Brexit: 128 Days Later
At 6am on June 24th this year I was not in a good mood. This was partly because I had only gone to bed at 4am; but it was mainly because whilst it was still getting light I watched David Dimbleby announce that 52% of people who’d bothered to turn up the previous day had voted to leave the European Union. Thus 2016’s ugliest portmanteau was set in train. Brexit was nigh. Within 10 minutes of this announcement Nicola Sturgeon had begun discussing the need for a second Scottish referendum and Martin McGuiness was calling for a united Ireland.
This was not going to be a good day.
It is now 128 days later. We haven’t had a zombie apocalypse (yet) but I thought I’d take some time to reflect on what has happened and what it might mean.
As anyone who had the misfortune to be anywhere near Facebook at the end of June (or most of July) will know I was really not happy about this thing lazily called “Brexit”. It just wasn’t that I had lost (that has happened in all bar one of the major elections I’ve participated in) it was that I felt the country was making a huge, unnecessary mistake. I don’t subscribe to the view that all those who voted to leave are benighted bigots — that would be unimaginably depressing. Instead I save my chagrin for the willingness of the chief Leave campaigners to lie and fabricate for the sake of winning an argument. They behaved like defining the future of a nation was equivalent to winning an Oxford Union debate. Some things perhaps got a little heated and “creative” at times but that was just parts of the undergraduate japes.
I was also really afraid of what was going to happen next. I couldn’t for a second buy the faux triumphalism of Boris Johnson’s nonsensical Independence Day. I did the same as millions of others and filled my particular social media echo chamber with long-winded, sarcasm-laden rants to try and make me feel better. It didn’t work.
These feelings have mellowed a bit, partially from exhaustion, but they haven’t disappeared. There was the distraction of Team GB winning shed loads of medals at the Rio Olympics but even that didn’t do much to diminish the underlying sense of dread and disjunction.
It’s (nothing to do with) the Economy, stupid
I’ll start with the economic impact because, as Bill Clinton’s well-worn campaign phrase implies, this is where all politics starts. As with everything else the two sides were divided, each trying to out-do each other in the build up with wilder claims. Neither has been 100% right but the Remain vote did have one distinct advantage: the considered opinion of every single economic expert ever. Shockingly (for Michael Gove at least) a lot of what they said would happen started to actually occur. This was great for people who liked to be proved right but not great in any actual sense.
Those things that react quickest to any news, the financial markets, fell off a cliff. Companies such RBS (84% of which we still inconveniently own) with big exposure to the UK lost billions of pounds of value, and sterling became cheaper within 48 hours than it had been for a generation. This was spun as a good thing by some Brexiteers but, outside of FX speculators and hedge funds, there are really very few winners in such a rapid sell off.
Of course this panic was never going to last and eventually Mark Carney (a.k.a. the only adult left in the room) managed to assuage fears for long enough to prevent a meltdown. Since then both sides have claimed vindication. The pro-Leave media have talked up a “post-Brexit boom” citing the rising FTSE 100. This conveniently fails to explain the effect of currency movements on multinational companies with a large non-sterling revenue base, or the low rate environment that has caused equities to structurally outperform fixed income. But obviously that not important because who wants to be lectured to by an expert anyway?
What this also ignores is the fact that our currency is now the cheapest it has been since before I was born and is yet to reach its floor. The UK government has lost its once-vaunted AAA credit rating. Things are more likely than not to be markedly more expensive in supermarkets next year. None of these things sound like good news because none of them are.
Overall confidence in the economy is also at rock bottom. The IMF’s most recent set of revisions demonstrate this perfectly. On the one hand the economic performance of the last three months seems unaffected. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given the UK hasn’t actually done anything yet to move any closer to formally leaving the EU. The more concerning half of the report was that itslashed the 2017 forecast from 2.1% growth to 1.1%. That sounds so innocuously small but it is actually a huge revision. That means the UK economy is performing way less than half as well as it had three months ago. 2.1% and 1.1% is the difference between creating new jobs and opportunities or not. 1.1% means a continuation of the stagnation that has plagued my generation for the last 6 years and caused “wage growth” to seem like a cruel oxymoron.
This revision also hints at how the economic ramifications of Brexit might play out. George Osborne described voting to leave as akin to “putting a bomb under the economy” and, as often, he was a bit wide of the mark. Instead, after the initial explosions, it would appear our economy might just slowly deflate rather than pop — not with a bang but a whimper. Last week Britain quietly became the world’s sixth biggest economy, losing the fifth spot to France. If measured by GDP per capita we come in at a world-beating 40th. Not quite the exceptionalism you’d proudly put on the side of a bus.
All change at the top?
Economic machinations are serious but they haven’t been the thing to dominate the summer news cycles. Far more headline grabbing was the bloodbath that ensued at the top of British politics. Most unsurprisingly David Cameron threw in the towel within moments of realising stuff was about to get real hard. He has since left Parliament entirely to pursue a life of causing less damage than achieved in office. Slightly more surprisingly it wasn’t his Conservative party who were most upended by the outcome of the vote. Despite cabinet level splits, decades of bad feeling, and the fact millions of the membership voted against their leaders, the Tories did what they do best and ruthlessly exploited a crisis. Twitter, Buzzfeed, and the other sites that rely on a manufactured sense of constant activity finally justified their existence as everything changed on a minute by minute basis.
Despite this flurry of activity, the result wasn’t nearly as revolutionary as many initially predicted. The most enigmatic long-standing senior member of the cabinet was elevated to Prime Minister without any recourse to a popular vote — some things are after all too important to leave to the plebeian voting public — and a swift dismantling of the orthodoxy of the past six years was over before most commentators could say regicide. Within days our new Prime Minister was declaring her devotion to Brexit with all the zealotry of a convert and assembling a cabinet that wasn’t even trying to appeal to the long-forgotten centre ground. Making a speech about the necessity of compassionate social justice whilst installing Priti Patel as Secretary of State for International Development marked a new zenith in Tory party double-speak.
The same climate of exploitative efficacy did not infect Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. In an excellent demonstration of his general leadership style he stood idly by pondering the legal mechanisms of Brexit whilst his shadow cabinet melted away and 4 in every 5 of his colleagues declared they had no confidence in his authority. With a disinterested shrug he let them get on with opposing him, all the while confident the rank and file of what is increasingly “his” party would vote for him regardless. His confidence was well-founded and after an ugly three months of leadership “contest” he swept back to power with an overwhelming mandate from 0.6% of the British voting public. The Labour Party is currently doing its best to prove that the fact everyone you know agrees with you can disguise the fact that perhaps you happen to know everyone who agrees with you
Finally, the agitator-in-chief, Nigel Farage MEP, walked away as soon as possible. He rightly recognised he had no capacity to operate as constructive force. Instead he appears smugly satisfied to leave half the country reeling and his erstwhile party literally brawling in the corridors. In an act of defiant hypocrisy especially reserved for rich, white, middle-aged men he continues to draw a significant salary from the European Parliament and was last seen at the German Embassy applying for citizenship courtesy of his wife’s heritage.
All this leadership tumult has somewhat masked the fact that the occupants of top table have a momentous task ahead of them. The dimensions of that task have started to emerge over the last month. It is increasingly clear that it will be a straight fight between those who want the best possible economic settlement and those who want the tightest possible controls on immigration. Various fantasists, notably Boris Johnson, insist that both are possible but this is patently not true. Even Theresa May accepts this but unfortunately only when talking to Goldman Sachs. Like everything else “success” will be about negotiated compromise. The negotiations proper haven’t even nearly started yet but in our increasingly rapid media climate it is clear that the economic argument is not doing well. Messrs Dacre and Murdoch don’t often write furious op-eds about the need for fair, transparent and economically advantageous trade deals or tariff structures. As soon as someone with an odd sounding name arrives at Heathrow on the naïve assumption they might try to better themselves and enrich one of the most multicultural societies on earth said doyens of the print media start foaming at the mouth. On current evidence the new government are more than willing to play to this disparity.
The end of the liberal?
To predict what comes next with any certainty would be as foolhardy as those who claimed clairvoyance before vote, or promised we’d be cashing cheques for shiny new NHS equipment by now. It is also probably the case that whatever does happen will be a relatively gradual process rather than a shock. That however shouldn’t distract from what a huge change the result in June was and will continue to be. Unpicking four decades of carefully considered legislation is not something to be undertaken lightly. Neither is trying to heal the rift that has opened between those who voted on opposing sides.
Endless diagnoses have been written trying to puzzle through “what caused Brexit?” There is no consensus but what is overwhelmingly clear is this was not just about the European Union. The vote became a proxy of a raft of other issues, feelings and frustrations that had little if anything to do with membership of a supra-national political union. The vote to leave will take us out of that union indefinitely but it also starkly highlights the fact that many in our country, and a small majority of those who voted, don’t feel the current social contract is working for them.
Regardless of your politics this should be a source of profound reflection. You might believe that the state is the fundamental bedrock of progress or something that should get out the way of free enterprise. You could want a redistributive tax system or one that minimises the burden on “wealth creators”. Perhaps you consider yourself to be “left” or “right”. It doesn’t really matter because surely everyone can agree the aim should be a system that guarantees the maximum possible benefit to the maximum possible number. The status quo is not doing that. My deepest fear is that the government that has been hastily assembled in the wake of the vote will only succeed it exacerbating and deepening the cracks that currently exist. The answer should never be the rhetoric of division and disenfranchisement. The 48% who voted to remain cannot be cast as a disconnected “liberal, metropolitan elite” unable to understand “ordinary people”. Similarly, we cannot start creating lists of those born overseas and discouraging immigration under the false pretence that it is undermining our future. Isolationism and protectionism have never worked before and have never been less like to work than in today’s globalised world. We are all global citizens and to deny that to score points is utterly disingenuous.
In the month following the referendum hate crimes rose by 41%. This is a number that should stop everyone in their tracks. That isn’t an arcane statistic about fluctuations in financial markets or public perception to political figures. This is a number constituted of hundreds of individually shocking events. This is the rise in the number of people verbally abused because of the colour of their skin or sound of their voice. Its people being told to “go home” when the pub around the corner from where they’ve lived and worked their entire lives. This is the systematic targeting of the Polish community — the same community whose forefathers gave their lives in their hundreds to defend this country from the sky the last time we faced an existential threat. This rise cannot go unnoticed, it cannot be seen as the natural consequence of anything, and it cannot become the new normal.
My angry, upset reaction to the outcome of the referendum wasn’t because I have an undying love for the bureaucracies of Europe. I love the European continent and feel a deep affinity with many of its places and it people. But I passionately disagree with much of The European Union’s recent policy — most obviously the brutal and utterly unnecessary imposition of hard-line austerity on Southern Europe.
My determination to remain was born of the fact I’ve always believed that being part of something bigger was better than not. That this passionate disagreement was a vital part of reforming an institution from the inside rather than running away. That looking out was better than looking in. The vote in June felt like a severe blow to that vision but I will not allow it to be the death of it. Perhaps the most positive thing I can take from the otherwise chastening experience is that it removed any vestiges of doubt about the necessity of becoming more politically engaged. In the month after the referendum I had more conversations about politics, with more people, than I had done in the previous 28 years. Many of those conversations are still going.
Even this quite low level of political engagement can be exhausting, especially when you feel you are swimming against the current, but I think it is more necessary than ever. I will never again complacently assume that because I think something it must be the majority opinion. I will do my utmost to understand and engage with the perspective of those who don’t live in the same bubble as me or occupy my social media echo chamber. Most importantly of all, I will not stand idly by and allow “liberal” be turned into a pejorative term by those trying to construct a false villain. I am a liberal because I believe Liberalism is the ascendancy of knowledge over ignorance, tolerance over bigotry, and progression over regression. Liberalism is not a passive stance. It is, according to the pre-eminent political figure of my lifetime, “a belief in radical change made through practical measures”. This feels like the perfect time to pursue that radical change.
