Brexit: How Britain was undone by the religious fervour of a deluded few

In his 1884 masterpiece The Wild Duck, Henrik Ibsen centred a play around the kind of lies that are so fundamental we all but absorb them into our bloodstream. He called them “life-lies.” It could be something we know is not true but need to believe anyway. It could be something we have never even dared question. The point of it is that a life-lie can either destroy our happiness or guarantee our basic identity. The hard part is determining which it will be.

Brexit became the Conservatives’ transcendent life-lie in the summer of 2016. The referendum had been so shocking and disruptive that it seemed to pose almost an existential threat. The government needed to neutralise the danger by accepting the result without any hint of challenge. This fast became a wholehearted embrace. Despite all the evidence, and in direct opposition to everything that the government had promised just weeks earlier, Brexit would indeed make us happier, more prosperous and more globally connected. It would be easy to negotiate a deal and get exactly what we wanted from it. Most important of all, Brexit was the will of the people and as such unchangeable.

In fact, when you examine the language around Brexit, the parallels with religion become unmistakeable. Politicians refer to the referendum result as “sacrosanct.” Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has literally described Brexit as an “article of faith.” And for three years the government has deployed the phrase “the will of the people” as a medieval clergyman might have said “the will of God.” It denotes the definitive end of the argument. It is nothing less than a commandment. The people have spoken, they will not speak again, and we must accept whatever they said.

Why is this a problem? There is nothing intrinsically wrong with religion, and people are entitled to any beliefs they like. Except this isn’t about private worship. Brexit is the country’s overriding preoccupation, driving the central policy of our government and the most sustained period of peacetime political crisis in Britain’s modern history. At any other moment, in any other country, we would ask to see the evidence. In Britain, today, that question amounts to, at best, liberal elitism, and at worst, outright treason.

Brexit has, in this way, been subsumed into the country’s ecosystem. What, ten years ago, operated as a fringe issue, eventually found approval with just over half the population, and then had to be accepted and loved by every person in the land on pain of being labelled unpatriotic, undemocratic or a “citizen of nowhere” who no longer even belonged here. Like a medieval creed, it became unopposable. For months or years, Remainers felt compelled to prove their compulsory new faith, or at least to say that they “respected the result” and would not challenge it. Some who did explicitly dissent—particularly women, non-white people and non-British born—received torrents of abuse and threats. Brexit as both medieval state religion and bible necessarily cast its opponents as either apostates or heretics.

The most politically frustrating element of this new national dogma is that, like all religion, its fundamental text is open to interpretation. Leavers insist they knew what they were voting for, but no one voter can claim to speak for any of the other 17m. Who gets to determine the one true Brexit? Some people insisted we must end free movement; others wanted to emulate Norway and preserve it. One voting bloc prioritised free trade deals; another had no interest in them at all. The proof that we don’t know what people voted for is that even Brexit-supporting Tory MPs can’t decide what they want three years after the vote.

The consequence is that there could, demonstrably, never be a “true” Brexit at all. A small group of people had to choose from its many possible permutations and then codify it. This group—the government—comprised not so much holy priests as fraudulent cultists. Without ever attempting consultation outside her own circle, the prime minister decided that she alone could dictate the people’s will and translate it into workable policy. Her comprehensive defeat on three separate occasions illuminates the folly of human beings assuming divine power.

The worst manifestation of this arbitrary religion appears in the form of no-deal. Specifically, the people themselves—the ultimate authors and arbitrators of our new bible—show no signs of approving it. Certainly, nobody discussed a no-deal scenario in 2016, and indeed Leave campaigners promised a superior deal negotiated at rapid speed. Even now, polling suggests that only a third of the population supports a cliff-edge outcome. Yet that doesn’t seem to matter. Article 50 has been triggered, and the Tory leadership candidates all promise that they will not extend it any further. As with an act of God, we are deemed powerless to prevent the chaos.

Why do the Tories persist in worshipping the monster that guarantees less prosperity, less influence and less openness? The two shortlisted candidates for prime minister wish to be the icons of Brexit. Boris Johnson guaranteed its fusion with his career the moment he became its spiritual figurehead, while Jeremy Hunt has in the intervening years scrambled a born-again fervour to advertise his own devotion. Even Rory Stewart, who became the darling of Remainers simply by breaking the taboo on stating basic political facts, found himself unable to contradict the essential Tory creed: Brexit must be delivered, come what may, and regardless of public opinion.

Perhaps the candidates’ explicit piety makes more sense when we see the views of Brexit’s symbolic guardians: the Conservative Party membership. A recent YouGov poll starkly demonstrated how much members are prepared to destroy. Sixty-three per cent would be happy to see Scotland leave the Union, provided Brexit took place. Sixty-one per cent do not mind significant damage to our economy. Fifty-four per cent are even prepared to tolerate the destruction of their own party. This is not just religion, it is fundamentalism. As with all extremist distortions, there is no possibility it may end happily.

Some lies need to be exposed so we can live in greater peace and truth. But others become the bedrock of our existence and daily life. If they fall away, we literally lose the thing we live for. If the government declared that Brexit was, after all, not in the national interest, it might relieve itself of an existential burden, but also guarantee its electoral oblivion. As one of Ibsen’s characters observes in the final act of The Wild Duck, when you take away the life-lie, you take away the life.