Not Me Guv

When Brexit Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

There are moments in the history of most nations when their leaders make bad decisions or decisions contrary to their own national interests, and there are some mistakes whose consequences are so completely at variance to the predictions made when these decisions were taken that no one dares acknowledge or take responsibility for them.

In circumstances like these, a government can do various things. It can compound its initial mistake by carrying on regardless, hoping that its idiocy will be forgotten, or that events will somehow fall together in such a way that it can tell itself and the public that its initial decision was right after all.

It can change course or even reverse its initial decision, though this does require genuine courage and humility, and may also call its credibility into question. Such reversals may not even be possible, because circumstances may have changed to the point when it can no longer go back on what has been done.

In these cases the country or the government concerned may prefer to draw a veil of silence over its initial decision. It might ignore its consequences, or lie about them, or it might blame someone else and refuse to take any responsibility for what went wrong.

Given the combination of ideological fervour, wishful thinking and downright charlatanry that accompanied the UK’s exit from the European Union, it was never likely that the architects and cheerleaders of that project would take responsibility for that decision if/when it failed to bear out their expectations.

People who are stupid or arrogant enough to believe that they held all the cards are not the kind of people who are likely to admit that they never held any when reality calls their bluff.

Very few will recognise that they were incompetent, ill-informed, misguided, or delusional in the first place. And anyone who thinks otherwise should consider this week’s editorial in the Telegraph, which pronounced the death of Brexit, in a stunning (paywalled) piece which begins with this startling observation:

Let’s not beat about the bush. Brexit has become the madwoman in the country’s attic. Demonised, its spirit crushed, it looms over the UK like Mr Rochester’s wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre. Of course, Bertha - who sets fire to her husband’s bed and rips up Jane’s wedding veil -cannot be blamed for all the chaos she causes. A rebellious force of nature, she is driven to insanity by repression and neglect. So, too, has Brexit been turned into a national psychodrama. With no plan to unleash its potential, it can only fester, stoking tensions in Northern Ireland and strangling small firms with red tape.

As Brexit literary analogies go, this one isn’t bad. Some might prefer Frankenstein’s monster, or Mr Hyde, or the island of Doctor Moreau, but coming from a newspaper once synonymous with a certain crusty Colonel Blimp conservatism, and which lost its rightwing mind in fervid pursuit of the Brexit, the image of the madwoman in the attic is an eyecatching contribution to the national conversation.

Bear in mind that this is the newspaper that choked at even the faintest whiff of a soft Brexit, that supported every sleazy political manoeuvre and parliamentary sleight of hand required to get the hardest and purest of Brexits, that hailed every pitiful trade deal as the greatest deal ever, with headlines like this:

COMMENT

Don't be fooled by Remainers, the Australia trade deal is better than anything we had in the EU

The template deal puts a stake in the ground for the type of country Britain is becoming: an outward looking, global trading nation

MATTHEW LESH15 June 2021 • 1:11pm

Why be fooled by Remainers, you might ask, when you can do that for yourselves, or when a former minister of the government that negotiated that deal now admits that it was ‘not actually a very good for the UK’ after all?

Such admissions will try the patience of even the most ardent Brexiters, and this week’s shock horror piece, written by the Telegraph comment editor Sherelle Jacobs, is further evidence that the patience of Brexiters is becoming strained to breaking point.

Good Loving Gone Bad

Jacobs is the Telegraph’s deputy comments editor, and one of many rightwing sharks swimming in the swamp that Spiked has made its own, for whom support for Brexit dovetails seamlessly with climate change denialism, anti-lockdownism, anti-veganism, and whatever other destructive rightwing libertarian ‘cause’ can make money and headlines.

In 2019 Jacobs could be found defending a speech by Ann Widdecombe comparing leaving the EU to the ‘slaves’ rising up ‘against their owners’ - a disgraceful comparison that no halfway decent commentator would have touched with a bargepole. And in October 2021, Jacobs described the EU as ‘a 1950s Disney fairy-tale wrapped in Continental legalese’ and ‘a failed empire that has condemned itself to irrelevance’.

Writing at a time when the EU was locked in conflict with a very illiberal Law and Justice Party government in Poland, Jacobs naturally took the latter’s side, and rubbed her hands at the imminent demise of ‘a failed federation’ driven by ‘power struggles and vanity’ and ‘tormented by suspicion of Anglo-Saxon freedom.’

Yet now, two years later, Jacobs has discovered that Brexit ‘has not brought about the kind of national reset that millions of people expected. Instead, it is beginning to look slightly rubbish, even pointless.’ As a result ‘it is more likely that we end up rejoining the EU - and sooner than many people think.’

Now it turns out that the ‘empire’ has not collapsed and the ‘failed federation’ is no longer gazing enviously at our ‘Anglo-Saxon’ freedoms. And Brexit is pulling her hair out in the attic, while Rishi Sunak is downstairs in the drawing room, flashing his ridiculous plexiglass smile at Ursula von der Leyen and Leo Varadkar.

What else can a spurned wife do except burn the house down?.

Was Jacobs wrong then, to expect so much? Was she naive and even deluded? Of course not. Because the death of Brexit is never anything to do with the project itself, or the aspirations of Jacobs and her employers. Like Othello, she and her fellow extremists loved not wisely, but too well.

Generous to a fault, Jacobs exonerates what she calls the ‘alt-Remainers’, whatever they are, and a ‘Westminster system’ supposedly dominated by ‘people who were never all that enthused about leaving the EU in the first place.’

The real culprit, in Jacobs’s estimation, is the Tory Party - the same party which the Telegraph has clung to throughout all the convolutions of the last seven years. As Jacobs points out, the Tories ‘little over three years ago received a historic mandate to “get Brexit done” and now it seems that they didn’t get it done after all.

Instead, the Tories have turned out to be fatally-flawed instrument for turning the Brexit fantasy into reality, and missed all the golden opportunities that Jacobs insists were there for the taking.

So this is so much good loving gone bad, and now that the Tory thrill is gone, Jacobs really has the blues, and can only stare down from the attic and dream of ‘the emergence of a new centre-right party’ to pull the Brexit ‘revolution’ from the flames rising up all around her.

I don’t want to get into Jacobs’ tendentious arguments about the ‘opportunities’ that were missed; from the ‘big business lobby’ that supposedly opposed deregulation and low taxation, or her belief that ‘the Brexit debate has fixated too much on questions of trade’ instead of seeking to transform the UK into a ‘science superpower’ through the government’s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, or the UK’s supposed addiction to ‘cheap labour’ that prevented it from forming a coherent post-Brexit immigration policy.

One the one hand, the fact that such an article should have appeared in the Telegraph is something of a watershed moment, at a time when recent polls have made it clear even to many of its supporters, that the dream of Brexit has turned sour. According to a Statista poll published this month, 54 percent of British voters believed that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 35 percent who thought it was the right decision.

And another survey commissioned by the Independent found that 65 per cent of voters now support a referendum with the possibility of rejoining the EU - an increase from 55 percent at the same period last year; that 54 percent believe Brexit was the wrong decision, compared with 46 percent last year, and that 54 percent believe that leaving the EU has made the economy worse - an increase from 44 percent last year.

Such conclusions might encourage some ‘alt-Remainers.’ But any such optimism should be tempered by the complete refusal in this shoddy cri de coeur to acknowledge that Jacobs and her newspaper might actually bear some responsibility for the gratuitous act of national self-harm that they proclaimed from the rooftops during our seven years in political hell.

Rather than engage in any reflection or self-analysis, Jacobs prefers to blame the Tory Party, and calls for something even more extreme to appear out of nowhere and make the Brexit fantasy real.

The idea that the likes of Richard Tice or any politician could fulfil such a role is unlikely, not to say delusional, even though the potential fragmentation of the Tories is definitely something that many of us might want to pull out the popcorn for, because never has political collapse been so richly-deserved.

But none of this means that rejoining the EU is as likely as Jacobs doomily suggests. Public opinion is still too volatile and too divided. The political class is too paralysed by self-interest or downright cowardice to acknowledge in public the disaster that many of its members know Brexit to be in private.

For the time being, the most we are likely to get is a closer realignment with the EU on purely technical grounds. This may ease some of the logistical problems caused by Brexit, but does not amount to a belated embrace of the European project.

Bad outcomes don’t always teach good sense, especially when there are so many bad actors willing to muddy the waters and turn Brexit even more than it already is, into a culture war where there are no winners, but only endless conflict.

As things stand, rejoining is likely to be the culmination of a positive political transformation in the country, rather than a means of achieving one in itself.

In other words, the UK will have to decide what kind of country it wants to be and agree on what kind of country it wants to be, and make its decisions about its future on a realistic and informed assessment of its best national interests and the best interests of UK society.

No single political party can bring about such a transformation by itself. Time has to pass. Lessons have to be learned and assimilated. Despite the abundance of charlatans in the Brexit process, it was the public that ultimately took the decision to leave, and it is the public that should make any future decisions on whether to rejoin or not.

If we reach a consensus that such an outcome is desirable, then it is very likely that a second referendum - enabled by some form of cross-party agreement - will be the final instrument by which such a decision is sent back to parliament. But it would be better and wiser to see it preceded by some form of citizens assemblies before such a vote takes place, so that the issues involved can be thrashed out at a community level.

At the moment we are a long way from any of that. And before we get there - assuming we ever do - we can expect to hear more of the kind of bitter and ultimately cynical recriminations that the Telegraph offered this week, which imagines the future of Brexit as someone else’s boot, stamping on its face forever, and invites its readers to see themselves as victims, rather than instigators, of the tragedy that we have all been trying to live with throughout these wretched, wasted years.