If Soft Brexit is impossible, it’s Vote Leave’s fault.
written ages ago — so a little dated
Dan Hannan is puzzled. “Why”, he asks over and over, “are people who used to want to stay in the EU now arguing for a much more severe exit than I, a leaver, ever wanted?”
He has one theory, but it speaks badly of remainers. To paraphrase: “Maybe it makes sense remainer converts are going for a hard brexit — they have a fundamentally low opinion of leave voters. They’re elitists who think leave voters were all horrible racists motivated solely by immigration. If they had more respect for people they’d be trying to reach a middle ground (like mine!) that the majority of leavers and remainers would be happy with.”
The thing is I don’t think it’s odd at all that former remainers have rushed past Hannan to harder Brexits. This is a reaction to the fact Vote Leave left almost no where else for them to go. Serious politicians don’t have the luxury of ignoring what the campaign actually said.
Key here is that plastered on the side of the bus (and everywhere else they think to put it) was the idea that we could get £350 million a week back from the EU. Sometimes this was “we could spend it on the NHS”, sometimes they said “should”.
We’re now told that this is an aspiration, an example, that no voters really believed they would do it (tell that to the woman with tears in her eyes at saving the NHS in this video). Gove’s “100 million for the NHS” in his leadership campaign was I think is a reasonable attempt to make this promise concrete.
Ignoring the fact that there never was £350 million to get, let’s take Vote Leave as their vaguest here — this was a promise that we could get a lot of money back, and we would spend it on something better than the EU.
The problem with this promise is that any other exit than a hard brexit means we will not get anywhere near a large amount of money. Norway (of Norway model fame) pays less than we do per capita*, but it’s not a massive reduction from our starting point. We will never get £350 million back and on any arrangement where we continue to make some form of payment we won’t get anywhere near £100 million back. If you’re in favour of the Norway model (like Hannan is) and were part of Vote Leave (like Hannan was) you have to grapple with the fact that the promise of Vote Leave stands against it.
If Vote Leave hadn’t made promises about getting lots of money back and immigration going down it would be much much easier for mainstream politicians to be drawn to the centre of the argument. But they did make those promises, and this made it extremely difficult for someone from the mainstream to stand up for softer brexits without immediately being attacked as betraying the vote.
This isn’t underestimating leave voters, it’s not making assumptions that 52% of voters are solely motivated by immigration — it’s simply that all other positions are unstable. They weren’t inherently unstable, Vote Leave made them that way. For all we can argue that we weren’t electing Vote Leave and their promises have no formal value — neither really do regular manifestos except as a constraint on elite behaviour. Technically MPs can always do whatever they want! But they are bound by the beliefs and arguments already in circulation.
To fight this you need a counter-narrative that says Vote Leave was less important than it appears. Hannan’s version goes like this: It was a very close vote! It’s hard to say anyone really got a huge mandate for huge change. We’re in the mandateless middle zone — where no one really won and like a coalition we need to put everyone’s wants and needs on the table and come to a plan that makes everyone happy.
This sounds reasonable, but what it’s really saying is “None of the promises we made need to count”. And this is something I agree with! I think being bound down bad paths because of promises we know were made in bad faith (and that everyone abandoned as soon as the vote was done) is a bad thing to do for the sake of principle.
But this argument also makes me really angry, because I like my principles. I think referendums aren’t inherently bad, I think sometimes there are cosy elite consensuses and we need mechanisms to break them. I think of myself as a “democrat”. Asking the people what they think about difficult issues isn’t inherently wrong, isn’t inherently disastrous. But it needs responsible campaigners who act in good faith.
Hannan doesn’t understand why remainers are furious when he talks compromise (I’m trying to give them a deal they’ll like!) but it’s simple: promises are supposed to mean something and he wants us to help Leave break theirs. And if it doesn’t work one way or another it’ll always be remainers fault —we either betrayed the good Brexit or failed to side with the correct faction to deliver the correct Brexit. What’s more — the instant there is any move towards compromise the liberal leavers get very suspicious! There fundamentally isn’t good faith here.
Our current problem isn’t just the result of a lack of imagination of former remainers in government, but the result of decisions taken by Vote Leave to prioritize winning over leaving a viable plan if they did so. They changed the facts of British politics. And to be told by someone who in the room that this isn’t the case and we can just ignore everything that happened (except for the bit he likes) is infuriating.
*Any ‘um, actually’ about funds going direct to various govs and projects rather than the EU central fund is being obtuse about what was being promised — we’ll spend less abroad to spend more at home.
