The Coexistence Fallacy

Roland Smith
6 min readJan 9, 2016

If there’s one conversation that keeps cropping up in the Brexit community, it’s the one that says we must unite and move forward as one. Which is a totally reasonable sentiment given that the referendum is hurtling towards us and, besides, we all agree that ‘we want out’.

That’s all true enough but unity around what? Apart from wanting to get out and liking apple pie.

I’m not being awkward here. Beneath the shared impulse to leave the EU, there are fundamental points that Brexiteers don’t agree on. Here’s a little list of Brexiteer impulses you may have come across:

  1. A common theme is that of a “bonfire of regulations” after the UK leaves the EU. The logic being that the EU is the source of lots of unnecessary regulation epitomised by silly regulations.
  2. Then there are the costs, especially the oft-repeated £55m a day and how that could be saved and pumped into the NHS, defence, or whatever.
  3. The wish to “go global”: to retake and use our independent seat at the WTO and other global bodies where so much law is made these days.
  4. The wish to exit the single market and the four freedoms in order to “take back control of our borders” and limit mass immigration.
  5. “To get back our democracy”
  6. The wish to get on with it and to exit using the quickest cleanest break possible
  7. To leave but to negotiate continued access to the European single market

There are too many people on the Brexit side who look at this list and simply see some different things that different people prefer to emphasise. A ‘menu’ of tasty morsels allowing individuals to pick and choose ones that fit with their own predispositions….and for a Leave campaign, to potentially choose all of them and house them under one campaign umbrella.

But there are some big contradictions in here (as well as errors) that won’t survive the heat of a referendum and will just make such an umbrella campaign look foolish when exposed. For example:

  1. How does a genuine globalist who may be quite pro-immigration unite with someone grunting about road-clogging, odd-talking Muslim Romanians with HIV living next door?
  2. How does a Brexiteer, who sees continuity value in the European single market and is trying to sell this proposition, unite with someone who sees it as terrible and wants to cut the UK off from it altogether (and is trying to sell that)?
  3. How does a Brexiteer attempt to sell a de-risked exit process that “will be good for Britain” while another Brexiteer is openly welcoming all the pain and fear thrown about by the Remain campaign and saying “but it’ll be worth it”?…and may even be making statements about preferring lower economic growth “as long as we get our country back”.
  4. How does a Brexiteer who knows that a large and increasing amount of regulation is now created at global level, especially food regulation, agree with another Brexiteer who says that on exit we’ll get rid of all those silly regulations about bendy bananas and curved cucumbers?
  5. How does a Brexiteer, who says the public are entitled to an exit plan to judge what ‘Out’ looks like, unite with one who says it is wrong and counter-productive to have any kind of plan?
  6. How does a Brexiteer, who expects a Leave vote to mean an immediate start to the exit process, unite with one who sees a Leave vote as a mechanism for pushing the government into a tougher renegotiation and perhaps to stay in on reformed terms?
  7. How does a Brexiteer, who understands the UK’s EU contributions and that in the grand scheme the amount is not big (and would very likely be reallocated on exit to currently EU-sponsored farming, science schemes, etc. in the UK), unite with one who gets very animated about our gross contribution and says we can reallocate it all to NHS hospitals ?
  8. How does a Brexiteer, who believes that the transition out of the EU can and should be quick using the WTO Option, unite with one who thinks it can’t (due to 40 years of entanglement) and that a quick/WTO transition is highly risky and flawed?

There are others I could add to this list but here’s another point: Some of the positions within the above conundrums may be simply factually dodgy assertions, but they’re no less powerful for that. It is thus not just a case of different ‘egos’ getting in the way (as is often said); there are very real differences of substance here.

This is why the range of Brexit views cannot easily coexist and this drives the temptation to have no exit plan at all (which appears to be Vote Leave’s strategy). The supposed logic of this approach, starting with a belief in that innocent-looking ‘menu’ of arguments, is that one should indeed deliver all of the above Brexit arguments in the hope that different ones will stick to different voters. But having no exit plan comes with its own set of issues, not least that the Remain campaign will make up an exit plan for you.

So if a wholly different approach is taken and an exit plan is devised, it must be coherent. That’ll mean distancing it from some of the positions above…..which necessarily means separating from people who insist on holding these positions.

It’s therefore a choice of coexistence-and-incoherence. Or coherence-and-disunity.

If all of that weren’t enough, now consider the everyday politics of this. To date [although it may be changing as I type], Vote Leave is largely an extension of the Conservative Party whilst Leave.EU has been largely an extension of UKIP. In other words, they represent an extension of the historic Conservative/UKIP schism under different branding. That’s despite some supporters in both camps being differently aligned. The suspicion and invective leveled at UKIP MP Douglas Carswell when he declared for the ‘wrong’ Vote Leave campaign was instructive.

That plays into the highly charged divide over immigration which doesn’t animate some (and they are quite liberal about it) but definitely animates others. That is a crucial difference between the two camps but also a difference within both camps.

What we are left with is the fact that each camp doesn’t trust the other, and so accusations are thrown around of either being “Tory tribalists who will fall into line” or of being “toxic on immigration”.

Then there is the Leave Alliance who stand aside from and criticise both main camps. Totally aside from the whole Brexit issue, in standard political ideology terms this camp is closer to Conservative Party politics (and so logically to Vote Leave). However the Brexit positions that Vote Leave have taken on EU reform, on the process of exit (attacking and undermining the Leave Alliance’s approach), and on which ‘menu items’ they want to emphasise have made it impossible for the two to work together.

An interesting change in recent days is that of Leave.EU also adopting the Flexcit plan, recast as ‘The Market Solution’, as core to their future campaign. Flexcit is a product of the Leave Alliance. It remains to be seen how that develops, but the solution’s continuation of single market access at the point of Brexit (and therefore of EEA-style freedom of movement) is already driving some UKIP supporters out of Leave.EU in anger. It’s a stark and very topical illustration of the coexistence problem.

Therefore full coherent coexistence across the Brexit movement looks impossible to achieve. In the end, there are likely to be multiple Brexit campaigns that, when looked at in the round, are all things to all people — and that’s even if the different camps manage to achieve the unexpected and unite under one umbrella (or especially if).

The EU referendum could therefore also be a referendum on whether that coexistence approach works.

In my opinion it won’t, but I can’t wholly dismiss the possibility that a single coherent approach within the Brexit movement might emerge during the campaign as the predominant theme. And it may prevail up to voting day. The risk is that it may be the noisiest theme, not the best one.

Gloomy? Yes, a little. But then again the Brexit movement could be saved from itself by someone wholly unexpected…

David Cameron.

Now that would ironic.

For more, now read about the “One-two referendum manoeuvre”.

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