This week in Brexitland, February 22, 2024
Here’s the Brexiters greatest weapon against rejoin
I think most people who have regularly read this Substack would agree, I am pretty firmly against Brexit. I still regard it as the single greatest mistake the United Kingdom has ever made. I care about this so much, I have dedicated hundreds of thousands of words to the idea by now, maybe even more than a million (I’m not going to count them all, that would be mad).
I say this at the top here as a preface for what I want to write about today: I’m bored of Brexit. I’m bored of pointing out the obvious flaws in the whole project. Bored of having to constantly indicate all of the promises that were made on Brexit’s behalf that have not come true in the slightest. Bored of hearing about “true Brexit” and the idea that it hasn’t “been done properly yet”.
I’m also bored of the inability of pro-European campaigners to organise in a fruitful manner. To see that there are a group of people on the centre-right who secretly, strongly believe that Brexit has been a total disaster, but dare not speak out because there is no safe haven for them turn to. Bored of pro-European campaigning being a sort of side dish on the left-wing campaign buffet table, somewhere at the back next to equal pay for women and females being barred from studying in Afghanistan, pushed aside by proportional representation and Gaza which sit at the front.
I’m bored of feeling like I see several ways forward, but no one within the limited pro-European bubble will listen. And not just to me - I’m only one bloke at the end of the day - but to anyone who has anything to say which isn’t along the same lines as everything that has been tried and failed since late-2015.
The problem with feeling bored is, that’s where the Brexiters win. They wear down resolve. They bore people like me to death so that I lose the will to keep going with this fight. The case for rejoin is obvious, staring everyone in the world in the face. It requires the Brexiters to throw stuff like pints of wine or glorified jobs fairs in North Carolina up in the air to try and distract everyone from this fact. Yet they have inertia on their side. The fact that trying to remain resistant is exhausting in the face of their weird, nonsensical crap is the whole point of what they’re doing.
I don’t want the Brexiters to win. I don’t want to have to wait until rejoining the EU is unavoidable - I’d like to get there sooner. Yet I’m starting to feel like boredom is going to win the day.
But I’m not giving up. The Brexiters, in their own, bizarre way, make that impossible. They demand that I agree that 2 + 2 = 5. And so long as I am sane, I am unable to verify that falsehood. I don’t know what to do next, but I know that I can never abandon the truth and the search for truth, not just in relation to Brexit, but in relation to everything else as well. The only way to get through the period of disinformation is to remain as wedded as possible to what is actually real.
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A bleak piece, but I think this was always one of the biggest dangers and biggest disasters of Brexit - that it would be so disruptive that it would be difficult to reverse, despite being so obviously the wrong thing for the country and something that was opposed by a higher and higher proportion of the electorate the younger you get.
But at risk of making you feel worse, I think you should re-consider Proportional Representation. I personally think it's vital to the country on its own terms, nothing to do with Brexit, but put that to one side. I think it's actually almost a pre-condition for rejoining the EU.
For one thing, the EU will be far more resistant to (re)admitting a country that could leave again with only minority support. That remains a real danger, and despite the obvious disaster that is Brexit, it's probably now a bigger danger than before. Trump's possible return to power shows that bad ideas can be proven bad and make a comeback in the right circumstances. PR makes it much less likely that a minority can hijack our political institutions.
Secondly, the logic of First Past the Post forces political parties to focus their efforts on a relatively small number of constituencies AND to remove or downplay policies that might upset voters everywhere else. The Lib Dems (my party) are instructive. A PR election in 2019 gave the party an opportunity to go all out on its pro-Europeanism, and it was politically rewarded for doing so. There are many reasons why the party did badly in the following general election, and you might argue that the party learned the wrong lessons, but regardless the party is back to targeting a small number of 'winnable' constituencies rather than seeking a broader mandate for its pro-European policies. FPTP makes pro-European campaigning look politically suicidal for any party that has aspirations to win more than a handful of seats. It's a vicious circle.
And thirdly, this country has a lot of problems, at least some of which are caused by political short-termism. PR is no panacea and no guarantee of better government. But I don't think supporters of FPTP can any longer credibly say that it provides stable or predictable government - at a local or national level. The EU does not require aspiring member states to use any particular form of democracy, but it does require them to meet various criteria. Arguably we don't need to change as much as post-Communist Estonia, Poland or Romania... But I think it would be complacent to assume that our road to becoming a state that meets the accession criteria will be a short one. Our problems mostly pre-date, though have been exacerbated by, Brexit. And they are serious, and are likely to make the journey to rejoining longer and harder than many of us are perhaps prepared for.
If you're against PR, I understand why you'd see this as a distraction (although I don't think you need to worry about Labour introducing it). But I think there's a strong case to be made that PR is one of the steps back to rejoining.
Back in the day I was quite active in the NO2ID campaign. One of the most interesting aspects of that was for me, a former Labour footsoldier who had quit that party over Iraq and then joined the Greens, was working with the local Tories. Some of them I found a bit arrogant, whilst others were quite funny and personable, but the point was that it was a bit of an eye-opened for me to have to see what the view from another side was. And again, Rejoin needs to work with views across the political spectrum. Over and over again I pick up people on sites like the 48% for conflating being pro-Europe with being anti-Tory. To carry on with NT's argument, this conflation is one of the Brexies' secret weapons - whilst the Rejoin Movement of Judea and the Judean Rejoin Movement slug it out the Brexies are laughing up their well-tailored sleeves. I have never backed the Tories in any way, but frankly i feel that I have more in common with the likes of Dominic Grieve or even Michael Heseltine, whom I despised back in my CND days, than I do with Lexies like Corbyn or Mick Lynch.