No one wears them; they’re empty. It’s an image of a shape with one entrance and two exits. One may imagine falling continually into the waistband, not knowing from which leg one may emerge. So does history occur: in myriad, often unconsidered, minor decisions.
– Terry Pratchett ‘L Space’ wiki
I remember the June 23 referendum as if it’s actually happening real now in real time. It’s been a long close race, but ultimately not close enough. About four in the am, just as the sunlight is beginning to break into the sky, a decision starts to emerge. Remain establishes a 52% majority and keeps it going well into the stirrings of the working day. Eventually, Dimbleby calls it. The votes are counted, the boxes emptied, the final hand is on the table. Britain has voted to remain in the European Union.
No one has slept, but the real work is only just begun. Cameron and Osborne, faces flushed with victory and relief, are all over the front pages. It has been Dave’s big gamble – and it’s paid off. Subtle but drastic realignments occur all over Westminster as career politicians scramble to adjust their philosophies in line with the triumphant Chipping Norton order. Businessmen all over the country check the result on their phones, shake their heads in relief, and drive to work. Radiographers and IT specialists and hop pickers and schoolteachers and retail workers and others who came from the continent and beyond to build lives here, decide to junk their visa applications, and wonder why they ever even considered leaving a country they love.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect is the response from the Leave campaign. UKIP disbands a day after the referendum. Even ultra liberal commenters praise Nigel Farage for his grace and good spirit. He tours the studios shaking hands with his opponents. ‘The result was not what I had hoped, but I respect the outcome of the democratic process,’ Farage tells reporters, trademark pint in hand. ‘Whether or not we are in the EU, we will always be British and nothing can change that. Let’s work together to build a great future.’
Farage takes the wind out of a defeated Leave campaign. Paul Nuttall leaves politics and embarks on the first manned mission to Mars – at least, that’s what he says later on his CV. Far away, in an office of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin allows himself a drink of strong spirits while he reflects on a new plan. Boris resigns to spend more time with his mistresses.
See anything wrong with my little counterfactual there?
That’s right – the last paras.
If Remain had won, even if they had won big – I don’t believe that the leave crowd would have walked away and accepted the result. They would moan and complain and demonstrate. They would say the result was ‘rigged’ and the electorate was ‘brainwashed’. There would be court challenges and appeals to the Electoral Commission. We could even, right now, be in the middle of a second referendum campaign. Because for political fanatics, democracy is a one-armed bandit. You yank the lever until the thing pays out.
Ian McEwan confessed recently that ‘I don’t accept this near mystical, emotionally charged decision to leave the EU. I don’t, I can’t, believe it. I reject it.’ But he admits he is in a minority on this: ‘Our church, perhaps to its detriment, is not so broad. It is moody, tearful, complaining, sometimes cogently, even beautifully. In general, until now perhaps, it seems to have stoically accepted the process.’
As we know, Theresa May was once a Remainer but has committed herself to taking us out of the EU off the back of the referendum result. It looks like an honourable stance – whatever she fought for in the campaign, she accepts that ultimately she’s a servant of the people and must carry out the majority wish.
But it seems to me that this honourable stance has faded into what I call ‘let’s do it to say we’ve done it’. This is a form of bad practice in organisations that can also be called ‘box ticking’ or, more simply, ‘cover thine arse’. You know what I mean by this – you follow protocol or directive, and document your actions thoroughly, without necessarily thinking of what’s best for the project or the client. Then, if and when everything falls over, you can throw up your hands and say: ‘Don’t look at me. I did what was asked.’
There are many good arguments for Brexit – I recommend this gentle low-key and wise piece in particular, by the academic Martin Robb. Many smart Brexiters have close affinities with Europe, and they know we will always have a relationship with the continent, no matter the constitutional arrangements of the day. (They are perhaps less wise in their enthusiasm for local representative structures above all else. How’s your local democracy doing these days? Bins collected recently?…) So I never believed that Remain had a monopoly on virtue or intelligence in this debate.
Fact is, though, any pro Brexit argument has to answer two big questions: how is this thing going to work, exactly, and can we trust this government to achieve it?
So far, the May approach looks like ‘do it to say we’ve done it’ on a constitutional scale. The government triggered A50 early and made Brexit the centre of their programme. Tony Blair spoke in almost DeLillo-style prose when he said ‘this Government has bandwidth only for one thing: Brexit. It is the waking thought, the daily grind, the meditation before sleep and the stuff of its dreams; or nightmares.’ And yet detail is lacking. We will have SME, and less immigration, but we don’t know exactly how. This government is doing a very radical thing, in a very mediocre way. Think the English Reformation, but project managed by the guys who used to run the godforsaken call centre you temped in after college. The American Revolution led by Mr Bean.
This is where acceptance can be a sleepwalk off the cliff’s edge. People have a habit of falling back on the position that things are going to happen because they have to happen. And indeed this post could well appear like the half-assed fantasies of an ivory tower liberal globalist. Maybe, but I should say that when I got interested in politics I was passionately anti globalisation. When I’d argue with friends about Thatcherism’s legacy, I’d get the rejoinder: Look, it had to happen, the world was changing, any government would have found it necessary to do what Thatcher did.
Again, maybe. But I am still not sure that it had to be done in the thoughtless aggressive way that Thatcher’s government did it – the onslaught upon the cities and valleys and towns, the devastation of entire communities. Like I say, I think Brexit could work for us. But I am not at all sure that Brexit will work if it’s the kind of Brexit that this government is aggressively and thoughtlessly pursuing.
Ian Dunt is the best writer on the Brexit age and provides the detail politicians won’t tell you. Here he reflects on the possible future if we crash out of Europe without a deal:
The early effects can already be seen. A year ago we were outperforming Germany, the US and Japan. Now we have slumped to the bottom of the G7 list of advanced economies. The pound fell in value after Brexit and that has translated, due to increased import prices, into inflation. This is denting consumer demand – the main driver of UK growth. Wages are no longer keeping up with inflation. The Bank of England has warned that living standards will continue to fall […]
Producers in Europe are coming to hard conclusions about the UK’s direction. Many goods must pass over borders in their manufacturing process. If there is a tariff and various bureaucratic requirements when they do so, they would be better off based inside the customs union. Almost half of European businesses have already started looking to replace British suppliers with competitors from inside the EU.
Meanwhile, British businesses are being given no certainty whatsoever. Every time May says that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, they are again being driven closer to having to make snap investment decisions in a state of regulatory uncertainty. None of this is necessary, even under Brexit. If guarantees were offered they would not be in this situation. Instead, May continues to play Russian Roulette with the nation’s future.
It is a truism that there are communities all over the UK that have not yet recovered from what happened in the 1980s. I have to smile when I hear fanzine leftists frame hard Brexit as a rebellion against neoliberal elites. What do they think will happen to working class communities after hard Brexit has finished with them?
For neoliberalism has an evil bigger brother: isolationism. It will rip through the fabric of our society like neoliberalism on rocket pills.
As Dunt also writes, you won’t hear this from the major parties. I want to be positive and in many circumstances I am also happy to be a liberal globalist, so I want to end by saying something positive about that magical half-known thing, civil society. I feel good every time I get into a decent argument or laugh out loud at social media or turn on the news to see a carnival demonstration. Civil society is not everything, it may not even exist outside liberal enclaves, but it is something.
And I remember Christopher Hitchens, who once said: ‘if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favour of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.’
Max Dunbar 