Tag Archives: Remain

Article: The Brexit Box

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Brexit has failed. If you still need convincing of that, this post is not for you. I’m taking it as a given.

If you too take it as a given, where does that leave the case for rejoining?

Surprisingly elusive. Why?

Because our debate has become boxed in, and confined to three dominant positions.

First: the Brexiteer position. They cannot countenance it being undone. They will argue democratic mandate, patriotism, sovereignty, EU malignancy and uplands upon which the sun, if only we wait long enough, or believe hard enough, will eventually shine. If you’re taking the failure of Brexit as read, you won’t be hugely impressed by such arguments.

Second: there is the Political Pragmatist’s position. Broadly where Starmer’s Labour party sits. Here the position is that the politics of rejoin are too dangerous. Who wants to open up that ugly debate again? And apart from being ugly, it is dangerous: the evidence of Brexit’s failure might not be enough to win a rematch, because it was never really about evidence. Such is the thinking, and you can see why politicians who want to debate other issues, and paint a positive picture of the future, feel the need to shy away from reopening festering wounds.

Third: there is the Resigned Remainer’s position. This school of thought extends the political pragmatist’s thinking and adds in: rejoining would be hard. The EU might not want us back. There will be various obstacles arising from our having left which will be hard to unravel. There might be genuine problems with the EU which need addressing. There are certainly issues within the UK which made fertile ground for anti-EU sentiment, and these have not been addressed. The EU might impose unpalatable conditions on a rejoining UK. The EU might insist on evidence that the UK is, on second coming, there to stay, and how would that be demonstrated? More god-forsaken referendums? Accession is never a quick process – it’s a ten year or more deal – and so we might as well accept our lot outside the EU and make the best of it.

Of course there are nuanced views, and there is some travel between the groups. I’d say Tony Blair’s position – ‘we’re out for a generation’ – has one foot in the Pragmatists’ camp, and one in that of the Resigned Remainers.

The problem with all of these camps is they are defeatist. The first because the Brexiteers can’t bear to have been found out, and wish to strangle at birth any attempt at repair. The second because, by design, it locks out debate and leaves its principal proponents, the Labour Party, far behind fast-changing public opinion. The third because, although it welcomes debate, it nevertheless looks out through an Overton Window of despair.

There must be a fourth camp. A camp where energy, urgency and hope thrive. Where we know that our standards are still more or less aligned with those of the EU because until recently we were a leading member of the bloc. An energised effort to maintain that alignment will make returning to the fold smoother and easier; it is not something to let slide for a few years while we wait passively for the stars to fight in their courses. Heaven cannot rescue us; we have to do it for ourselves.

In this fourth camp, of course there is acknowledgment that there’s work to be done in facing squarely the failings of our system. Inside or outside of a trading bloc, we cannot leave millions of our own people behind and call ourselves a decent society. Enough of that crap.

And there is, no doubt, more to be done to make the EU feel like it belongs to its member states rather than sitting on top of them. Energised determination to rejoin the EU does not mean blind belief that the UK or the EU are perfect as they are. On the contrary, it demands the political will to fight on a grand scale for the tough stuff: dramatic redistribution and re-engagement inside the UK, and real leadership and painstaking, unglamorous cooperation on the international stage.

We need to break our discourse out of the Brexit box, and shift it towards this fourth camp. We need our best politicians to step forward, occupy and lead this fourth camp. Drive. Belief. Statesmanship. Britain led in Europe before. Britain can lead in Europe again. Britain, and Europe, have nothing to gain from delay, and everything to gain from haste.

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We Voted Three Times To Leave!

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David Davis MP, former Brexit Secretary.

It’s an argument that Leavers keep trotting out.  I heard David Davis on BBC Any Questions repeat it only yesterday, 20th September 2019.

It goes like this: the public voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.  First, in the 2016 Referendum.  Second, in the 2017 General Election, in which over 80% of votes were for parties “respecting the referendum”.  And thirdly, in the 2019 EU elections, in which the Brexit Party won most seats.

There’s a technical term for this argument: it’s bullshit.

THE 2016 REFERENDUM

First, the 2016 Referendum was won on a wafer-thin majority, of 51.89% to 48.11%.  That is not “overwhelming”.  In a town hall meeting of 101 people, 49 of them would have been Remain.  In such a show of hands, you’d be hard pressed to conclude anything but division, right down the middle.  No conclusion; no decision to be inferred; no action to be taken.

Of course the referendum wasn’t just close, it was bent. Many were excluded from the franchise (including many UK citizens living abroad, and EU citizens living in the UK – all of whom are in the direct firing line of any Brexit policy). The Leave campaigns broke the law, harvested our data with the help of Cambridge Analytica, and funded their dark ops with money sourced from god knows where.  Over a billion Facebook ads were “dropped” in the days before the vote, and we don’t know much about them because they were tailored, but it’s safe to guess that they were as honest as the lie on the side of the Leave campaign’s bus. Investigations are ongoing.

THE 2017 GENERAL ELECTION

What about the General Election of 2017?  Over 80% of us voted for parties supporting Brexit.  Isn’t that the mandate to trump all mandates?  It’s true that Labour talked a positive talk on Brexit.  But they have famously equivocated, trying to hold their Remain supporters on-side.  Many, or probably most, Labour voters did so while holding their noses on the party’s Brexit stance.  They voted Labour for many reasons, but not for Labour’s Brexit position.  They voted Labour because they hoped the Brexit stance would change, or because their local MP assured them that it would, or because they had no decent local alternative, or because they were tribally Labour, or because they valued Labour’s policies on matters not related to Brexit, or because they were loyal to a hard-working incumbent MP.  I was one such voter.  You may NOT count my vote as a pro-Brexit vote.

If you want further evidence of support for or against Brexit, hold a Brexit referendum, not a General Election.  (A fair, inclusive, legal and honest one this time, please.)  The General Election results of 2017 tell us next to nothing about popular support for Brexit.

THE 2019 EU ELECTIONS

What about the big win for the Brexit Party in the 2019 EU elections?

EU Elections 2019 PA/BBC

The Brexit Party won a whopping 29 seats and 31.6% of the vote.  Impressive.

But was that an overwhelming vote for Brexit? Combined with the Tories’ 9.1%, the pro-Brexit vote was 40.7%. 

Voters’ support for Labour MEP candidates like Seb Dance, who had demonstrated great commitment to our membership of the EU, cannot be added to that 40.7%.  40.7% does not constitute a majority.

The 2019 EU Elections did not show a majority for Brexit.

The 2017 General Election doesn’t tell us anything about popular Brexit support.

The 2016 Referendum – bent, bought and restricted – delivered an inconclusive verdict.

When you hear the likes of David Davis peddling the lie that the people voted “not once, not twice, but three times” for Brexit, you could be forgiven for asking yourself why, three years on, the lie is even necessary.  Shouldn’t the supposed mandate be irrelevant by now, as we contemplate the coming-to-bloom of those much-vaunted Brexit opportunities? Shouldn’t we be readying ourselves for our moment in the sun, our arrival on the global political stage, our imminent economic dominance, our glorious freedom?  The question of why we’re doing this, and on what basis, should long ago have been forgotten and displaced by the heady scent of obvious benefits, just around the corner.

Or is this “once, twice, three times a lady” argument the only song the David Davises of this world have left to sing?

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Why the LibDem Revoke policy is shocking – but not in the way you thought

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LibDems/Getty

Something quite shocking has happened.

The LibDems, on a roll since the EU elections and with defecting MPs arriving almost weekly, have announced a new, eye-catching policy.

Their manifesto in the next election will include a promise to cancel Brexit.  No ifs, no buts.

Arguably this is nothing new – what else could their EU campaign’s “Bollocks to Brexit” have meant?

But it has the merit of clarity.  It says “We are the remain party.”  Since as many as one in three voters recently thought the LibDems were still in favour of some sort of Brexit, this announcement surely obliterates that doubt.

So if it was both hardly new and somewhat necessary, why has it caused so much fuss?

Even Caroline Lucas has gone to press (or at least twitter) to complain that it is anti-democratic; that “you can’t turn the clock back” and “you can’t ignore the 17m who voted leave”.  Lord Adonis has chimed in, “I strongly agree.”

You can’t ignore the 17m who voted leave.  And we haven’t; the last three years have been all about leave, all day, every day.

THE POVERTY OF THE MANDATE

Nor, of course can you turn the clock back.  But you can, and you should, ask whether the 2016 referendum was fair, legal, and compelling.  It was none of those things.  And even if it were, the concept of Brexit has changed; it now seems to mean only leaving without a deal, something derided three years ago as patently absurd.  And so, too, has the world around us changed; the global picture of Trump, Putin and President Xi jockeying for position now makes the case for membership of a unified Europe so much stronger.  The risks of Brexit in any form have been gradually, if only partially, revealed to us.  The claims of its benefits have fallen away, such that now there is no longer any serious attempt to suggest economic positives, or even social ones; the offer now is just some nebulous sense of taking back control, even if that control paradoxically weakens us; even if we exert it, as one defiant Brexiter insisted, while we sit in the dark eating home-grown turnips.

BOXED-IN BORIS

Meanwhile, PM Johnson has boxed himself into a Do or Die (Br)exit strategy from which there is, ironically, no escape.  He shows no signs of being able to do a deal; nor, at least until Parliament moved to block No Deal, has he shown signs of even wanting one.  He promised to leave on 31 October (and owned that date as if he had set it himself) and all his credibility, such as it is, now depends on meeting that promise.

But how?  The EU cannot move much without threatening its own existence; there is no time; the reasons for the backstop (now better understood by ordinary folk, especially those who grew up with the Troubles) have not fallen away.  There are no “alternative arrangements” worth their salt, and if there were, there’d be no need for — and therefore no issue with — a backstop.

There is no way through this for Mr Johnson, just as there was no way through it for Mrs May.  It can’t be done.  It is an impossible goal, a circle which cannot be squared.  It is a dead parrot.  And yet it refuses to shuffle off its mortal coil.  You’d feel sorry for Johnson, but he asked for the job, and reinforced the very walls which now close in on him.  He shows no care or concern for the millions of lives thrown into chaos by his stance, nor for the constitutional mess he creates daily, nor the palpable threat to us all from the undermining of the rule of law.  It’s his bed, but we all have to lie in it.

THE MOVING OF THE DIAL

In this context – the poverty of the Brexit mandate, and the impossibility of delivering it – it is past time for someone to stand up, clearly and unambiguously, for binning Brexit.

But the dial has been strikingly moved in recent months.  It used to be a choice between Mrs May’s hard Brexit Withdrawal Agreement to possibly “no Brexit at all”.  (And I have it on pretty good authority that, had she not been able to secure her first extension with the EU, she had decided to revoke.)

Now it has become a choice between an illusory harder Brexit deal (yet to be articulated, let alone struck) and “Brexit first, deal later” – which is what no deal really means. These repellent options have become the two ends of the possibility spectrum (the so-called “Overton Window”), and so blinkered has our politics become, that Jo Swinson and her excited supporters announcing a manifesto pledge to jettison Brexit entirely can be characterised as extremism, and undemocratic.

Our continued membership of the EU, which has brought peace and prosperity and freedoms for decades, is now an outlandish, harmful wish.  Even offering it as a manifesto pledge, to be followed through only if a party wins a majority, is now judged anti-democratic.  That is to say, an elected government, standing on a clear platform of continuity with the last four+ decades, delivering on its promises, could now be deemed anti-democratic.  Not in the estimation of some swivel-eyed partisan, but in the estimation of sensible women like Caroline Lucas, and passionate remainers like Lord Adonis.

How we got here beggars belief.  Politics has been amazing to watch.  But in some ways this is the most shocking development.  How easily our frame of reference has been shifted.  How effectively the options have been narrowed by the repetition of specious arguments and demented catchphrases, a crude and self-interested press and a largely subservient broadcast media.

IF THIS IS THE POWER OF AN ADVISORY REFERENDUM…

Are the LibDems to be banned even from offering voters continuity with the last four decades, solely on the basis of the 2016 referendum? 

If there were to be another referendum, for which Caroline Lucas has campaigned, would it be wrong to include a revoke option on the ballot?  What would be the point of it, if it did not offer revoke?

Are we to say that only a referendum can counter a referendum?  Not parliament, not MPs, not a new government elected with a majority of seats on a clear manifesto pledge?  That would be an extraordinary adjudication.  How long would such a situation obtain?  If this is the power of an advisory referendum, thank heavens it wasn’t a legally binding one.  It would have bound us, and our capacity for self-determination, in perpetuity.

Even if the 2016 referendum had been inclusive, fair, legal, and overwhelmingly decisive, future parliaments cannot surely be locked in by it.  Future policy offerings cannot be vetoed by it.  Our votes, in general elections as in referendums, still have to count for something; they cannot be invalidated by our previous votes, just because those previous votes were made in a referendum.  (More on what might constitute legitimacy here.)

THE REAL SHOCK

You could argue that the LibDems tactic isn’t a good one; that it will lose them votes; that it will split the remain vote; or that it will cause them problems in the future. Fine. There is a valid debate about tactics to be had. You could just not like the policy, and refuse to support it. Fine.

But to contend that it is anti-democratic even to offer revoke to a future electorate is extraordinary. That statesmen and women of distinction and general clear-sightedness are holding such a view is a measure of how effectively our political horizons have been shaped and constrained by the Brexit ultras. This is the real shock. When good women and men turn against not just their own people, but against their own goals, the game is, in large and terrifying part, already lost.

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