Brexiter (il)logic and where it could lead us

One of the most dangerous things about Brexiters is the constant re-invention of their claims. So each time one claim is falsified, it is used as ‘evidence’ that they were right after all. Equally, they use completely contradictory claims to ‘prove’ that they are right.

There are numerous examples of this. Sometimes, although now decreasingly, they say that the EU is bound to give the UK a good deal because we are (or were, before the referendum) the world’s fifth largest economy. But at the same time they criticise the EU for not having trade deals with the world’s largest economies. Sometimes they say that a deal can be done quickly. But at the same time they criticise the EU for being slow and lumbering in decision making. Sometimes they accuse the EU of riding roughshod over nation states. But when the Wallonian regional parliament seemed to be scuppering the EU-Canada trade deal they said this proved that the EU couldn’t act decisively.

Or take another set of issues. Prior to the referendum, whenever the situation of British people living in the EU was raised, they blithely said that nothing would change; now that the situation of those people is in doubt they say it proves the EU is heartless. On freedom of movement of British people generally they said that leaving the EU would make no difference as people had moved to other countries long before the EU existed. So freedom of movement rules don’t matter. Except that when talking about immigration, those same rules mean we can’t control our borders.

The overall paradigm is, first, a series of claims about how easy and/or beneficial Brexit will be, so we should leave. Then as the claims meet reality they are not abandoned, but used to claim that the EU is punishing Britain, so we should leave. Intellectually, this is completely moribund. No amount of evidence or rational argument can touch it. In fact, I think that one reason why the Remain campaign failed in the referendum was that it tried to counter the Brexiters’ claims in that way, and did not have any kind of emotionally or rhetorically powerful narrative of its own. And that, in turn, was because even most remain campaigners approached the EU in purely transactional terms, and had done for many years.

That is neither here nor there now: the referendum was lost. What is very much still relevant is that the same hermetically-sealed, evidence-proof and argument-proof logic now drives government policy. And it drives it in one direction only: towards a more and more calamitous form of Brexit. Each time reality demolishes one of their claims (the most ubiquitous, perhaps, and the most absurd, certainly, being that German car makers would ensure a good deal in double quick time) the Brexiters do not acknowledge that they were wrong, but move on to a harder position. So, first, we can somehow be in the single market but with no strings attached. That’s proved wrong. So it will be a trade deal. Now that that is looking increasingly difficult they move to saying that no deal would be perfectly fine. And, in any case, it’s all the EU’s fault and ‘just goes to prove’ that we are right to leave.

There’s no way out of this kind of thinking. It is completely circular and unfalsifiable. There is no imaginable event that could shake it. Suppose the UK gets a great deal? It proves we were right to leave! Suppose we don’t? It proves we were right to leave! The same cannot be said of remainers’ logic. No doubt we are all prone to confirmation bias in the evidence we notice and put value on. But it is very easy to imagine an event that could shake remainers’ logic. If there were, indeed, a great deal for the UK – one that was as good as or even better than being in the EU - then that would be it. Remain would be completely discredited.

So once you buy into Brexiter logic, there’s no going back and there’s also only one way of going forward. Harder and harder. Nothing can be said, nothing can happen that will make a difference. And that Brexiter logic has now – so far as can be seen, although it is still just possible this will change – captured government right up to and including Theresa May.

That is incredibly dangerous because it is beginning to look as if the government is prepared to walk out of the EU with no deal; and even that it might be prepared to renege on its existing commitments. If that happened, it would make Britain virtually a pariah state, untrusted by other countries and unable to make agreements with them in the future. Even more dangerous, any ‘no deal’ scenario would be likely to provoke a nationalist frenzy in which internal ‘fifth columnists’ would be identified and hunted down as traitors. Who can doubt that we have a press prepared to endorse that? We can already see this possibility in some of the rhetoric of Brexiters, and it is inherent in, precisely, a logic that is impervious to reason. In those circumstances, opposition can, indeed, only be understood as sabotage.

Until recently, this would have seemed an entirely unimaginable scenario, but so too would that which we are in. It’s less than a year ago that many Brexiters were advocating single market membership, and it’s only a few months since a no deal exit was unthinkable whereas now it is being openly championed by many leading Brexiters. In the meantime, despite their victory, they seem to be as angry as ever they were, and that anger is directed at remainers – partly for lacking the true faith but also, I suspect, from a deep but unacknowledged fear that they have made a terrible mistake. As they push harder and harder towards a mirage, with worse and worse consequences, they will get angrier and angrier with those of us who remind them of the insanity of what they are doing.

Unless something very unexpected happens in the forthcoming election, Theresa May will be in a commanding position. It may be, as I’ve argued before but feel less confident of now, that she uses it to rein in the Brexit ultras. At the least, it must be hoped that she resists the intolerance of dissent that their logic takes us to. If not, the infamous referendum claims about the dangers of Turkey will come true, albeit in reverse: Britain will follow down the path that Erdogan is taking that country.

Ivan Rogers' resignation: a sign of dangers ahead

The resignation today of Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK Ambassador to the EU, would appear to be one of the consequences of what is emerging as a pattern. Rogers was vilified by the press and some Brexit politicians for reporting – as was his job – the likely attitudes of other EU countries to the Brexit negotiations, warning that these were likely to take many years to complete. The treatment of Mark Carney is part of the same pattern, although he has robustly stood his ground.

Rumours abound of civil servants and others, such as business leaders, being frozen out of government discussions if they raise any questions or concerns about Brexit. As I predicted in the very first post on this blog, the civil service is increasingly blamed as the completely unrealistic and unworkable ideas of the Brexiters encounter the hard rock of reality. Brexiters – or at least the hard core ones – will never admit that they are at error and will instead seek to blame others. It seems very likely that we will see a string of resignations and early retirements from the civil service just at the moment they are most needed.

This is a situation that was eminently predicable because of two factors. First, that the central policy of the government is driven by a fiercely ideological, evidence-free, populism combining a sense of both of victimhood, even in victory, and suspicion of ‘betrayal’. Secondly, that the referendum created the unusual situation where the bulk of those who had to deliver it in practical terms almost certainly do not support it. In those circumstances, an enforced or voluntary purge of functionaries becomes almost inevitable.

The dangers of this are really immense, at a number of levels. At the extreme, it paves the way for something not too far from totalitarianism. If civil servants (and judges) are denounced as ‘enemies of the people’, how much longer before any dissent from Brexit orthodoxy becomes forbidden? Alarmist, perhaps, but we are moving very quickly into unknown territory. Brexiters have already called for ‘investigations’ into the supposedly negative coverage of Brexit by the BBC. And as I have pointed out in another post there is a growing narrative that everyone has a ‘patriotic duty’ to get behind Brexit.

At the least, it will result in the wholesale politicization of the civil service, with only true believers in Brexit being able to function irrespective of their expertise. Brexiters, including the ubiquitous Jacob Rees-Mogg, are already calling for Rogers’ replacement to have pro-Brexit views. More specifically, it will create a group think mentality in which no realistic or sensible policymaking is possible, driving the UK headlong into the most disastrous form of Brexit imaginable.

This matters to all of us, but perhaps Brexiters should be especially worried. Having won the Referendum, the onus is now on them to deliver the good outcome that they promised. If they fail to do so, the disappointment of their supporters and the anger of those who do not support them will be huge and the consequences unpredictable and potentially dramatic. I think that Brexit is doomed to a degree of failure anyway, but it will certainly be more likely to fail, and more likely to fail very badly, if policy is developed and implemented by people who know and care nothing about the realities of what is involved.

In my previous post I discussed whether Theresa May’s calls for unity were meaningful. Here is one test of it: is she going to continue to preside over a ‘cultural revolution’ where anyone raising practical, legitimate questions about Brexit is to be hounded from public office?