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Friday 15 March 2019

Two Weeks to Brexit - The End of Glory

It is now two weeks until 29 March - the date on which the United Kingdom will leave the European Union, unless a withdrawal agreement or a delay to our exit date is agreed at the last minute.  Now is as good a time as any to reflect on the dire position that we are in and how we have got here.  This will not be a short article, or a good-tempered one.

If and when Brexit happens, it will not only amount to a self-inflicted economic and political wound.  It will be the death of an idea of Britishness - a vision of Britain as a modern, liberal nation, a leader of the democratic West and a member of the European Union.  This was probably not an idea that ever had majority support, although it briefly came close to it for a moment back in the 90s, some time between Geri Halliwell's union jack dress and the revival of immigration as a major political issue - back in an era when Conservative cabinet ministers talked openly about joining the Euro.  It was later briefly sighted during Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics.  But by then it was too late.  The vision of Britian that was then starting to prevail was an older, narrower and meaner one: the arrogance and self-entitlement of the imperial age wedded to the Little Englander mentality of a small island.  Two World Wars and one World Cup!  Brexit will be an experiment in what happens when primitive emotionalism about immigrants taking our jobs and being ruled by foreigners comes up against the realities of the interdependent modern world.  Future generations will study it as a case history in collective insanity, the Tulip Mania of the 21st century.

The divide that Brexit has exposed is one that goes back long before the EU referendum, and indeed long before there was an EU to be a member of.  It is also a divide that too many of us assured ourselves couldn't exist here - not here in Britain, with her stable political system and pragmatic political culture.  It was an arrogant complacency based on the idea that we were different.  Nationalist zealotry was for other people - those poor chaps in Northern Ireland; the Jews and Arabs in Israel or Palestine or whatever it was called; the Germans back in the Nazi era, obviously.  "Culture wars" were what those loony Americans had, and we could afford to smile at their silly notions about guns and gays.  We British were above that sort of thing.  We were a serious country.

Insofar as any of this was ever true, it certainly isn't now.

The revolution devours her children

Brexit is a kind of revolution, and it is a cliché to say that revolutions have a self-radicalising dynamic: they become more extreme and intolerant the longer they go on.  The Eurosceptic movement in Britain was never exactly a model of tolerant inclusivity; but since the 2016 referendum it has taken on the characteristics of a cult.

Experience teaches that it is a mistake to undertake a major international realignment on the basis of the policies of one party, let alone one faction in one party.  When we joined the EEC, it followed years of negotiations pursued by both Conservative and Labour administrations; and Heath's final deal was voted through on the back of support from Labour MPs.  After Leave won the referendum, the obvious course of action would have been to build a coalition of support for a future relationship with the EU that would command cross-party backing and endure into the future.  This was not just the morally correct option; it would also have had the advantages of providing badly needed stability and drawing off enough Remain voters to end any lingering controversy over the referendum result.  David Cameron, in the tail end of his premiership, showed that he understood this and paved the way for his successor to build a broad-based consensus on Brexit.  But he reckoned without Theresa May.  May abandoned this approach completely.  Her initial announcement of a hard Brexit policy, at the 2016 Conservative Party conference, was decided on by her and Nick Timothy alone; not even the cabinet was asked for its approval.  Her infamous Lancaster House speech in January 2017 was a bit more widely consulted on, but not that much.  The Article 50 letter itself was kept so secret that not even David Davis saw it until the day before it was sent.

We may never know what May thought she was doing, but it is clear by now that her unilateral embrace of a hard Brexit was a disastrous mistake.  It had the effect of aligning her with the bitterest and most vicious faction of the Tory Right - people who had no hesitation in turning on her when, after Chequers, she inevitably failed to meet their impossible standards of ideological purity.  These people had spent the last half century feeling professionally betrayed; and the likes of John Redwood, Christopher Chope and Peter Bone were not about to start behaving like reasonable adults at this stage of the game.  It was no more likely that Steve Baker was going to stand up in the Commons and say "you know what, not everyone agrees with our views so we should probably show a bit of flexibility" than that Jeremy Corbyn would say that he could sort of understand where Tony Blair was coming from.  The ERGers' behaviour since May started making the compromises necessary to get us out of the EU has been predictably obnoxious and infantile.  They would say, of course, that the referendum entitles them to do this.  One answer to this is that their favoured option of "no deal" goes directly against what Leave voters were promised.  Another is that they were acting in the same way years before anyone had even thought of having a referendum.  They would be behaving like this anyway.  It's what they're like.  All that the referendum did was to hand them a couple of useful rhetorical lines to use in interviews about the 17 million and the "will of the people".

Her party aside, May's decision to go hard early also had the effect of empowering the worst elements in British society at large.  Ruling out a soft Brexit as early as autumn 2016 raised expectations that could never be met.  The result is that people who didn't even know what the customs union was three years ago now insist that we must leave it, using all the blood-curdling rhetoric of treachery and treason.  Part of this is bog-standard nationalism of the sort that exists in every country.  That is a matter for psychiatrists.  But the more interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that it is distinctly British.  It isn't just that these guys are refusing to compromise - so that the only acceptable Brexit is one that excludes every possible continental influence from British life - it's that they genuinely think that they can get away with it.  They honestly, sincerely believed that the EU would give us cake and unicorns because we're the British.  Some critics on the left have taken to saying that Brexiteers are "disaster capitalists" who are actively seeking the chaos of "no deal" in order to increase the profits on their stocks and shares.  But this is a misreading of the situation.  These guys really, truly believed their own propaganda about "the easiest deal in history" - and they are genuinely enraged that the EU didn't cave.  This is where the small-dicked rhetoric about "punishment", "humiliation" and so forth comes from.  It stems from a basic confusion between a country being sovereign and a country being able to do whatever it wants.  The key point is that this is a mistake that only a former empire would make.  This is why Brexit is so obviously the symptom of a post-imperial hangover.  We went almost immediately from the end of empire to joining the EEC, and we haven't had enough experience of world powers telling us that we can't have things that we want.  Yet.

Oddly enough, Leave politicians themselves draw on the vocabulary of the imperial period when they talk about Britain becoming a "colony", a "vassal state", and so on.  This rhetoric is not only ridiculous on its face - we're talking about a customs union, for Christ's sake! - it is also despicably insulting to the many countries around the world who really have been turned into colonies at the hands of the British, starting with Ireland.  Ah yes, Ireland.  One of the saddest casualties of Brexit has been the trashing of relations between our two countries.  The work done on building goodwill and reconciliation - a process that finally seemed to have succeeded at the time of the Queen's visit to the Republic in 2011 - has been doused in petrol and set alight.  Attitudes towards "Eire" are being openly expressed that should have been dead and buried a century ago.  On the BBC's flagship Today programme, John Humphrys asked an Irish government minister with apparent seriousness whether she thought that Ireland should leave the EU and rejoin the UK - a question that would, rightly, leave an Englishman in need of medical attention if he asked it in a bar around the Dublin docks.

But the Brexiteers can only huff and puff.  The true power relations between our two countries were exposed a few hours ago when Leo Varadkar appealed to the EU to be "generous" to Britain.  In context, Varadkar's quote was well intentioned - he was clearly not trying to talk down to anyone - but the dynamics were clear.  Generosity is what a superior shows to an inferior.  And the fact that Britain is being held to its obligations to Ireland over the backstop arrangements is a symptom of a wider imbalance of power.  Brexiteers cannot admit this imbalance, even to themselves.  Especially to themselves.  So, in order to preserve the delusion that the UK is still one of the big boys in the playground, they have spent the last three years thinking up arguments for why we actually hold all the cards in a negotiation against a power bloc which has over five times our GDP.  German car makers will save us; the EU need our intelligence co-operation; they can't afford to survive without our divorce payments.  Any argument would do, as long as it supported the prescribed conclusion.  A process could be observed whereby these and other arguments were fashioned by a small circle of professional Brexiteer politicians and activists in London, and then repeatedly loudly at grassroots level by pub bores and social media users who bought them uncritically without really understanding what they were saying.

To that extent, Brexit is the triumph of ignorance and misinformation over truth.  But I wonder if this criticism doesn't miss the mark.  Brexiteers aren't Brexiteers because someone has failed to point out unnoticed facts to them.  You rarely convert someone to the Remain cause by explaining why the ERG are talking nonsense about Article 24 of GATT.  As for those people who didn't know what the customs union was until yesterday - well, perhaps they knew enough.  They might not know a tariff rate quota if it shoved itself up their arse, but they know that they don't want to be ruled by a gang of damn foreigners - and that is what this is really about.

As for being ruled by foreigners, we will have many, many years in which to discover the reality of negotiating as an outsider with the EU - and the USA, China, India and Japan.  An early taste of this has come with the spectacle of Brexiteers like Farage publicly lobbying other EU member states to veto an Article 50 extension.  People who spent 45 years complaining falsely about Britain's destiny being controlled by foreign powers have wound up trying to bring about that very situation.

The edge of reason

As is always the case in any cause involving the far right, what's ultimately at risk with Brexit isn't outsiders or minorities - although they certainly are at risk - it's the safety of the system as a whole.  Movements that start out by scapegoating immigrants (or Jews, or LGBT people) rarely stay that way.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Parliamentary democracy itself is being actively delegitimised.  Anti-Parliamentarian rhetoric is becoming a feature of British political life for the first time since the Civil War.  We have been treated to the spectacle of more-or-less mainstream politicians - Liam Fox, Nigel Farage, John Redwood - complaining that Parliament is failing to represent the true will of the people.  The same Weimar-era gibberish has been heard from pro-Brexit media commentators like Lord Digby Jones and David Blake.  Even the normally more-reasonable-than-thou Daniel Hannan has been seen experimenting with the idea that MPs are in the pocket of a foreign power.  The idea that Parliament is illegitimate is not merely an exceptionally dangerous idea in its own right; it is one that every previous generation of Conservatives would have rejected out of hand without a moment's hesitation.  Time was when a belief that Parliament is a corrupt clique that obstructs true popular rule was found only among revolutionary Marxists; today it is held by Tory cabinet ministers.

And if Parliament should fail to do what the Brexiteers want?  The worst and most disreputable Brexiteer Tories - Jacob Rees-Mogg, Chris Grayling - have warned that it will lead to an upsurge in support for the far right.  Nice political system you've got there.  Wouldn't want to see anything happen to it.  Mind how you go.  No doubt Mr Rees-Mogg will be returning to our screens soon to warn that the Government must adopt socialist policies in order to prevent Momentum supporters from kicking off.  Or perhaps it doesn't work that way.

At any rate, real violence is closer than any of us would like to admit.  The "yellow vests" who have been blocking Westminster Bridge and burning EU flags may be a sign of things to come.  Remainer MPs have been warned by the police to limit their movements for their own personal safety.  Three people - three people! - have been jailed for threats against one single politician (Anna Soubry).  There is no real parallel to this sort of thing in recent history other than the Troubles, and possibly the Miners' Strike - great precedents that those are.  Is the state starting to lose its monopoly on force?  We'll find out when the next economic downturn comes and the Tommy Robinsons of this world come looking for scapegoats.  Of course, while all this is going on, some people are advising us to move on because there's nothing to see here.  People like Daniel Hannan, the Comical Ali of the Brexiteer right, who pops up every so often to explain that Brexit isn't actually about nationalism at all, that Leavers really like immigrants, and that all they want is lower business regulation.  It's not just a river in Egypt, as they say.

Sinister extra-Parliamentary threats have gone hand in hand with a collapse in the quality of British political life.  Say what you like about them, David Cameron, Gordon Brown and John Major were serious people.  Professionals.  So was Tony Blair, up to a point.  But what have we got now?  A political class dominated by cranks and charlatans like Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Gove, and empty suits like Philip Hammond and Keir Starmer.  Theresa May is a hopeless and profoundly flawed prime minister, but she does at least perform the function of making some of her colleagues look good.  It seems that behind every Paddy Ashdown is a Vince Cable, and behind every Alastair Campbell a Seumas Milne.  The decline has been remarkably quick.  When Ken Clarke speaks from the Conservative benches, it already sounds like a voice from another age.

It doesn't help that parts of the British internal debate are suddenly being watched by the world.  When Jacob Rees-Mogg defended British concentration camps in the Boer War, continental Europeans watched the footage online with utter incredulity (so, I'm told, did the South Africans).  Jeremy Hunt's comparison of the EU to the Soviet Union went down like a cup of cold sick with politicians from mainland Europe who had actually lived under Soviet rule and grasped the difference.  The revealing thing here is the lack of self-awareness.  Hunt clearly had no idea that he would get in trouble for his remarks, because he was talking to a domestic audience consisting of the kind of people who think it clever to leave comments on the Guardian website about the "EUSSR".  He had no idea that any foreigners would notice; despite him being the Foreign Secretary.

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No-one can really know what is going to happen next.  It is even possible that Brexit will be cancelled - although a second referendum with a 52% Remain victory would not deal with any of the fundamental problems that I have mentioned.  Whatever happens, though, we can be sure that the nationalist right wing will not be appeased.  They are likely to furnish the next Prime Minister; and, perhaps worst of all, there is no mainstream liberal opposition party that is waiting in the wings to stop them.