It may just be the London media and Westminster that has gone bananas about Brexit. The polling suggests that the majority of Britons are realistic, with an overwhelming number – 72% – saying this week in a poll that they would rather have “no deal” with the EU than a bad deal. This indicates that while most people are prepared to be reasonable there is a point beyond which they think the EU is, as it were, taking the piss. In that spirit, the country outside the metropolis seems to be getting on with life, worrying about housing and wages, hoping there won’t be a recession, and expecting the leaders who are paid to take care of this stuff to sort something out on a Brexit which a majority of voters either want or accept is happening soon.
In Londonland there is no such agreement even about the basic facts of what is happening. The argument is vicious and getting worse steadily. Otherwise credible figures such as Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat former Deputy Prime Minister, publish weird tracts – Stop Brexit – that are almost religious in their fervour. Salons featuring some of the least popular figures of the last 20 years of British public life meet over dinner in expensive London houses for a good remoan. Other cannot hide their disgust for their fellow Britons, and openly and disgustingly predicate their case on wishing those of us who voted Leave would hurry up and die so they can reverse the referendum.
Meanwhile, on the ultra-Brexit side there is confusion and delusion. Some Brexiteers are depressed, fearing rightly that if this – the talks with the EU, the wider project – continues to go badly then they will get the blame for having voted to Leave.
Others Brexit stalwarts are on autopilot, just reproducing the eurosceptic clap lines that they have used for decades, with the brighter ones at least looking worried that the applause has dried up. Elsewhere, I now see some “let sunshine win the day” liberal Brexit fans such as Douglas Carswell, a former Tory and UKIP MP, cheering for “no deal” this week. Hold on, Douglas was in the forefront of the team saying we wouldn’t be here. A deal was supposed to be easy, in everyone’s interests, it was said. And now – with little explanation, other than public school populists blaming the “elite” – all that is replaced by “make my day” anti-Europeanism? How about a bit of self-reflection instead?
In this way, the media-political nexus appears to have gone totally tonto. The whole shebang is reminiscent of those accounts of what it was like in the Jacobite v Hanoverian decades, with one side, the rebels, looking for rescue from the continent and the other determined to drive through its agenda no matter the cost or casualties.
I cannot absolve myself of blame, even as a hack penning analysis and opinions for a living. I must say sorry if you thought that the headline on this piece suggests that I am going to apologise for voting for Brexit.
No, I am more convinced than ever that Britain decided in its strange way to do something important and right in voting for Brexit. From Maastricht onwards, the British were reluctant to go where the EU is going, towards ever closer integration in which ultimate authority sits above national democracies. Even when a leading EU contributor, the UK, warned we might leave the organisation unless there was a change of direction, this did not produce a rethink. The majority of countries – Canada, New Zealand, India, Chile, the US, Japan – seem to get on just fine making their own laws, having control of their borders and trading with their friends without the need for an integrationist superstructure topped by a court – the ECJ – in a race, with the ECHR on human rights, and bossing people about. I am glad we are leaving, and still hope we can do it sensibly and not stupidly, although it will be tough.
My personal Brexit mistake was twofold.
First, I had assumed that after the referendum there would be a coming together of moderate leavers (those prepared to accept compromises) and moderate remainers (those accepting that as it must be delivered, it should be done well.) This unification process did not happen, partly because those of us seeking such an outcome did not map it out or make the case clearly enough.
The referendum, and the untruths told by both sides, both the £350m confection pushed by Vote Leave and the promise of instant recession by Project Fear, put poison in the bloodstream which is coursing round the body ever faster.
Like many a moderate Brexiteer I was also too blasé about the government’s direction of travel. After becoming Tory leader, a Remain Prime Minister Theresa May felt the need to prove her Brexit credentials. The citizen of “nowhere” rhetoric, misinterpreted from the writer David Goodhart’s work, sent a nasty signal to cosmopolitans and in the botched general election of June it turned out she had a tin ear for the concerns of citizens of “somewhere” too.
Until her Florence speech in September this year, May was insufficiently imaginative and unconstructive. Long before that, moderate leavers – like me – should have done much more to push for dialogue with sensible remainers, but then there was the distraction of the on-going fight with those ultra-remainers who openly admit they are out to stop Brexit. How can there be any trust built across the divide if the goal is to overturn a democratic vote, all underpinned by a refusal to accept Brexit is happening? Want a second referendum? How about best of three or five?
The blood boils even in moderate leavers when we are reminded time and again that smart people who might have invested energy in designing a softer Brexit have spent their intellectual capital trying to scupper it. What do they imagine happens if an overturning of the referendum is the eventual outcome? Brexit voters will just shrug? Er, no.
Unfortunately, such animosity and polarisation is a key characteristic of cultural civil wars. The choice becomes binary and participants are forced to choose one side or the other rather than unifying and pushing for a common position.
Second, I put way too much faith in German power and Berlin’s capacity for forcing a settlement on the most dangerous man in Europe, the terrible federalist Jean Claude Juncker, and the other members of the EU 27. Not only is Merkel poor at history-defining powerplay, Germany now does not have a government after the elections in September. Michel Barnier, the EU’s stressed chief negotiator, tried ten days ago to move the talks along to the next stage, trade, but was pushed back by Germany and France.
If politics won’t work, the EU falls back on treaties and the rulebook. The European Union, as my Times colleague Simon Nixon argues, at root defines itself as a legal entity governed by its rules. Only in the rarest of circumstances during the life of the project has it been bent to the will of national leaders, as it was pre-EU by Thatcher with the invention of the Single Market in the mid-1980s under Lord Cockfield, and by Kohl and Mitterrand with their post-1989 acceleration to the euro.
Where can such leadership and initiative come from today when the EU has Spain to worry about and Eastern Europe in open rebellion? Perhaps from President Macron of France, who has imagination. Not from Germany, where, as we have seen, there is a vacuum. In the UK it is much worse than in Germany. The unfeared Prime Minister’s authority is broken and the Tory party is like a school in which the pupils know that the headmistress has lost control. Only a new head might be able to restore order and pride, by firing miscreants at will and setting a direction for others to follow. Meanwhile, the Lords are limbering up to cause maximum disruption to Brexit.
Without a breakthrough, and some assertion of political will in the UK and the EU, it will be a “no deal” scenario, and that should be known by early next year.
There are two ways this can now play out in Britain, or in Londonland. There can be a final effort this autumn and winter at dialogue on common ground, marginalising the two extremes (Brexit ultras and ultra-remainers) and finding a way through in good faith to a deal or a national effort to make “no deal” work, or it can be full-on 52-48 conflict until one side wins or neither gives up for decades. I would prefer the former approach, compromise, but at this rate it will be the latter scenario. And if it comes to that, then into the trenches we go, metaphorically, where it will get even messier.