People keep asking me, “What’s going on with Brexit? Is there going to be one? When?” as if I was some sort of oracle. Naturally, these people aren’t British; the British couldn’t care less what I think. There are quite enough British commentators trying to make some sense of the mess, and many of them are no doubt a lot more qualified than me to do so. Not that that matters. One thing we have learned over the past few years is that everyone has had enough of “experts” ie, anyone who is actually qualified to know something, or at least have a better idea about something than a total ignoramus. This consequently makes my viewpoint just as valid as anyone else’s. So here is what I think is going on. Possibly.
Why did people vote (narrowly) for a Brexit in the first place?
To understand the answer to that question (and we are going to have to be a little bit brief here as you could write a book on the subject), you have to understand the British view of foreigners in general and Europeans in particular. And to get some kind of handle on this, I will tell you a small story from my own experience.
I studied languages at A Level and went on to study them at university. It was not a popular choice. I suspect that there were 50 or 60 members of our Sixth Form and only four people decided to study French, two did Spanish, two did Latin and no one studied German. As it turned out, I was therefore 50% of the Spanish class, 50% of the Latin class and 25% of the French class. One other guy made the same choices as me, so I saw a lot of him over the course of the week. There was no enthusiasm for languages amongst my peers. Back in the 70s, you didn’t come into much contact with non-native English speakers in South Oxfordshire, and people didn’t keep going away to Europe for long weekends. Everything was viewed from a British perspective.
So, what has changed in the interim? Actually, not that much. Although EU immigration means that people now see plenty of Europeans and work alongside them, there hasn’t been a huge upsurge in learning their languages or trying to understand their mindset or in seeing things from their point of view. I have a friend who retrained as a French and Spanish teacher. Sadly, she couldn’t find a job in the UK as there was just no call for French or Spanish language teaching. She ended up in the Middle East.
The British experience of foreigners is conditioned by what can be shared with them in English. English is now the world’s lingua franca, thanks in large part to the internet. So, the British have a massive advantage: everything happens in their native tongue and everyone else has to make some sort of effort. The British don’t really feel inclined to make any effort. My relative bilingualism still seems like a party trick amongst people I know in England, as if I was a brilliant musician or conjurer. How do I do it? But non-British born English speakers are just viewed as if their mastery of the language was something totally normal. German businessmen speak impeccable English and no one bats an eyelid. A British businessman that can pull off the same feat in German is a freak.
This encapsulates the British view of foreign countries and the people who live there. They just aren’t that interested. That’s why they like going to Orlando, Florida. The weather’s nice, you can understand the natives without too much effort and things are about as exotic as you really want them to be. So, Britain was never really on board with the EU. The British have been reluctant travellers. They don’t really see themselves as part of a greater whole, Europe; they see themselves as defenders of their damp, windy islands. There are great generalisations here, of course, but you have to generalise if you are going to talk about 17 million people – the ones who voted to leave the EU. Paradoxically, the ones who actually live cheek by jowl with the Europeans and work with them in the larger cities are those who mainly voted to remain in the EU. They probably do see themselves as partly European, and the younger voters ditto. The internet has shrunk the world and they are no longer as parochial as their parents and grandparents. But there you are, a lot of them didn’t get it together to vote in the referendum. Well, it wasn’t on Facebook, was it?
So, a lack of interest in, or even distrust of, Europeans was the first reason for the Brexit vote. The second reason is even easier to understand: blame it all on someone else.
Ever since the financial crisis of 2009, when the bankers and their bonuses all got bailed out with public money, life for many people in the UK has been economically meh. You either lost your job and had to join the dole queue or the gig economy, or you didn’t but had to accept stagnant wages for even more work. Your credit card is maxed out, your rent is sky-high and you just can’t see anything much improving. It’s all a bit pants. But there you are, it’s austerity season and you are going to have to live with it. Sadly, like a nuclear winter, austerity season has been going on rather a long time – something like a decade and everyone is now rather fed up with it. Sure, blame the bankers, but what can you do? None of them went to jail and you still need to use a bank. So, who else could you blame? Hey, let’s blame the EU. They are a convenient target. We don’t really know what they do, they talk funny and they’re not even British. Surely, they must be responsible somewhere along the line? Without them making all those decisions that affect us, everything would be just hunky dory. It’s that old saw of blaming the foreigner. Just about every country does it: it’s not our fault, it’s their fault.
And why is the EU particularly easy to blame? For multiple reasons. For a start, it’s a PR disaster. It has never spent any time or effort trying to explain what it does, or why it is beneficial, or why anyone should like it. Its leaders are nearly always deeply unlovable. Are you likely to feel warm and fuzzy towards Jean-Claude Junker, the self-important little bureaucrat? Or his predecessor, the unbearably smug José Manuel Barroso? Only Donald Tusk seemed like a decent guy, and even then, everything he said was turned against him. Well, it’s too late now. The EU is easy to dislike, largely out of ignorance, but partly, whose fault is that? Yes, it is quite opaque, and yes, it does up-sticks and decamp to Strasbourg every few weeks for no good reason other than that the French didn’t want the Belgians to have all the fun of hosting it. It is a deeply flawed institution. But then, the alternative is surely worse.
Add into this mix the unicorn hunters. These are the people, like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who have been parroting for years now that unicorns exist and that they can bring you one if you will only let them. The land of unlimited cake is a real place, where you can bake them and eat them. All by yourself. Leave the EU and everything will be marvellous – jobs a plenty, a geyser of money and true freedom where pesky foreigners will no longer make any decisions that affect you but that instead your true will will be represented by MPs who have only your interests at heart. There will be no more compromise but only a golden age of unadulterated Britishness. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, to many of us, this sounds somewhat unlikely. But people just love being told what they want to hear, no matter how unlikely it is. Let’s face it, how many people buy lottery tickets every week? And what are their chances of winning?. But the ads tell them that they are all going to be millionaires and they suck it up. You get my point.
So, to cut a long story short, Brexit was voted for – again, fairly narrowly and after a campaign by Leave which glossed over all the details that would have to be dealt with if the UK were actually to quit the EU. One of the biggest of these is what do you do about Ireland? It’s the only land border with the EU, but the Troubles only came to an end when the border became an irrelevancy. If the UK and Ireland were part of a greater EU, and the border was just a line on a map, it no longer mattered all that much whether Northern Ireland was part of the UK or part of Ireland. Sure, it matters to some, but it ceases to really be an issue worth shooting off-duty policemen in the face for. But re-establish a hard border there with customs officials and so forth and the clock gets rewound a decade or two. No one really wants to go there. So how do you avoid going there? Hmmm. I’ll get back to you on that one.
The UK voted for divorce. Fair enough. But like all divorces, there are quite a lot of things to work out after more than 40 years of marriage. Does the UK owe the EU anything? How much? How is trade to be conducted? What of all that common legislation? Free movement of people? Goods? What about all the EU citizens already in the UK and the UK citizens in EU countries? No end of decisions and agreements to make. About two and a half years was spent trying to thrash all this out and come to some sort of understanding after serious negotiations. The deal was agreed by the UK and the EU. It wasn’t perfect; in fact, it was far from perfect, but what did anyone expect? All the people who voted to Leave expected a deal that was better than being in the EU, and the EU wasn’t about to hand that over as otherwise, what would be the point of being in the EU?
The deal needed to be ratified by Parliament and, somewhat unsurprisingly, it was rejected. An unprecedented three times. For the Leavers, it just wasn’t good enough. They felt that the UK negotiators had been closet Remainers and had let the EU run roughshod over them. Call that a deal? You must be joking. The Remainers, on the other hand, couldn’t help but notice how the deal was worse than remaining in the EU – well, no shit Sherlock. So no one much was prepared to get enthusiastic about it.
If you don’t like the deal that is being offered as a divorce settlement, you have two options: tell the EU to stick it where the sun don’t shine and leave with no deal, or call the whole thing off – face the reality that leaving isn’t so simple and that in any case, the downsides of leaving outweigh the downsides of remaining. Theresa May, the PM responsible for leaving the EU, was deemed to have failed and to have lost all credibility and she was replaced by the Leaver and unicorn-hunter Boris Johnson.
There are now 4 options:
- Forget the whole thing and Remain, i.e. ignore the referendum result
- Have another referendum in the hope that the country will have come to its senses and that a majority will now want to Remain. Then we can get back to what we were doing before the whole mess started.
- Accept the sub-optimal deal.
- Leave without a deal and try and pick up the pieces when everything shatters in every direction and the economy crashes.
If you think that Brexit is a rubbish idea, but you can see that the referendum result sort of needs respecting, you’d go for (2) and cross your fingers.
If you’re the LibDems, you’d shoot yourself in the foot and opt for (1) having totally failed to understand the mood of the country.
If you’re Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, you’d sit on the fence until it fell down and try to maintain the ambiguity about what you really thought, if indeed you thought anything, until you were somehow magically voted into office.
If you’re Boris Johnson, you’d vow to Leave on October 31stcome what may.
Boris is still essentially pretending that he can find a unicorn in the shape of some hugely beneficial deal that can still be negotiated, despite the EU repeatedly telling the UK that it can’t be. It would seem obvious that it can’t. But it also seems obvious, to me at any rate, that the only hope you’d have for a hypothetical improved deal is if you could frighten the EU into thinking that you’d cheerfully leave with no deal if you didn’t get what you want. To this end, you’d talk up no-deal and plan vigorously for it if you had indeed decided that you were going to slam the door shut on October 31st. This strategy would, of course, get all the media on your back as you’d have to take them in at the same time as your posture took in the EU negotiators. It is thus quite possible that all Boris’s talk of leaving without a deal is an elaborate bluff.
There is a problem with this strategy, though, and that is when your bluff is called. If the EU calls the UK’s bluff (and it almost certainly will, as it is inconceivable that the UK could get a better deal out of the EU than in), then it’s curtains for the UK. Their hand is empty and the EU will clear up. Yes, it’s bad for the EU that the UK is leaving, but it’s going to be worse for the UK.
There is an interesting democratic point here too. In the Boris playbook the referendum result trumps Parliament and the wishes of “the People” have to be respected. Thus the UK must leave the EU. This is what May was failing to achieve as she was unwilling to face the reality of a no-deal exit. Parliament will never vote for a no-deal Brexit, so the simple thing to do is sideline Parliament, which is precisely what Boris has done by shutting it down for 5 weeks. The logic is implacable. The media and half the country have got very excited about it, but really, it’s his only option out of the impasse.
There is a deeper irony in that the whole point of leaving the EU (supposedly) is to “take back control”, i.e. hand over greater power to Parliament. You can’t help but have a chortle when Parliament is shut down so that it no longer has control of anything. Is this what greater democracy looks like? The country in any case has now decided that its politicians are a complete shower and can’t be trusted or voted for. Somewhat removes the whole point of leaving the EU, it seems to me.
So, what’s going to happen now? Who knows? But time is on Boris’s side as if nothing changes, the UK will automatically leave the EU on October 31st. I doubt there will be a magical new deal. There might be a second referendum. If MPs had got their act together and May had been a little more subtle, we’d have had this months ago. Mind you, there’s no guarantee that the country won’t vote as before, but at least it won’t be able to say that it wasn’t properly consulted with all the facts out there (unlike last time). And just as likely, the country will leave without a deal at the end of October, sterling will tank and the economy will contract and a lot of the things that “Project Fear” warned of will come to pass.
And no one will have been able to produce a unicorn.
Lots of people are going to be very upset.
We live in interesting times.