferred the comfort zone of complaint about the EU, and would be much happier had they lost the vote.

Like many things that come as a surprise, the vote to leave the EU now seems to have been almost inevitable. The longstanding failures of leadership from which it grew mean that even if Theresa May was the greatest political leader of all time – which she most certainly is not – she would face an almost impossible task in undertaking Brexit. But they also have huge importance for those who would seek to reverse Brexit. Leaving aside all of the procedural and political complexities of such a reversal, it would require, in very short order, the emergence of political leadership (meaning not just a person, but an entire movement) which could transform these decades of neglect and failure.

That is obviously the case just in terms of domestic politics; it is also the case, it seems to me, if there is to be any chance of the EU welcoming a reversal of Brexit. After all, suppose, for the sake of argument, there was another Referendum reversing that of 2016 by a narrow margin with a vociferous, resentful and revivified Brexiter movement sworn to seeking yet another vote. What kind of membership would that be for an EU which has, in large part, now moved on from the initial shock of 2016?

Perhaps a different way of putting this is that remainers should not have as their aim or expectation winding the clock back to 23 June 2016. At best, that would only be to recreate what happened on 24 June. Instead, unlikely as it presently seems, it will be necessary to recapture the mood in which, in the summer of 1975, my school mates and I wrote our projects on the bright, new European future before us. We could not know then that our political leaders were going to abdicate all responsibility for making that future secure.

 

*From hereon I will just refer to the EU rather than the EEC or the EC, even though in places this is inaccurate.

**Remigi, E. et al (eds) In Limbo. Brexit testimonies from EU Citizens in the UK. London: Byline Books, 2017.