Six Reasons Why
The Autopsy of Brexit
I finally got round to watching 13 Reasons Why, the young adult drama that explores the fallout from a teenager’s suicide and what drove her to it. The first series, in which each episode is framed by the dead girl narrating on a tape the things that one of her friends or acquaintances had done, is pretty good. The quality drops off a cliff edge in later series once this narrative device is lost. (Follow me for more seriously out-of-date TV reviews.)
We spend so much time in the now of politics that we don’t look back enough to understand the why. It is now generally recognised that Brexit is a failure. We ought to spend some time looking at the reasons why.
1. The Campaign
At a distance of nearly seven years, the Leave campaign is memorable for only two things: the lie on the bus and the lies on the posters. Britain was not paying £350 million a week into the EU. Turkey is still not joining the EU. Britain was not at breaking point over immigration.
This campaign was, of course, successful, at least for the purpose of winning the vote itself. Leavers were gleeful about this, exulting that Remain had been beaten by a bus.
The after-effects of the campaign cast a long shadow over Brexit’s prospects. Remain supporters cried foul at the time. Polling afterwards showed that Remainers generally thought the main motivation for a Leave vote was ant-immigration or racism.
Leavers vehemently dispute this was their motivation. You can’t blame Remainers for this view, however, given how the campaign was conducted. When the Leave campaigns both spent weeks highlighting the supposed risks of large numbers of brown-skinned Muslims being poised to descend on Britain (without, it should be noted, the least hint of any qualms from any prominent Leaver about the message being given), it’s a legitimate deduction.
And the consequence was that when it came to trying to establish a new common ground, a large chunk of the population had already disengaged from the process. Why would you want to make common ground with people who you thought were deceitful racists?
2. Citizens of nowhere
Once the referendum had been won, that job of creating a new common ground began. This was always going to be delicate after such a close and viciously-contested campaign. The winners were entitled to see their victory put into effect. The losers were entitled to see a way forward mapped out within which they could feel included.
This did not happen. Theresa May began the process of sketching out what Brexit might look like. In the process of doing so, however, her government went out of its way to further alienate the losers. Far from encouraging those who saw themselves as cosmopolitan to see themselves as having a place in post-Brexit Britain, she derided them as citizens of nowhere, stood mute as Leave outriders labelled Remain supporters as quislings and traitors, and said nothing when the judiciary were labelled enemies of the people for insisting on proper process. Remain supporters were presented with a vision of the future where their aspirations and values were not just excluded but seen as seditious.
When establishing a new direction for the long term, obtaining losers’ consent is essential if you want that new direction to endure. Leavers never tried. As a result, Brexit never secured even grudging acquiescence.
3. No deal is better than a bad deal
Theresa May’s next mistake was just as serious. While negotiating with the EU, she sought to play to the gallery. “No deal is better than a bad deal”, she boomed.
As well as being demonstrably untrue in many cases (often you do better to take a bad deal than no deal, as many low paid workers could have told her), her claim was psychologically disastrous. The Leave coalition had always been a ramshackle affair, mixing wild-eyed laissez-faire capitalists with the anti-immigration mob, with an unhealthy admixture of those who just had a visceral hatred for the EU and all its manifestations. Compromises between these groups needed to be hammered out. Priorities needed to be set.
By claiming that no deal was better than a bad deal, Leavers never needed to consider where they should compromise. So they didn’t. Instead, they continued on their conveyor belt to the extreme. So Theresa May simultaneously managed to alienate those who lost and inculcate an unrealistic belief into the winners that all of their inchoate hopes and dreams for Brexit would be met. The wheels were not yet falling off the wagon, but the nuts were loose.
4. Theresa May’s unsellable deal
Theresa May eventually negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the EU for a transitiona agreement. Within the narrow terms of that exercise, she did exceptionally well.
If the political conditions had been set in the UK, this deal could have proved to be a strong and stable foundation for Brexit. It required compromises of both Leavers and Remainers. It also gave something to both. For Remainers, it offered a settled relationship with the EU — not a close relationship, but one which could be built upon in time if public opinion agreed. For Leavers, it took Britain outside the single market and the requirement to accept freedom of movement. It was economically worse for Britain than EU membership but it was at least coherent and workable, and it respected the spirit in which the referendum had been fought and won.
If the referendum had commanded losers’ consent and if the winners had thought about the compromises required to provide a consensual way forward, the deal would have stuck. Heck, if either of those preconditions had been secured, it might have stuck. But it had neither.
During the referendum, few Leavers would even have heard of customs unions. By this point, however, many would claim that it would be a betrayal of Brexit if Britain had any kind of customs union with the EU. This was not just Theresa May’s failure. I am willing to be corrected but I am unaware of a single prominent Leaver ever publicly suggesting that building a broad consensus was not just a regrettable necessity but desirable. This remains true to this day.
With Leavers furiously opposed to this deal, far too many Remainers, particularly in the Labour party, saw themselves under no obligation to salvage it when it represented so much that they had fought against so hard. So they declined to support it too.
To be clear, I regard this as just as serious a misjudgement as that of Leavers. Even in narrow political terms, what do you imagine would have happened to the Conservative party if Theresa May’s deal had passed with Labour support? It would have been the Corn Law split of the 1840s all over again. In the ensuing internal Conservative party warfare, Remainers would have had plenty of time and space to mitigate what they regarded as the deal’s worst defects if they so chose.
So Theresa May’s deal failed. From this point on, Britain’s exit from the EU was always going to be needlessly destructive.
5. Not accepting yes for an answer
The hardliner Leavers then took over. Having sought to suspend Parliamentary democracy in order to ram through an irreversible policy with no electoral mandate, they renegotiated the withdrawal agreement with the EU on a basis that placed an internal barrier within the UK between Northern Ireland and Great Britain in order to get the doubtful benefit for Britain of maximum freedom to negotiate trade deals with other countries. They duly secured a general election, which they won on the slogan Get Brexit Done.
They did not, however, understand their own slogan. The middle ground of the public was not looking for the purest Brexit. They were looking to put it in the rear mirror, being heartily sick of the whole subject. With that in mind, the government should have accepted the compromise and branded it as a triumph. It did not have losers’ consent but at least the winners could have used the time it bought to try to demonstrate Brexit’s supposed benefits.
The government could not do this. By this stage, Leavers had long ago lost sight of the idea of creating a durable settlement. So they sought to rat on their own word. First they threatened to break the withdrawal agreement. Then they signed up to a Trade and Co-operation Agreement that substantially followed the approach of the withdrawal agreement. Then, before the ink was dry on that, they threatened to pull the plug on the aspects dealing with Northern Ireland. Instead of telling the DUP to make the best of it, the government wilfully talked up the problems, pouring petrol on the flames.
It wasn’t just the faithlessness, making it impossible to establish a settled relationship with the EU. It was the sense the government exuded that Brexit is far from done. By advertising that the government thinks the deal isn’t good enough, it encourages the public to think Brexit isn’t good enough either. This in turn meant that the inevitable disorder and disruption on leaving the EU were seen not as teething problems but as indicators that the whole thing was a bad idea.
6. Failure to stabilise
Brexit became less and less popular as time passed after Brexit took effect. That is actually unusual: normally controversial policies gain popularity once implemented. But with the government itself disavowing the deal that it had struck, the complaints of those who lost out from the Brexit process were reinforced rather than countered by the government’s words and actions. Now it languishes as an idea: with the benefit of hindsight, the public now believes by 60:40 that Brexit was the wrong decision. Polling on rejoining the EU also suggests that idea would find favour.
All the while, Britain’s relationship with the EU remains unresolved. The British government insists that the Northern Ireland Protocol must be rewritten. The EU insists that it must be honoured. When Boris Johnson was ousted as Prime Minister, the opportunity to refresh relations arose. Liz Truss got very few things right during her brief tenure as Prime Minister but one of the few things was to take that opportunity. Rishi Sunak has been building on that, and the EU negotiators seem to have decided that he is a man who they can do business with. This week, James Cleverly and Maroš Šefčovič reached agreement on the way forward regarding the specific question of the EU’s access to UK IT systems to help unlock the dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol. A final breakthrough does not seem imminent but evidently progress is being made.
Still, the sands of time are running out on this government and in less than two years it seems pretty likely that the current government will be replaced by some form of Labour-led government. If Brexit does not look to be on a stable footing by then, it looks near-certain to be unpicked by a government with a Remainer world view.
Most Leavers seem oblivious to this danger. They are banking on the current dissatisfaction with Brexit being insufficient to persuade the public to disturb things further. If things aren’t settled, this looks a very dangerous assumption (and even if things are settled, in all likelihood things will come up to unsettle them). Relying on people deciding to put up indefinitely with something they dislike is a big gamble.
Still, purist Leavers continue to put out menacing warnings to the government about any idea of compromise. But the EU will not feel obliged to do a deal at any price: its officials can read the polls and will know that it is likely that they will have a more amenable negotiating partner fairly soon if they need to wait. If a deal is to be done, a compromise is going to need to be made.
It seems likely that the hardliners have enough votes in Parliament to overcome Rishi Sunak’s nominal majority in the House of Commons if any compromise is made. If a deal is indeed reached with the EU over Northern Ireland, it seems fairly likely that it would only get through Parliament with Labour votes.
Unlike 2019, Labour now seem psychologically ready to provide that support. If they do, it might well rip the Conservative party in two. Since this is an obvious risk for Rishi Sunak, the likeliest course of events is that no deal is reached with the EU. But that would leave Brexit unstabilised right the way to the next election.
What next?
Britain is not going to rejoin the EU in the very near future for the simple reason that the EU has no interest in taking part in a hokey cokey. Before the idea can be contemplated, Britain needs to resolve its own views on the subject. The trajectory of Brexit envisaged by its proponents, however, will not endure. With Brexit unstabilised and unpopular, the country will turn towards mitigating the wound rather than trying to take advantages of imagined opportunities. Outside the EU and regretting its choice, Britain’s course for the next few years will be to get ever closer to its neighbours again.