As the fifth anniversary of the 2016 referendum approaches, the bereavement of Brexit is worse even than then. At least then, like the patient given a dire prognosis, there was hope that the treatment would mitigate the disease and the whole thing might turn out a bad dream. Now we just have the calamitous reality of the divorce from our own continent, day after day.
It is defeatistly fashionable, even among some of my friends, to say that we have to make Brexit work, not to seek to reverse it. Focus, they say, on mitigating a few bits of Johnson’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Don’t reopen old wounds. Don’t attempt the impossible. Don’t, for goodness sake, agitate to rejoin. Change the subject.
I fundamentally disagree. This isn’t a death which cannot be undone, but a serious political mistake which can and should be rectified. It is a case not of bringing Lazarus back to life but of telling Johnson, Farage, Gove and Cummings to get lost. A great democracy and a great people which can’t do that can’t achieve anything much.
I understand that some of my political friends, including the leaders of great political parties, are suffering from political PTSD. They lost the 2019 election; they think that Brexit is a reason why they lost, maybe the reason, particularly in the so-called Red Wall; and they can’t face continuing the struggle.
The cure for this pervasive defeatism is to consider, and weep, every day about what we have lost and why we lost it.
What we have lost is not a small thing that can be made up in other ways or be foregone without much pain or cost. We have lost a fundamental part of our freedom, our economy and our identity.
We have lost free trade with Europe, and we are losing a large part of our enterprise with Europe. We have lost European citizenship—the automatic right to travel, work, study, reside, conduct business and forge relationships across Europe. We have lost a prominent seat in the European Council, the governing body of the political union which now embraces every major European nation besides ourselves. We have lost membership of a host of European partnerships which enriched our lives, boosted our prosperity and made us safer, from Erasmus student exchanges and the Galileo satellite navigation scheme to the European arrest warrant and reciprocal schemes for health, goods and travel insurance.
Until we regain these losses, we will be relatively impoverished and relatively less safe; we may go into a systemic national decline as in the 1950s and 1960s, when we last made the mistake of refusing to engage with France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium in the original European Economic Community. Now that Britain has definitively lost its empire—for all Johnson’s ludicrous ‘Empire 2.0’ posturing—while the EU includes Ireland to our west, and virtually the entire European continent to our east and south, the mistake is vastly greater.
The reason why we lost all this was not because of the decided will of the British people, after comparing the benefits of EU membership with the costs of Brexit. On the contrary, because of a chronic failure of the opposition parties and sensible Conservatives to unite properly at Westminster in the post-referendum hung parliament 2017-19, the British people were not granted the necessary second referendum to make this judgment after the close initial vote of 2016 which started the Brexit process.
Above all this was a leadership failure. The 2019 election was not an election primarily on Brexit, but rather on whether Johnson or Corbyn should be prime minister—and there was never much doubt as the outcome of that contest. Corbyn’s non-leadership on Brexit was a constant factor in the unfolding disaster at every stage, from the referendum campaign in 2016 until the passage of the Withdrawal Agreement in 2019 without a referendum.
As for now-disgraced David Cameron, who called the 2016 in-out referendum, it still beggars belief that he did so when there was little demand for it outside the Faragist right, and without even placing an “out” proposition on the table or providing for an effective democratic process in the case of an “out” vote. So a narrow majority fell prey to silly lies—“£350m more a week for the NHS”—painted on the side of a bus, propagated by a clown-leader, Boris Johnson, who only adopted the leave cause as a Tory ploy to usurp Cameron from No 10. And without any exit from Brexit once the bus careered out of control.
Behind all this was a much longer and deeper leadership failure. Austerity after 2010. A failure to make the case for Britain’s place and opportunities in Europe over many decades. A failure to tackle the regional inequalities and lack of jobs, skills and industry which underpinned disillusion in the “Red Wall”—and which will be made worse still by Brexit.
The imperative now is for good leadership to replace bad leadership. And there is no credible post-Covid-19, post-Johnson plan for a better Britain which does not require a fundamentally closer relationship with the European Union, moving step by step towards rejoin.
This is a classic case of John Dewey’s dictum that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” That’s why I was glad to become chair of the European Movement last month. Founded by Churchill after the Second World War, its mission is to realise Britain’s European destiny. Never has that been more timely or more necessary. Banish the gloom.
