The biggest reason why Brexit has failed is a tricky one to approach, from both sides of the Brexit debate. I’m going to give it a try The Brexit divide refuses to heal. Despite what they assume, this is the Brexiters’ fault. As the winners of the referendum, it was up to them to also win the peace; to establish Brexit as the new norm. They have singularly failed to achieve this, mostly because they have never tried. “Liberal tears” were just too enticing to pass up, even if it meant dooming the long-term future of the project. To be fair, Brexit has always been more of an oppositional thing - even now, more than three years after we’ve left, the Brexiters can’t help but talk about the “Remainer establishment” and how Brexit is constantly being sabotaged by some “blob” or another. I don’t think they know how to accept victory and move on. I think they are phobic of success.
Good article - I agree with all of it. I'd add that structurally Brexit was doomed to fail for another reason too. The remain argument tried to unite support behind a single vision. The leave campaign ran multiple, contradictory campaigns, promising to fix a range of ills that were unrelated to our relationship with the European Union. And even those issues that were related to it were to be resolved in mutually incompatible ways.
Big election campaigns will always target specific messages to different groups of voters, and won't generally seek to disabuse voters who've positively assumed their party's position to be one thing if it's actually something different. But there is normally some degree of balance and internal compromise. The Brexit vote was a coalition of groups with fundamentally incompatible policy desires.
The only possible way to have 'made Brexit work' was, post referendum, for the winners to have sought to bring the whole country together around what would in practice have been a 'soft Brexit', or at the very least would have involved a series of national conversations that were genuinely inclusive and which might conceivably have resulted in something close to a consensus forming around a harder version of Brexit. But of course, most of the winners had no interest in doing this, largely because they knew Brexit was an opportunity to advance positions that would never receive majority support. I think this links back to your point about the UK being structurally incapable of making Brexit work: we lack the political architecture that would have made this possible. A minority of hard Brexiteers were able to deliver a Brexit harder than anything that would have been possible had our political system been more representative.
As a shallow US observer, I say it seems not so much that Brexiters are afraid of success as they are incapable of imagining what it looks like. My initial reaction to the whole thing was "wow, that's a really big job". Leaving the EU starts with re-negotiating a host of relationships, and then reviewing, evaluating, and possibly redoing several hosts of regulations, agreements, and laws. A huge complex task, even if done haphazardly. Everything I've read sounds like they didn't even get how big a job it would be, and they're still in denial over that. It seems there may be limits to muddling through.
Good article - I agree with all of it. I'd add that structurally Brexit was doomed to fail for another reason too. The remain argument tried to unite support behind a single vision. The leave campaign ran multiple, contradictory campaigns, promising to fix a range of ills that were unrelated to our relationship with the European Union. And even those issues that were related to it were to be resolved in mutually incompatible ways.
Big election campaigns will always target specific messages to different groups of voters, and won't generally seek to disabuse voters who've positively assumed their party's position to be one thing if it's actually something different. But there is normally some degree of balance and internal compromise. The Brexit vote was a coalition of groups with fundamentally incompatible policy desires.
The only possible way to have 'made Brexit work' was, post referendum, for the winners to have sought to bring the whole country together around what would in practice have been a 'soft Brexit', or at the very least would have involved a series of national conversations that were genuinely inclusive and which might conceivably have resulted in something close to a consensus forming around a harder version of Brexit. But of course, most of the winners had no interest in doing this, largely because they knew Brexit was an opportunity to advance positions that would never receive majority support. I think this links back to your point about the UK being structurally incapable of making Brexit work: we lack the political architecture that would have made this possible. A minority of hard Brexiteers were able to deliver a Brexit harder than anything that would have been possible had our political system been more representative.
As a shallow US observer, I say it seems not so much that Brexiters are afraid of success as they are incapable of imagining what it looks like. My initial reaction to the whole thing was "wow, that's a really big job". Leaving the EU starts with re-negotiating a host of relationships, and then reviewing, evaluating, and possibly redoing several hosts of regulations, agreements, and laws. A huge complex task, even if done haphazardly. Everything I've read sounds like they didn't even get how big a job it would be, and they're still in denial over that. It seems there may be limits to muddling through.