This week in Brexitland, December 8th, 2022

Brexit as The Phantom Menace: Why Starmer’s position on Brexit still makes sense when you look at the Tory clown car and how it needs to come off the road

As you may have noticed, I don’t like Brexit very much. I know, I know, I barely ever mention it. Given that, why do I continue to support Labour’s “Make Brexit Work” approach to UK-EU relations? I’m not a Labour member; hell, I’ve never even voted for Labour at a general election. Given how Brexity they have become, why do I not only hope they win the next election by as large a margin as possible, but back their policy on Brexit specifically?

This is a good week to talk about it given Starmer was asked about whether Britain returning to the single market would boost growth. He was pretty unequivocal in his response:

“No, at this stage, I don't think it would. And there's no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market.”

Given his “at this stage” comment, he was asked as a follow up if returning to the single market in the future might be good for Britain. Again, the Labour leader stuck to his guns on this.

“No, I don't think having left…I argued for remain, as everybody knows. We left, and having left, there is no case now for saying 'go back'. And going into the single market and customs union, we've had this debate endlessly over the years, 2016-19, is effectively going back in. I do think that we can have a deal that operates better than the deal that we have got, and that's what I would seek to do. And that's what I mean by making Brexit work.”

Given the above quotes, how can I, as a Remainer of such credentials, support the Labour party on this? There are two reasons: one is the the current state of the Conservative party, the other is where the public is at right now with Brexit. Let’s start with the Tories.

The Conservative party at present is like a friend of yours that has had a severe mental breakdown, leading them to drink two large bottles of vodka, afterwards donning circus clown makeup, and then deciding to drop three tabs of acid. They are currently driving a stolen car that is hurtling down the M25 at 95 miles an hour, all while leaning out the drivers’ side window and shooting out the tires of passing vehicles with their father’s shotgun. For the sake of your friend and more to the point, the general public, this clown car needs to be stopped at all costs. The clown who has had a breakdown needs to be put in the drunk tank and sobered up so that the process of healing can begin. Who knows, perhaps after a stint in prison, the clown can be reformed.

What I’m saying here is, Starmer needs to do whatever it takes to win the next general election because the further damage the clown car could do is unthinkable. You probably agree with me on this one but disagree on what I’m coming to next, the public’s attitude towards Brexit. Surely the electorate has turned against the project now, so Labour should be able to campaign against it directly and still win the next general election? No, they can’t do that, and to demonstrate why, here’s another analogy.

Brexit is a lot like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. For those of you who were too young to remember the opening of this piece of cinematic turd in 1999, the phenomenon around it needs some explaining. There has never been a movie as anticipated or as hyped as The Phantom Menace in the history of motion pictures. People queued for a week to see it when it opened. There was excitement around the film that I can’t find a parallel for; it was unrivalled, before or since. It was a quasi-religious experience.

The problem was the quality of the film itself. It was 2 hours and 13 minutes of utter nonsense featuring a racist cartoon rabbit, an annoying kid actor who says “Yippie!” a lot, a bad guy who is in the movie for about four minutes and has one line of dialogue. Oh, and the film doesn’t even have a protagonist. I could go on and on about the fatal flaws of The Phantom Menace, but you get the point. It turned out to be an unbelievably terrible movie.

The viewpoint that The Phantom Menace is one of the worst films of all time is now the widely accepted version of events. But it wasn’t in 1999 and for many years afterward. This is because people had built up such an emotional attachment to the idea of the film, they couldn’t accept how awful it turned out to be when they actually saw it. In fact, I remain convinced that people became much more attached to the film because it was so bad. If it had been merely mediocre, people would have seen through it much more quickly. It’s as if its sheer awfulness allowed people who couldn’t accept that their hopes and dreams had been dashed to see in its chaos a sort of demented genius.

It took many years for this to wear off for a lot of people. For them to have enough distance from 1999 to be able to accept that indeed, The Phantom Menace is one of the worst movies ever made. There eventually came a point when they could not only admit this, but talk about it openly and then even laugh about having ever liked the film in the first place. But if you had tried to get them to fess up to the movie’s absence of quality at any stage when they were still not ready to come to terms with that, say from 1999 to 2004, you would have got denial and perhaps even outright anger from them. ‘You just don’t get it,’ they might have said.

This is why Labour’s position on Brexit at the moment is absolutely the correct one for the times. They can’t say that The Phantom Menace (aka, leaving the EU) is bad yet - too many people aren’t ready for that truth bomb. Instead, they are proposing something akin to The Phantom Edit. This was a cut of Episode 1, done online by fans, which took the supposed worst bits of the movie out - all of Jar Jar Binks, huge portions featuring the annoying kid - in an effort to make the film “good”. At that stage, a lot of people still felt that Phantom Menace could have been great or at least okay, so long as you fixed certain elements of it. The Phantom Edit eventually helped everyone heal a little by demonstrating that, even when you took the very worst bits of it out, it’s still a crap movie with a plot that makes zero sense. There is simply no way to make it good.

Pro-European campaigning against Labour’s position on Brexit should begin in earnest the day after they get a huge majority. Once the clown car is off the road and there is space for a rational discussion about this issue again, let’s go for it. However, while the clown is going 95 on the M25 and waving a gun around, all anyone should focus on is the clown. Once it is no longer a pressing concern, we can start to get people to see that The Phantom Menace (aka Brexit) is a horrendous piece of shit and consider next steps. But a Labour version of The Phantom Edit almost certainly needs to come first before enough people begin to change their minds. Starmer needs to attempt to edit the worst bits out of Brexit so that everyone can then see there is no merit in it whatsoever, whatever you do to it.

If you try and push people on this before they are ready, they will react negatively. Never underestimate how important certain things are to people’s stable view of the universe. Until enough voters lose their attachment to Brexit as something that will come good eventually, you cannot convince them it’s a terrible idea, no matter what arguments you produce. Remainers time will come again. Be patient. And give Starmer a break in the meantime. And avoid The Phantom Menace or even The Phantom Edit.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.