The five types of Brexiters - and how they explain why Brexit is such a mess One of the things leading Brexiters in the media like to say a lot is that everyone who chose Brexit in the referendum knew exactly what they wanted and what to expect when they voted in 2016. The implication is that everyone who voted for Brexit did so for the exact same reason, which is strange given how many different - and often conflicting - views on what Brexit should be are out there amongst Leavers these days.
I’m guessing this article, which is excellent, is focused on those Brexiters who either inhabit the political circle eg commentators, think tanks, and politicians, but not the ordinary voters, even though they can inhabit those five spaces as well.
What the country has to actually come to terms with before rejoin becomes an option is that the really, really big elephant in the room, actually the invisible mammoth behind the economical-political pachyderm, is immigration.
Immigration is at the heart of the Brexit issue and covers a wide range of spaces.
1. The ‘Too many people’ space
This is the largest group of general Brexiters. They can be from any class, but are largely middle class. They may be immigrants themselves. They work with immigrants, they buy services from immigrants. They even socialise with immigrants. They used to regularly go on holiday to where the immigrants come from. They have friends who are immigrants. BUT you understand they don’t have a problem with ‘those’ immigrants, its all these others coming over and clogging up our public services. Sucking up Daily Mail tropes, finding that the NHS is becoming harder to access (austerity), that their schools have lots of children of immigrants, seeing local services under pressure (austerity) convinces this group that there are too many people in the UK and something must be done. They don’t necessarily agree with the likes of Farage, but they were convinced by good old booster Boris and his ‘had enough of experts’ sidekick that they could have their cake and eat it. We’ll leave the EU, control our borders but pretty much carry on as before, including our twice a year trips to the sun. (Possibly with our immigrant friends)
2. The ‘immigrants are cheating us’ space.
This is the second largest group of Brexiters. Generally they are either working class, or retired working class. They have much less social contact with immigrants and whilst not actively hostile to, for example an Eastern European living next door, their xenophobia is strong and enhanced by what they see as the economic advantage the immigrants hold over them. Immigrants are taking jobs for ‘less money’. Immigrants are claiming benefits. Immigrants are working for cash thus avoiding tax. Immigrants are thereby influencing the economy against us. This group were highly susceptible to the likes of Farage and bought heavily into the idea that Turkey would join and release a fresh horror upon them. Highly dependent on the NHS they were immediately ready to embrace the message on the side of a bus and border control was a must.
3. The ‘we don’t like immigrants thank you’ space.
This group is almost exclusively retired seventy somethings. They worked (hard) all their lives, and have retired, occasionally comfortably. During their working lives they were not exposed to the EU workers, but the Windrush generation and the Asian corner shop. They were in that generation who didn’t like people of colour, because they were different. They didn’t mix with them, and always checked their change twice when served by one. Now they’re retired they find themselves being cared for by a new set of immigrants. White people, nice, but with funny names who suddenly talk rapidly to a colleague in a strange language. This group have children in the ‘Too many people’ space. This means they have many stories to share about the pressure on local services that mean their grandchildren have to learn about Muslims at school. This generation will also tell you that we didn’t fight a war to be….. If you pushed this group into a corner they would be appalled that you might view them as racist, but the fact is they are, either openly or unconsciously. Again they can be very polite to immigrants, and even welcome those that they personally know as carers or providers. But for this group the vote to leave was a no brainer.
4. The ‘we hate immigrants’ space.
A sizeable minority group, across all classes but mainly working class or unemployed (unemployable). Often male, but with a surprising number of women, this group hate immigrants with a vengeance. Almost exclusively racist, they view people of colour as unequal to white people. They also hold prejudices against other faiths, especially Jews and Muslims. They also hold many of the same views as the ‘immigrants are cheating us’ space. Amazingly they often view EU immigrants as brothers in arms against the ‘great replacement’ myth that they subscribe to. Where they have joined a right wing minority, and often minute, political party they will enthusiastically attend events where speakers from the EU holding the same prejudices are the main attraction. However for this group border control was the very, very top issue that they believed could be resolved only by leaving the EU. Many of them also believed that Brexit would mean all immigrants, even those children of immigrants born here, would have to ‘go home’.
Of course these four spaces I personally see are not exclusive and within each space is a spread of intensity of feeling. People in all of the groups are capable of analysing their views and modifying them in the light of new facts, and altering their stance. However this takes time, and needs understanding and nurture to encourage change. The Brexit disaster is focusing almost exclusively on the economic fall out, and the political struggle within the Tory party. Once that elephant has been properly acknowledged or ‘eaten’ we can then tackle the mammoth behind it.
While immigration serves in many countries as a convenient scapegoat to hide governmental failure, there is at least one distinct aspect in the UK not seen elsewhere.
At some point someone created the myth that the EU had somehow control over its members immigration and thus allowed anti-EU agitators to milk the much broader anti-immigrant sentiments.
Maybe that is because the UK is one of the few countries that have no actual immigration control and thus have a much more massive failure to hide than other governments.
Or maybe because people in the UK are less aware (or not at all) how strict and effective some other EU members control their immigration.
In any case the puzzling thing is that this myth is still alive, despite it now being obvious that Brexit spectacularly failed to "improve" anything in that regard.
Chris Grey on his Brexit blog, as well as other journalists (Byline etc.) have pointed out several times that it's only in Britain that Freedom of Movement is mixed with immigration at all, and continental Europeans are continually puzzled by this.
It's not that Germans, French, Scandinavians etc. are less racist in general; but from simply crossing the border for 1 week summer vacation in Italy, to spending one semester abroad while studying with Erasmus, to falling in love and moving across the border, FoM is never seen as immigration.
It is tempting to ascribe this to the specific island geography creating an island mindset - the channel tunnel is still very new; and that most Brits don't have a passport, and GB was not in Schengen, means that a casual travel is a bit more difficult than for continentals, where just driving in your car straight for +4 hours often crosses a border.
And long before Schengen made this easier, people used it:: back in the 50s and 60s, there were "Butterfahrten" - butter voyages, where Germans in the Rhine region took a bus trip to Netherlands to buy butter and other stuff cheaper (Scandinavians still do this for alcohol because of high, but different, taxes in each country), due to different VAT and custom-free for x amount of stuff.
I found it strange to read that on the one hand, Brits mention very quickly how the last time they were conquered was 1066 - then reading Rosemary Sutcliff how one group of people after the other came and settled and married and mixed before. (Plus the weird blindspot that, having no foreigners to fight against, Brits had 3 different Civil wars!)
On the continent, even paying cursory attention to history in school, one running thread is that borders changed every century, because there was a war between reigning houses, long before World Wars displaced millions; e.g. Prussia became strong by accepting French Hugenots, since the King didn't care about confession as long as people paid taxes and boosted economy.
So identity is always overlapping - it's not German vs European, it's Munich and German and European, because it's all our heritage and common culture and where we grew up and which guarantees everybody the UN Human Rights (EU Human Rights Charta added to make it explicit, but it was implicit before), and it's really better that we get along and understand each other and no longer have wars.
Whereas e.g. in Dorothy Sayers crime novels of the Interwar period, there's the same racism against anybody not coming from x generations of English - even naturalized British citizens, who grew up in England, went to school etc. are not really English, but foreign (Have his carcase). Which is weird and sad to read, and much sadder that this hasn't changed in the almost 100 years since for many many Brits.
I think you made a good point about the borders here - that is an "island mentality" thing, because Britain *is* an island, that makes a natural border which doesn't change in the way you describe for continental Europe, where as you say, that means everyone is aware of people who stayed in the same place while the borders moved around them and made them part of different countries over the centuries. You've also got the fact that united Germany and united Italy are both pretty recent, so that difference between "culturally German" and the political entity that is Germany is a real thing for you. There is something of that kind of thing in Britain, but probably more with people from, for example, Scotland, or the North of England, where there are strong regional or country identities and people don't like to be lumped in with the Southern English as if they were all one thing.
I've just recently read a Dorothy Sayers book, but I guess it didn't have any characters of the type you noticed in Have His Carcase - I read "Busman's Honeymoon" which *did* have casual anti-semitism in it where a debt collector character turns up and Peter Wimsey makes some allusion to whether this man might be Jewish. He turns out to have a Scottish name so Wimsey jokes that that is a "difference that makes no difference", because Scots like the Jews are also characterised by a stereotype of being mean, or penny-pinching.
Of course, Rishi Sunak is a perfect example of what you are talking about. Sunak is clearly as British as Boris Johnson, he was born in Britain, and his parents sent him to an establishment posh British private school (Harrow iirc), yet there are conservatives phoning talk shows to express how disturbed they are that he has become their leader, because he's not really "British" is he.
Paul, island mentality a big part of it. Our political culture is also ossified. Germany national government can devolve from the nation to the states, and up to the EU, depending on what's needed.
The UK? We struggle to devolve from London to the regions/cities (London mayor doesn't have tax raising powers), the SW, North, feel totally ignored, Scotland always raging. And as we all know, hated devolving up to Brussels.
Indeed, British govt is set in aspic in Whitehall, minimal transparency (see Windrush scandal, the joke of £37 billion wasted on centralised bogged down Test And Trace during Covid).
A big part of the Leave vote was irritation with opaque Brussels, but also with distant and unresponsive and secretive Whitehall culture.
Ironically, Mr. Remain, Keir Starmer, will address this as he wins in 2024, finally starting to break the stranglehold of Whitehall.
It's certainly the case that a lot of the post-Brexit fallout is resulting in power-grabs from Westminster. This was noticeable in the bill that was notorious for the "breaking the law in a limited sense" debate, where I recall Nicola Sturgeon was vocal that powers which during the EU membership had been devolved to Scotland were basically being re-patriated to Westminster as a side effect of that legislation, and currently, the "bonfire of EU regulations" bill which will automatically destroy thousands of laws if Parliament doesn't have time to scrutinise them properly. One of the problems with that bill is that it allows ministers to make law without parliamentary scrutiny - so there it's not just power devolving to Westminster, it's power moving from parliament to the executive.
Local government has weakened in the UK over the decades, and we do have no comparison to the German federal system.
The British only really have experience with centralised governance as even the current devolution setup is relatively new (compared to countries like Germany, let alone Switzerland).
If you grow up in a nation with distributed governance, especially in a federal union such as Germany or Austria, the concept of having another level of shared governance is nothing extraordinary.
With only experience of full on centralism it is understandable that the primary assumption would be that "all" power had moved from "London" to "Brussels".
As you said a potentially improved distribution of power hinted/suggested by Starmer might ironically also help with understanding of the EU's approach to governance.
At some point the British might even appreciate the difference that in the UK the central government "allows" devolved ones to do something, while in the EU the member governments "allow" the commission to do things.
Essentially an inversion of who holds the power to change the setup.
Anda, we're gonna need to go thru a period of hard adjustment as Leavers like my best friend die off (sorry, V) to drain the toxin, we find better ways to run our democracy, lose our WW2/supremacist mindset, and allow a generation of totally Eurocentric Gen Z to grow up and push for Rejoin.
It'll be up to euroskeptics to prove their case that the UK can prosper.
But I believe that'll be a variation on a Swiss arrangement. And of course, Single Market membership may be a halfway house to a later call to Rejoin.
Very thorough comparison of the difference in mind sets!
I think the term "island mentality/mindset" is often just used as a short cut for "not having to deal with borders unless for vacation travel".
Because Ireland, for example, is also an island but a lot of its people have to deal with border crossing all the time and the rest are still very much aware of it.
This effect was also very visible in the voting behavior across the UK. People directly (or closely) impacted by a border voted to remain with considerable majorities (almost two-thirds in NI and over 80% in Gibraltar).
Ironically Brexit will have increased the number of British who are now aware of the impact of borders on their daily lives.
Fishermen who are now aware that the end of FOM (of goods) means fish needs to be exported rather than just sold.
Similar for farmers who, alongside fishermen, were vocal Leave proponents.
Worse for anyone working for a business that uses a significant amount of components from outside the UK+EU in their products as these can easily run into Rules of Origin limitations and even incur tariffs.
Let alone people working the UK's large services sector.
And even more people who know someone from these groups.
It will be interesting to see if this awareness will persist, maybe even grow, or if the "insular" mindset will regain its grip on British minds.
I think Ireland has a very different mindset because they have for centuries been the victims of English colonialism, so any system where all countries are equal are of course preferable to them of the British system of English master-inferior other countries.
And that so many young urban Brits have overcome this mindset because it was EU that offered a young person from the city blocks the opportunity to work 3 months in Austria ski resort, while GB is still socially stratified so that Oxbridge 1% go on ski vacation, the rest stays put.
So young people experienced how EU puts money to give people from poor backgrounds chances, while GB... gives money to Tory donors.
They meet young Europeans and talking with them, they are all fed up with how old men in government block needed reforms, lack of equality etc., so they have more in common with them than with a British Tory-voting sun-reading pensioneer.
That's true to a great extent. But are the youth of Southern Europe, especially Spain, Italy and Greece equally happy with EU membership. Euro membership hasn't particularly helped endemically high levels of Spanish youth unemployment come down, and I recall massive riots from the youth of Greece as EU and Merkel imposed swingeing austerity a decade ago.
The youth usually has even higher approval rates than the median as they are more likely to make use of or wanting to make use of opportunities like working or studying elsewhere.
I think that is even visible in the UK.
I vaguely remember a report recently that had a significant majority of 16-24 year old in favour of rejoining.
Don't remember the exact numbers but could have been 75% compare to still somewhat 50/50 overall
Yep Anda, Bxt is like a truth serum, a ripping away of the curtain. We're finally going to see our place in the world, how hard it is to keep the cogs running when you throw a rock into the machine.
And critically, no more ability to blame Brussels.
British governments always hid behind the accusation of not getting on with modernising Britain or facing down criticism of immigration by saying "don't blame us, blame the EU"...especially Cameron.
Well, now that fig leaf is removed. We're now on our own two feet with no EU crutch. How long can we stay standing?
MK, you have to see this as the Brits considering themselves "IN Europe, but not OF Europe". Or is that "OF Europe, but not IN Europe"? Basically, the UK never joined the early EEC because of our WW2 history where we were never directly invaded by Germany (despite Battle Of Britain nearly not going our way), so we never "lost" the war, and despite much carnage from Doodlebugs, we didn't have quite the carnage much of continental Europe had. We viewed ourselves along with US and Russia as having been instrumental in winning the war, saving Europe, and thus we didn't need to align ourselves or look to integrate into the new peace project.
And this was mainly the view from the Left, the all powerful Labour Party that won a landslide in 1945 put all it's energy into creating the NHS and Welfare State, and it's paymasters the unions wanted nothing to do with mass immigration, despite of course the Windrush generation effectively helping build early modern Britain from the rubble of WW2. Plus not compromising Commonwealth trade, including agricultural from Australia and NZ. Indeed, what is commonly considered racist attitudes of Leave voters disliking EU migration was mirrored by the Left after 1945 re Commonwealth migration. Xenophobia was not exclusively on the Right. Indeed the Conservative Party saw the benefits to business of migration 70 years ago.
Only when Suez ran an oil tanker thru our national pride did things start to change.
Though the French also won the war; also lost their colonial empire, also brought over cheap workers from their colonies (and fought bloody wars to keep the colonies, yet lost them).
Germany especially started very early the friendship- and school exchange programs both with France - especially because of the Erbfeindschaft = inherited enmity, which nationalists on both sides deliberatly stoked from Napoelon through Prussian-French war to WWI and then WWII - but also with Britain. Hundreds of school kids spent holidays visiting each other - not just to learn English because English is what everybody in the world speaks, or to see Paris and eat good french food - but to overcome the old prejudices and learn to like each other so we'd get along once we were adults.
This "a part, not really belonging" is really weird when compared to France which enthusiastically rebuilt not only their country and modernized their industry, but also went into the Montanunion -peace through economy - because they wanted to avoid another war.
Maybe it is because the Brits also believed in this special partnership with the Yanks, so one foot on Europe, one foot on the American continent?
Was it because of centuries of Britain playing "balance of powers" - deliberatly interfering underhanded on the continent so that no other nation could grow big enough to threaten? (Perfidious Albion - is that why Brits saw spanish/ catholic conspiracies in every corner? Or because it was even back in 17th century easier for the 1% to blame spanish catholics for starting a fire, instead of neglience by authorities and self-interest by the rich hindering the fire-fighting?
I've heard that because Britain was bombed less, they kept their old machinery, while Germany and France had been bombed extensivly (and in East Germany, Soviets had taken machines as reparations) so industry had to build from scratch, which had the beneficial side-effect of having the most modern and efficient machines to start post-war consumer boom and then export.
British socialists as upper-class twits dabbling in theory without ever looking at how it played out in reality and without morphing into social democracy, that is, a moderate version that works, is a very sorry chapter. Even more sad that it didn't die out in the Interwar period, but was chugging til Corbyn!
Here, the social democrats had a long tradition of trying to change the system for people, and unions working with the employers; partly because employers were afraid of revolutions like after WWI, so cooperation was in everybody's interest.
MK, that's a very cogent overview. I have to tell you, apart from the most enlightened middle classes, mainly in London, few in UK had this outlook. I might be wrong on that, but there was never a dialog of enthusiasm on free movement, save for all the au pairs that were now available, and cheap flights to Spanish beaches.
What also didn't help was De Gaulle twice scuppering our applications to join in the 60s, creating real emnity during this period, the theory being that he wanted as irreversible an integration of French agriculture in the CAP, so that Brits entering the EEC would have to sever ties with the Commonwealth for meat, dairy, wheat etc. And battening down the EEC infrastructure of rules, so we had no say in their creation or utilisation. Meaning that in early 70s in finally joining we quickly dropped most of our trade with Australia and NZ. And on joining, we were told this is the club, now we have to accept it, no Q's asked.
That created the first anti EEC sentiment in the late 70s and 80s as I remember news coverage of "wine lakes" and "butter mountains", whilst Commonwealth farmers went to the wall as our £billions of trade dried up overnight.
EEC membership in the UK continued to be seen thru this prism of a club created to suit German manufacturing interests (cars, obviously) and French agricultural interests. And thus there was nothing positive promoted in our media on membership, the increasing mood was that we were in Europe, but apart.
Exacerbated as Thatcher fought her battles to get our membership free rebate, and pushing Brussels in a neo liberal/free market direction away from predominabtly France's socialised/regulated direction.
Thus was set in the 80s and 90s further anti-EEC sentiment that we were funding the French model with no benefit to Brits.
At no point was there any momentum of enthusiasm that travel had opened up, food choice was wider, greater opportunities for our youth.
Certainly I didn't see this, and my personal animus to the EEC only grew in the 70s 80s and 90s.
Whereas in Europe, you were all getting on with cross fertilisation of travel, trade, study and friendships.
Partly I see the purely economic outlook from the Brits "our economy is going down the drain, so if we must, let's join the EU (EC)" which is different from "lets make sure this time that peace through economy works" (because despite nationalists stoking the Erbfeindschaft, there was already a peace initiave after WWI between France and Germany - Stresemann and Briand - which didn't reach enough population).
Partly it's that unholy alliance for over 4 decades of right-wing tabloids and politicans - both Tories and Labour - blaming everything on Brussels to deflect from their own mistakes.
Which ties into the "politics is for gentlemen, not for normal people" attitude that seems to be accepted as normal in British society: Europe had the 68 revolution, which was political both behind the Iron curtain: Prag, Warsaw etc., and in the West and which beyond demonstrations changed society and made a lot of "radical" ideas: feminism, equality, more democracy, widely accepted.
The Brits had the Beatles: yes, good music, but I have not heard of social protests?
Which also ties in that Brits never had a proper revolution: neither farmers revolution like we had during Reformation, nor later for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.
Cromwell's Glorious Revolution, from what I glanced at, was not started by common people, and the goal was not to give power and rights to the common people, but it was still a struggle of the 1%, between nobility via parliament and the King/Monarch.
Which also goes way back, that many Brits boast about Magna Charta being start of democracy because the king lost some rights to the parliament.... that's nothing unusual, kings had privy councils, ministers, senior councils etc. through all of history. King Hammurabi wrote down that the law was above the King (I don't know how much he followed that principle in reality, but at least he said that principle), whereas Britain today still has the Monarch above the law, and all allegiance to the Monarch - not to the principle of Law.
So the Monarch can never commit treason, because he is the Law, whereas in Europe, following the Code Napeolon principle instead of common law, the Law is above all, and treason is breaking the fundamental law.
This principle to the law could apply even if GB has no written constitution, but the whole idea seems foreign even to the anti-monarch/republican-thinking Brits.
I agree that the fabled "special relationship" with the USA and the similar mythical concept of "anglo-sphere" has had held the UK back in realising its potential as a member of the European communities.
It has definitely not helped that British Conservatives, sometimes even Labour, have tried to copy US models for a wide range of policy areas instead of adapting or at least learning from European models.
For example trying (and failing) to control immigration through hostility and at point of entry instead of through diligence and at interaction points between people and state agencies.
Or subjecting workers to a race to the bottom instead of wage security and stability via collective bargaining.
I guess this preference for exploitation and confrontation over partnership and collaboration will, as long as it exists at its current strength, remain a major obstacle to any form of rapprochement with European organisations, nations and their peoples
I have to fully agree, hurtling twds my seventh decade, pretty much Thatcherite in outlook over that time, it's taken leaving the EU and reconciling the phenomenon of small boats landings, to get me to reconsider a lot of previously-held fixed views.
It seems that from the post War lefts antagonism to the European project, to the post Thatcher antagonism to expansion, to long held Anglo Saxon diffidence at best and downright hostility at worst attitudes to influx, we can really be summed up as "in Europe, but not of Europe".
I suspect this will change. I think Starmer is on for a historic epoch making tectonic plates shift at next GE, as Tories are wiped out, including most if not all the hard euroskeptic group of MPs. He will tentatively explore closer ties with Brussels. He'll win big again in 2028, and at this point the Tories will have to go in one of two directions, One Nation, Europe-friendly maybe with Rory Stewart as leader, or RedKIP euroskeptic route likely with Kemi Badenoch as leader.
By early 2030s, the hardcore older Leavers will be dead, and Rejoin momentum will be in ascendancy.
Starmer or whoever is leader will then move to a Rejoin tack, mid 2035 is when it might happen.
I believe that euroskeptic fantasies of Hitler defying independent Brits needing no relations with "defeated" Europe will wholly be replaced by Bxt and the whole euroskeptic movement being deeply unpatriotic, the period 2015-2035 bring viewed by vast majority of population in over a decades time as directly damaging to UK and it's citizens' interests.
Effectively a corollary of the post Suez period where UK had to look long and hard in the mirror.
Yes, it's interesting how from a European perspective, Brits are much closer to US in many important points than to Europeans (which is not a positive thing here)
during the first industrial revolution, the direction it took, with mass poverty (and poverty laws before) was manchester liberalism: let the markets rule everything, no restrictions at all, which was (subconsciously apparently) based on Calvinism's doctrine of what the Yanks now call prosperity gospel: if you're rich and sucessful, it's because God blessed you, so you deserve it, and should not be restricted by laws; so if you're poor, it's because you sinned, are morally bad or just because God doesn't like you, so any help would be useless and wasted.
Which is of course very nice to hear for those who are at the top because they can be as greedy as they want; nice to hear for politicans, because they don't have to try and solve poverty, they can blame the victims instead.
(Yes, I know Britain is Anglican, not Calvinist - but this idea that it's people's own fault for being poor comes from Calvin's idea but is widespread both in UK and USA).
In Europe, while protestant work ethic meant that people should work hard, at end of 19th century scientists did collect a lot of numbers: weekly wage of labourer, weekly rent for a room, cost of a loaf of bread, a kilo of potateos and a liter of milk, and found that the bare cost was higher than the wage (as Dickens did point out in English!), so they lobbied to change the laws. While it was not minimum wage yet, at least social insurance: pensions and accidents, were covered.
Partly from fear of Bismark that because the situation was so bad, full socialists/ communists would gain masses and do a real revolution, so with one hand he made strict laws forbidding anything looking like socialism, with the other hand he generously improved the worst of the conditions.
Because intentions matter less than the outcome: improving conditions worked, and people got interested in social democracy instead, of changing the system without a full revolution.
It's interesting how both Brits and Yanks mention so often early on that their land was "never" conquered, as if this is some great achievement, instead of simple geography, and as if being stuck in an isolated island mindset is someting to be proud of, instead of something that needs to be overcome. (No man is an island ... often-quoted British writer, but a whole nation is okay, apparently).
Another similarity is that, while the time is shifted between when GB was an empire and when US still is, both got used to having wars abroad for their own interests, which the common person wasn't bothered by; whereas the French, while having a colonial Empire, too, when they had a war again with the Prussians/ Germans or anybody else, the common person was directly affected.
Both wars between High Houses, e.g Spain, and wars for ideology/ religion, eg Thirty years war, afflicted many countries in Europe. Also again driving home how much chance influenced which country a person was born in.
Note: Europeans still sadly have racists, about 30% through all of society, but it seems to have broadened. (Even under the Nazis, while Aryans were the Master Race, Aryans were not limited to Germans! Brits, Irish, Scandinavians were also part, everybody not black, not Jewish, not Slavic). So instead of "French/German people are superior to everybody else by virtue of being French" it's "Western Europeans are better than lazy Southeners (Med. people) or corrupt Eastern Europeans, or not-educated lazy Africans, because we have good edcuation, good organisation, good industry". It's not said that explicitly among the non-tabloid reading middle-class, but it's thought so when German Sun, the BILD, prints about "our" money being sent to Greece to help their economy when they're just lazy, too many people agree instead of talking about the real reason - corrupt govt., 1% not being taxed (hits too close to home, and too common among other countries).
Yeah, I think this is right. So many people voted Brexit to "control the immigrants" but EU freedom of movement only affected migration to the UK from other parts of the EU, since it was part of the freedom for EU people to work anywhere in the EU - so the more logical among us found it puzzling that Farage's infamous poster had so many brown faces on it. It has often been pointed out that the result of blocking immigration from the EU is likely to be more immigration from other places, though I guess it's also possible that the outcome will be reduced immigration leading to worse recessions because we don't solve the labour shortage problems.
Anda, can you elaborate further, me and millions more like me are somewhat unaware.
I am cognizant of the fact other EU nations "enforced" free movement way better than we ever did.
From ID cards and employment quotas paperwork that meant individuals working were trackable and big fines for employers breaking the rules and gaming the system, to EU nations absolutely enforcing the small print on permitting free movement rigourously.
Whereas in the good 'ol migration and EU rules skeptical UK, workers drifted in, if they lost work, they likely didn't always return home, many will have slipped into the grey or black economy.
Our more liberal attitudes including no ID cards or work quota documentation meant that the UK, biggest beneficiary of EU migration, care and hospitality and construction fuelled by EU migration, national wealth fuelled by EU migration, also had the most schizophrenic/proto nationalist attitudes to numbers and individuals and nationalities, as our system came to be seen as being full of holes, impossible to police, and easily gamed.
And of course Farage, Hannan and the rest weaponised this over a decade long process leading to 2016.
You have already listed many examples of how EU nations have over the last century developed and instantiated major improvements to their employment laws and immigration systems.
However ID cards are not a very good one because they don't relate to either.
They are essentially just small form factor versions of passports and convenient for daily live identity proof situations (bank, parcel pickup, voting, etc).
What you probably meant is are various forms of residency registration as that provides an interaction between a governmental agency and people who are not (necessarily) employed.
It not only allows for automated checks on things like visa status to be done in regzlar intervals, it also provides means to contact people and make them aware of requirements (e.g. visa renewal) should a change in status be coming up.
While not strictly related to immigration control, it does certainly help that employment regulations are, as you mentioned, actually enforced.
In the UK, especially under conservative government, such rules are often just considered "red tape" and even if kept as law simply ignored and rarely enforced.
And that's not even considering advanced employment laws such as national collective bargaining to prevent wages being undercut by people coming from lower wage countries.
Alistair, my overview of all this is as a "reluctant Remainer > Rejoiner". I fit somewhere in your checklist, but I think you may need another category (or three!). Pride comes before a fall, and on reading responses here from Anda and Münchner Kindl, I'm reminded how narrow and biased my lukewarm view of EU membership was, in particular Free Movement.
So, there is another category for Leavers that needs to be addressed. That's for those like me who saw the cold supranational aspect of the EU, distant law making, endless bureaucracy (monthly trips to and from Strasbourg), and Britain's very specific situation of century-long settled migration figures doubling, and doubling again, in less than a decade of the Single Market/Free Movement ramping up.
My opinion was based (unreasonably or mistakenly, maybe) on a quadrupling of average levels of inflow being unsustainable for wage levels in UK (indeed, British builders took a hit to their wages as Poles and Roumanians flowed in by the hundreds of thousands since 2005), the pressure on non urban communities (a town near where I live has doubled in size in less than two decades, relations between Brits and Poles and Lithuanians there are no model for live and let live).
So, unprecedented population flows, whether it's a myth or fact that this pressurised the NHS, housing, social services, was the corollary to the UK forging ahead in the latter Thatcher era, and especially under Blair (Cool Brittania period), our wealth as a nation surged, and we built built built, and finally filled vacancies in burgeoning public services, agri, hospitality, care, construction.
I guess this is a RedKIP take. That "Global Britain", the result of making full use of Free Movement, Britain fully plugging in and leading Europe economically, also created fragmentation socially, as "forgotten Britain", the Red Wall, what would be described in US as "Flyover America", "the deplorables" were left with underinvestment, fracturing social bonds as thousands of "the other" moved into their rundown towns, took every poorly paid, back breaking job going, and exacerbated disconnect not just with Brussels, but also London and UK government.
The RedKIP take is that wealth creation is not the only measure or should not be the only driver, unique and rapid changes in population couldn't be sustained without some need for counterbalance.
Of course Farage tapped into this, allied with hard euroskeptic MPs, and when Cameron PM couldn't square this circle with his laughable "renegotiation" primarily with Merkel, the die was cast for the 2016 vote.
RedKIPPERS thus view the policy to Leave as justified that the majority of non metropolitan Brits (English and Welsh in particular) never signed into their towns being changed so dramatically, wealth, GDP, economic dynamism could not hold sway exclusively over feelings of inexorable change. And thus if Free Movement could not be ended or significantly modified (it couldn't), then we "must" Leave...
So many thanks for your constructive commentary. I'm interested in your views. However I'm not convinced that I need another grouping/space. My first group 'too many people' covers a huge multitude of issues/concerns/attitudes. I would suggest to you that this very large grouping was giving no thought whatsoever to our membership of the EU before the 2015 election. That only changed as a result of Cameron's weakness and lack of strategic planning. Cameron had no idea how to win the 2010 election other than not being Gordon Brown and I think was very shocked by the hung result. He therefore approached 2015 in a complete funk that UKIP would/could decimate his blue shires vote and responded with a badly thought through promise of a referendum.
It was only once that particular cat was out of the bag that the leaver's opinions began to be heard more loudly amongst the 'too many people' group and the thinking that the EU was possibly a bad thing began to take hold. You can then follow this with the "the cold supranational aspect of the EU, distant law making, endless bureaucracy (monthly trips to and from Strasbourg), and Britain's very specific situation of century-long settled migration figures doubling, and doubling again, in less than a decade of the Single Market/Free Movement ramping up." And, all of that only began to be talked about during the referendum period, by the biggest leavers group, as most of them were certainly not worrying about it before.
BUT, my point is that all of that thinking was dwarfed by the 'too many people' effect. Nobody in that group was voting out because of distant law making, or unelected officials. They just agreed, because it was a discussion point, that too many foreign voices were being heard on their high street, and they were unable, or unwilling, to see that Tory austerity had crushed their public services regardless of who was actually using them. And I have to stress again that they were NOT expecting anything to really change. Because they were told, again and again, that it wouldn't.
With regards to the 'red wall' voters, they include all of the four spaces on immigration. But, probably the second group of 'immigrants are cheating us' had a larger presence, and a louder voice. On top of that the 'immigrant haters' and their political movements targeted those voters, fanning the flames of the debate with their vitriol, even if they didn't benefit at the ballot box.
Finally, I'd like to repeat my central point. I don't care about distant law makers, or straight banana stuff, that particular elephant in the room is dwarfed completely by the enormous mammoth of immigration. We need to have a very honest and healing conversation about that subject before we can think about rejoining any part of the EU. And, that is why Keir Starmer is avoiding any talk of single market membership or anything else which might be a softer Brexit position, because he knows full well that great big hairy mammoth is still there in the background and one day will have to be eaten.
Alistair, I mostly agree with you. You're talking to someone who fitted at least a couple of your categories.
I believe the constant promises in the 2010 GE to keep annual immigration to the "tens of thousands" ie no higher than 99,999...pretty much agreed by all three parties (who can forget all those "I agree with Nick" replies from Cameron and Brown), set an impossible pressure.
And then when Cameron/Clegg presided over immigration figures 3-5x higher than the maximum they all promised, and Farage turbocharged UKIP to laser focus on Tory seats in the 2015 GE, Cameron caved to the euroskeptics in his party.
One of the great ironies being that a clear majority of the 300-500k annual influx numbers were non EU migrants, the very group that the British govt COULD say no to (no Free Movement from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ghana, Philippines etc). But of course saying no to brown and black people from outside EU and yes to white people from inside EU would be viewed rightly as racist.
So Cameron cornered himself in a trap of his own making, and then sprung it.
He decapitated himself voluntarily and then the Tory Party with the willing participation of the British people went on to spring a bigger trap on themselves.
And thus Cameron's tactic to prevent maybe a half dozen defections to UKIP and avoid another Hung Parliament in 2015 with his policy announced in 2014 for the referendum will mean that a decade later in the 2024 GE, Cameron not only didn't stop the termination of 6 Tory MPs, but likely will facilitate the termination of hundreds, and effectively the termination of the world's most established and over time most brutally successful election machine, the Conservative And Unionist Party.
I think lack of planning and investment by local government is a much larger contributor to all of these pressures experienced by people.
Given that this has hobbled the UK for decades before EU membership it is troublesome that the population would suddenly believe the excuse that its "Brussel's fault".
Especially since EU funds were helping regions that were totally ignored by "London".
We'll how this develops when it becomes undeniable that the Leave promises to match these investments are inevitably broken.
Interesting. Where do you fit the immigrants who in large number voted Leave (Indian resteraunts owners in Leicester and Bradford etc). And the sizeable votes for racist or racist-adjacent parties in EU...Front Nationale, AfD, Swedish Democrats, various competing parties in Italy, PiS, Orbans bunch.
I think if you had Leave/Remain referenda in all these countries, you might be horrified how close to Leave the vote would be helped by the supporters of these parties.
Actually, the opposite happened: during the run-up to the Referendum, there was a lot of talk about FRexit, because Marie Le Pen rode the anti-Brussel wave (less immigration, more general dissatisfaction), then Italian right-wingers joined, and a few worried about Domino effect.
Then Leave "won", May drew her red lines (without any consultation or thinking) - and immediately, Support for FRexit and all other -exits collapsed: if you plot the poll numbers in France, Sweden, Italy, etc., the numbers rose to 40% and more, then collapsed back to 20%.
Then it went worse, bungling the negotiations, experts spelling out all the iceberg = invisible details under the surface that make current modern life possible: which 99% of Europeans never thought about before, either- "of course" airplanes fly to other countries and Spanish tomatoes are in the supermarket, but a honest detailed article on what makes it possible and how easy it can be broken (even before Corona showed how disrupted supply chains look like for everybody) was interesting, shocking and made some people appreciate all that invisble work that upholds our normal modern life.
And the total bungling, the slide from Soft Brexit to Hard Brexit, showed even a lot of moderate anti-Brussel Europeans, that the actual -exiters were ideologues both in denial of reality and having no plan whatsoever at all (because they prefered their sunlit uplands, and if you refuse to accept reality, you can't plan for it).
That cooled a lot of moderate people and made them reject -exit.
Potential Leave groups in other EU countries have a much harder time to milk the anti-immigrant support because people are much more aware that immigration is not related to EU membership.
Anti-EU themes are much more along the lines of "control of our laws" then "control of our borders" because everyone really likes the absence of burdensome union internal borders.
Land borders - and their removal - have a much higher impact on daily live for people living in continental EU countries and the absence of such obstacles has thus much higher value.
It helps that none of the continental countries rely solely on point of entry checks for their immigration control, so not having those (or only on EU external borders) doesn't impact their country's effectiveness in implementing immigration policies.
When it became apparent that Brexit was not going well, it was thus easy for the populists to drop any mention of EU exit because their core anti-immigrant support was not affected by that.
After 5 years of watching the UK writhe in agony as it tries to rescue itself from the Brexit torment you might be vastly overestimating the enthusiasm for ‘leave’ in other EU countries. Schadenfreude maybe, leave - nein Danke
Good question. So the Asian immigrants voting leave, believing that new arrangements with the Indian subcontinent would become looser as a result, fit into their own little space. I did think about this group (my local Indian restaurant staff who know me were surprised I wouldn't vote leave) but felt they were 1. Too small a demographic and 2. Making that decision more on a business practical level rather than because they didn't like immigrants. With regards to the EU right wing parties and their supporters I do not know enough about them, but I suspect that many of their members would fit into my 4th group, and have an anti Muslim agenda rather than an anti immigrant agenda. I note that popular support for leaving the EU amongst the 27 members is apparently now lower than ever according to recent surveys.
Well, referenda were held in France and Ireland over Lisbon. I seem to recall those results not being exactly glowing popular examples of peoples being totally happy with the direction of travel at the time.
I think the referendum in France was about the EU Constitution proposal which got scrapped after failing to get popular agreement.
The bits that could get approval were then salvaged and put forward for vote as the Lisbon treaty. Which then got the necessary buy-in.
In the Irish case similarly an initial rejection resulted in addressing the population's main concerns and a respectively modified treaty achieved the required approval.
The UK could have tried a similar approach of inclusive democracy by having a referendum on the withdrawal agreement and, if that had failed to get approval, renegotiate to address the main concerns and try again.
But that would have likely ruled out the hard Brexit the Leave leaders wanted to achieve.
The high profile Lexiteers also include Claire (baroness to you) Fox, Gisella Stuart, Larry Elliot and Bob Crowe (now deceased but prototype for Lynch). Socialist Worker have been long term enemies of the "Capitalist Club" EU, along with the British Communist Party. And then you have the whole Spiked nexus - who in fact are now probably the main pro Brexit media voice - since so many of the ERG have fallen silent, and the Telegraph are having a bit of a wobble. Influential Lexiteers also include ALL of Corbyn's inner circle - Seamus Milne, Carrie Murphy and Andrew Murray - so it's inconceivable that Corbyn (proteje of Tony Benn) isn't also a Lexiteer ! Worth pointing out that Milne is also an unapologetic Stalinist, whose approval of the 1968 Soviet tank invasion of Prague gives him the nickname "Tankie".
One of the greatest ever "what if?"/sliding doors scenarios in politics, is if Lexiter Jeremy Corbyn had come out truthfully to campaign for Leave, and gone into a GE promoting a genuine Lexit prospectus of renationalisation etc.
A real possibility he could have swung 2017 over the line for Labour, or certainly pushed Johnson way closer in 2019.
He also might have ripped the Labour vote apart. Remember what happened to Labour in the 2019 Euro election when they managed to get outflanked on the pro-Remain side by the Lib Dems and Greens - the Lib Dems came second and Labour only just scraped ahead of the Greens into third.
In the purest, most cynical, anti-Tory tactical terms, this would have hurt the Tories horrendously; Lexit would have defended the Red Wall (because it would appeal to RedUKIP voters better than either the Tories or actual UKIP could) but would lose (most of) the inner-urban liberal seats, probably to the Greens, while it would make the Lib Dems tactical appeal in Remain-leaning Tory seats much more effective (Corbyn would look like a no-hoper meaning it was safe to vote Lib Dem, and the tactical anti-Tory/anti-Brexit vote is much clearer).
That was the election that Jo Swinson was trying to plan for, though I think the likely result is not her as PM, but Caroline Lucas pipping her to the post as places like Islington vote Green.
While an interesting 'what if', I'm sceptical for another reason. A lot of people - especially in the Red Wall - just didn't like Corbyn. They perceived him to be someone who didn't like the UK, didn't like British people and who liked many of our enemies.
If he'd been unambiguously pro-Brexit I'm not sure he'd have kept many of those who distrusted him onside. Even though he would have been sincere, many of those people would still have trusted him less than Johnson.
I tend to think that a Corbyn who would have been unambiguously pro-Brexit would have been a different sort of Corbyn and wouldn't have scared so many patriotic traditional Labour voters.
Either that or he would utterly terrify people by being for Havana-on-Thames in so many words (in which case his own party would have turfed him out). I guess I'm imagining Graham Stringer (until recently, my MP) as Labour leader rather than an actual version of Corbyn.
At any rate, my point was mostly that this was the election that Jo Swinson was expecting to fight and planning to fight and that in those circumstances, her attempt to become PM wasn't as ridiculous as it became when Labour switched to supporting the referendum. Even the "revoke" move was designed to outflank Labour's referendum on the pro-Remain side and rebuild the Lib Dem Euro-election coalition, but it failed because the sort of people who tweet with #FPBE aren't actually representative of Remainers. The problem was that when this failed, she and the party didn't have a Plan B, and they looked increasingly ridiculous trying to prop up a strategy that had demonstrably failed.
It's also worth saying that the Lib Dems did achieve forcing Labour to accept the referendum; that period between the Euro-election in June and Labour's referendum U-turn in September has been memory-holed by people who think Labour could have been pro-Brexit in 2019: they tried it in the first half of the year and got trashed.
Yes, but whatever faults Corbyn had, he was always pretty "honest" as a politician, in the Tony Benn mould, never succumbing to PR spin or triangulating, or checking the odds.
As Parliament's leading Brexiteer, he let himself be led by Starmer on the second referendum, and so killed any chance of a Labour Brexit.
I don't see how honesty is a virtue if it's based on that person being in denial of reality and clinging to a disproven ideology.
Whether it's Corbyn believing in "socialism in one country" or the ERG actually believing in "Britannia unchained", their honesty doesn't stem from moral value, but because they denied reality so long they don't understand that not blurting out their extremist beliefs might persuade moderates outside their bubble.
I certainly have no time, and few Brits do, for Corbyns view of society.
Britannia Unchained was in all reality the least preferred option for most Brexit voters.
Truss was an anomaly out of time, a chancer who thought had no intellectual lineage from Thatcher, despite her derangement that she felt she was the person to finish what Maggie started in the 80s.
I think it's a myth that the second referendum was a decision made on the merits by anyone in the Labour party. They'd been resisting it for a long time and the whole Legacy Remain campaign apparatus (things like "Best for Britain") and the Lib Dems had been trying to convince Remainers that this meant that Labour was anti-Brexit.
This finally achieved cut-through in the middle of 2019 when we had all the indicative votes, and also through the Euro-election campaign - at which point the Labour vote disintegrated in their core areas (they lost Islington to the Lib Dems in the Euros).
The decision for the second referendum was entirely an electoral decision; they couldn't afford to be outflanked on the pro-Remain side and if they let themselves be so outflanked, the Lib Dems would eat their lunch.
I think Starmer's strategy before that crisis was to take the most pro-Brexit position he could without costing them serious numbers of votes from Remainers. The original thought was "where else are the Remainers going to go?" and that worked in 2017 (the Lib Dems were screaming that Labour was pro-Brexit and Remainers just didn't believe it) and it kept working until April or May in 2019 and then it just disintegrated almost overnight.
Do you remember all the indicative votes for "different Brexits" that were discussed in earnest (for just one session I believe?), and then voted on, needing to get to a particular threshold?
There was the Customs Union one, Single Mkt one, EEA one, EFTA one, Oven Ready one (maybe not, lol).
Anyhowz, not one passed the threshold, and so we were back to the ticking timebomb of No Deal one, which then opened up the clear lane for the Oven Ready one to become the "only" choice.
The interesting thing is that Labour then whipped it's MPs to vote for Johnson's deal. Had this not happened, with Lib Dems help, Johnson's one may not have passed.
I don't buy that Corbyn actually was 'honest'. While a backbencher he never had to make any compromises and, in part thanks to repeatedly voting against his party, gained a reputation as someone with integrity. As leader he had to triangulate all over the place to try to keep the Labour coalition together. Not so different to any other leader of a major political party. And he obviously never actually got into power where he'd have faced even harder decisions and trade-offs.
And - and for me this is important - when it came to talking about foreign governments, he could be decidedly slippery.
Regardless what I think, I don't think he'd have won over many of the Red Wall voters even if he'd unashamedly advocated the kind of Brexit he obviously believed in.
You mean the kind of Bxt that would have allowed progessive renationalisation of utilities, energy, rail etc...the policies that most people in the UK now would support, seeing the Thatcher neo liberal dream come to its final fruition, meaning Mick Lynch, head of main railway union, is the most popular and well respected political figure in UK, his rail strikes having overall public support, and his fully open views that a Lexit would have led to this mass nationalisation, totally prohibited under EU membership.
Anda, in the end it really doesn't matter, Bxt is just a grind, a psychodrama for one wing of Conservative Party, that used the citizens for its own ends. It's pure Darwinian natural selection. Survival of the fittest, the weak will die.
If the powers that be were really interested in at least investigating options that would smooth the bumpy ride, and immediately get synergy to something bigger than cold isolation, then a loose trade association with no pretensions for political union that would on day one be of the highest rank re ethics and standards and quality, EFTA membership ticks every box.
I did hear that Norway initially turned down overtures for us to join because Johnson intimated he would use membership as a launch pad to something "bigger" (oh yes, that fabled Trump led US/UK FTA lol), and they didn't want their own version of "EFTAexit" psychodrama.
Anda, one of the great ironies is that as reluctant entrants to the EEC, we then went on to possibly, w the exception of Poland, derive the most benefit economically, as Thatcher's legally framed Single Market allowed particularly our service/financial sector to flourish (augmented by Big Bang), and our manufacturing to have somewhat of a renaissance via our unique portal into Europe status (Nissan in Sunderland, anyone?).
Additionally, finally our fruit could be picked, old people be looked after, our hospitality and NHS expand, as supply met demand. Certainly there was also an influx of quite the best looking and most urbane young people coming over.
In many ways, quite a few stereotypes were broken, as we found Poles and Roumanians without doubt made the best builders etc (there would have been no 2012 Olympic Stadium without them), and age-old xenophobic scares about non-Brits were busted.
Of course Farage tapped into the darker underbelly of this seismic change.
Now we find the investment is drying up (anyone want to chip into British Volt battery factory?), we're in desperate need of 500k nurses, doctors, pickers, butchers, care workers, baristas/waiters, lorry drivers etc.
And my prediction is that by the end of the decade, Poland pull alongside us in the league table of rich nations.
There is a Darwinian outcome to all this. Brits can no longer criticise the EU for our misadventures and poor decision making/governance. The cognitive dissonance as the "chickens come home to roost" will be on a nationwide level, unheard of in the modern age. Kind of like the comedown from Suez, just much much worse.
But like Suez that forced us to engage w the world, Bxt will have the same effect, two elections from today.
Interesting considerations regarding the differences between Lexiters and RedKIPers.
Until now I would have considered them the same group but you make good arguments that they are not.
One thing I've never understood about Lexiters' internal thought process was how they expected a good outcome given a conservative government would be in control of all stages of exit.
The outcome would never have been anywhere close to what they had in mind.
Assuming they had a coherent vision to start with.
Anda, there's been a long and proud tradition on the working class Left, thru the Labour Party and the unions, to argue for never joining the EEC as was (see the many speeches of Tony Benn and Peter Shore etc), campaigning to leave (Labour visited Brussels in early 80s to investigate the process that would facilitate Leave had Michael Foot won the 1983 GE), to the greatest "silent" Lexiters of all, Corbyn and McDonnell.
Indeed it was only when Thatcher cemented the neo liberal revolution over consecutive elections that Labour swung to being pro-EU as a social counterbalance (ironic as the EEC/EU remains a capitalist redoubt, no allowance made for nationalised industries or nation-centric subsidised industries), and the Tories moved from championing the business opportunities of the Single Market to being more parochial on immigration etc.
While I don't agree with their reasoning, I can at least somewhat understand their goals.
Hence my before mentioned puzzlement that they thought it could be obtained by letting the conservatives decide all and every detail of the exit process.
If they had any hope of obtaining their mythical socialism in isolation they would have had to bring Brexit at a time they were in control of the government or at least an influence on it.
In any case fell for the same lie that the EU was holding them back rather than their own governments unwillingness or incapability of making the necessary reforms.
Especially people on the top political level should have seen that other EU nations had no issues with having and supporting publicly owned businesses, having very advanced employment laws and effectively funding public services such as health care and education.
But I guess the long complicity of Labour governments in using the EU as a scapegoat for national failures would have made confronting such truths an awkward endeavour.
I think ideology at the other end of the political spectrum may be the reason for a clouding of minds as to the sense of voting alongside the Conservative party.
Yes, I think the Lexiters are in so many ways a mirror image of the Brexit Ultras on the right. They prefer their own fantasies to figuring the reality of the world, they just have different coloured unicorns.
That may be true. My gymnastics as a previous Bxt "agnostic" was to have one leg in the Lexit camp, one leg in the RedKIP camp, and one leg in the Soverignty First camp.
Anda, I know many Labour voting Lexiters. For them, and to me at one point, "Brexit really did MEAN Brexit".
This translates as since only the Tories were going to get Leave done, that was a small price to pay for the ultimate goal of a, to all intents and purposes, irreversible severance with the EU, both parties resolving to uphold the Leave vote, and provide competing prospectuses for a Leave based future.
Presumably a Johnson style laissez faire "all things to all Leavers" type versus a Truss "Singapore on Thames/IEA" type versus a Corbyn "regain control by mass nationalisation previously not permitted by EU membership". Of course the lack of consensus between parties, and even between senior members in parties (Corbyn Lexit v Starmer second vote, May/Rory Stewart version v Johnson break all the rules v Truss libertarian mass migration version), meant that the Bxt most likely to be least damaging, least radical, least prone to the ego of any one leader, ie EEA/EFTA type semi detached Leave, fell by the wayside.
Even in that surreal period after May's Bxt deal fell, and various incarnations were put to MPs in the Commons in a big elimination vote.
MPs on all sides badly failed the nation during that period, leading to the Cult Of Personality Bxt final result that was Johnson's Oven Ready Deal.
Ok, I guess it made sense from their point of view, though I still think it was extreme gambling that the Tories wouldn't make a complete mess of things or that any mess could be cleaned up reasonably easy.
However one needs to wonder about some parts of their motivation, given that at least their leaders must have known that nationalisation could have easily been achieved while being an EU member.
Unless they were equally unaware of reality in other EU members or (hopefully not) purposefully feeding that myth to gather support among undecided voters.
I think the prominent Lexiteers - not ordinary, fairly non-political people who just have a sense that we'd be better and fairer on our own, but political idealogues - are fantasists and always have been. That their utopian socialist workers paraside was not going to be delivered by the Tories was no more utopian than many of their other political beliefs.
Corbyn's takeover of the Labour party was a unique opportunity for them: they'd never really been serious about winning power in democratic elections and weren't worrying about the practicalities of delivering their socialist goals.
Also remember that on the far left there's a strand of thought that believes that if only things get terrible enough, finally everyone will realise they've been fooled this whole time and will come around to supporting the glorious workers revolution. Seen in that light, a terrible Tory Brexit could be a step on the way to a wonderful Lexit Britain.
I don't believe mass nationalisation is allowed under EU anti competition rules. Ditto state funding to prop up industries like steel.
Why do you think the Lexiters were so adamant Bxt had to happen. Most are not ardent Havana Caracas types, most viewed Bxt as an opportunity to regain full control of political and economic policy so that options like full fat renationalisation of the energy sector and boosting home grown steel production to benefit our economy could not be opposed by Brussels.
EU competition rules have no bearing on ownership.
This was simply used as an excuse by conservative governments to fulfill their privatisation agenda.
It is annoying and disheartening that Labour not only let them get away with that lie but be fully complicit in trying to milk the very same lie for other purposes.
I guess it is another example of lack of information by the British public on how things are done in other European countries.
Here in Austria it would have been politically impossible to do a UK style privatisation bonanza.
Aside from massive public opposition this would have been met with massive opposition by these companies. And their managements are politically well enough connected across the party spectrum.
I doubt the regulations would even have passed the EU process if they had required privatisation as that would have meant going against Germany, France and several of their close allies.
The UK might actually have been the only member that went down that route.
Anda, it's not lack of information of the (non-Sun reading, but educated) British public, it's active denial.
I'm not a British citizen; I'm a layperson, not a professor for organisation or similar like Chris Grey; I'd never looked at hundreds of these details in depth, but since 2016 there have been so many articles simply on the internet by experts, pointing out the lies, and giving the facts, that it was not lack of information.
And yes, during Corbyn times many experts called out explicity that Labours strategy was "We know Tories doing Brexit will burn the country down, which will destroy the Tories, then Labour will be voted in power and we can build socialism in GB, so sunlit socialist uplands´!" - and every rational person going "You're helping the tories to burn down the countries, are you insane?", yet being ignored.
I agree that active denial has also had a role to play and likely even resulted in misinformation being spread on purpose.
For example if a person like Mick Lynch is in active denial on rail privatisation and thus purposefully spreads falsehoods, it might lead other people to discard actual information.
If they had already had that information to begin with, it would have been much harder for these myths and lies to get a hold.
Lack of information is not necessarily caused by lack of availability thereof.
However there is a difference between having to actively look for information and it being apparent in your day to day life.
In the case of national industries, you and I are in the second category, so the notion that the EU would somehow prevent this is absurd to us.
For Marc and others in the UK, who's experience is almost the opposite, misleading information by sympathetic experts like Lynch can easily be given more weight than other available information.
I've learned a lot about the situation and inner workings of the UK since when I started to follow things more closely after the referendum's surprise result.
Before that I had simply assumed that things would be at least similar to how we do things while in reality that's not true at all.
Thanks for an amusing and interesting dissection of the diverse brands of people who made up the Brexit coalition that have brought us to the horrible place Britain is in right now.
As ever I have enjoyed this article but I think that NT misreads Nineteen Eighty Four - the Inner Party didn't really have an ideology, but was interested only in power for its own sake, as O'Brien says to Winston Smith at one point. What group does this remind you of?
Nick, I've always read your blogs with great interest, as someone who voted Remain, went on to become a "philisophical" or "jaded" Leaver, and recently wrangled back to how I voted originally.
However I feel you're classifications are way too pat and self satisfied, especially your dismissal of Lexiters.
And if you think there's only "one" type of Remainer/Rejoiner, you're mistaken.
Your tone is a little condescending, the first time I feel your words are guilty of that.
I don't think Nick is suggesting that there was only one type of Remainer and that there is now only one type of Rejoiner.
People have almost certainly had different priorities when deciding to vote Remain.
However, unlike Brexiters, their differences weren't inherently incompatible.
For example if one person voted to remain because they themselves or relatives/friends relied on Freedom of Movement of People, the goal of retaining that would not be in conflict with another person who's priority was exporting goods to other EU countries without any artificial burden.
I agree, my point is that despite my voting intention being 50/50 with 24 hours to go, I eventually voted Remain, despite having no positive feeling towards EU membership or the frankly distant politics of Brussels and Strasbourg. I'm friendly with people who voted Remain because they hate the way of government in UK and wanted more convergence with Brussels. Not a lot in common here.
Even in the anti migration Bxter side, I know those who absolutely hate free movement with a passion, and those who genuinely were concerned that a century of steady immigration equivalent to 40-50k annually, became 150k by the turn of the millenium, and 300-500k by the time of the toxic hot war of 2010-2015 as Cameron battled the twin fronts of Farage UKIP and ERG in his party.
Even I looked at 40-50k inflow annually in 1995 becoming 150k in 2005 and 300-500k in 2015, and see why Leave won.
But that's (again) putting feelings over reality, and ignoring known history.
After WWII (because many people had died), there was a lack of labourers, so Germany imported Italians, Greeks, Yoguslavs, and then a few million Turks; France imported Algerians (colony) and GB sent the Windrush ship.
All of these "foreigner" who in France and GB were colonial subjects = citizens, stayed and helped build the economy and country. And because the country and economy flourished, the 60s had themselves a baby boom.
And for the past 30 years, experts and business warned that now that the Baby Boom is retiring, birth rate has dropped, population is aging = we all desperately need new young people to do the work. The nursing work, the low-paid work, all the work.
So anybody who was worried about too many people (because GB is an island, so too many people it will tip over, as one memorable idiot said on TV) was denying reality.
Yes, of all my previously solidly held views during my adult life, my views on immigration have been the ones most challenged and found wanting. If I've done one major 180 in my opinion of things, immigration is it. And thus my views on Free Movement.
I can certainly understand some of the weariness regarding the EU, after all I had similar doubts when we here in Austria voted to join in 1994.
However a lot of issues like "distant" politics are primarily a failure of our representatives and media.
In some countries the media does not even report on votes in the EU parliament or council, let alone about discussions on regulation drafts or similar.
Same for ministers or MEPs who, given wide spread usage of social media, could do some of the reporting themselves (and some do).
On the immigration angle it is now at least very obvious that EU membership had nothing to do with the UK's lack of control.
Anda, I'm of Polish-Estonian extraction, my parents coming to the UK just before and just after the end of WW2.
And my dad, like all Polish migrants, worked all the hours God sent, to make a better life for all of us. My mum never liked living in the UK, but dad provide for her too.
However as a Brit, born and bred, I imbibed typically xenophobic views, and it's only really since we left in the EU that I've reassessed my heritage as the son of a "do anything/any hours" migrant and feel somewhat ashamed of the Farage-lite views I developed over two decades of absorbing tabloid headlines and not practicing clear critical thinking.
I fancy myself as a reasonably (lol) metropolitan egalitarian type, but I still was *this* close to voting Leave.
To me personally, my mindset then and now speaks volumes.
Now I view a philisophical attachment to Bxt as naive at best and poor thinking at worst. And I realise the herd mentality and purity spiral aspects of allying to Leave in much clearer relief in 2023 versus 2016.
I think everyone can relate to falling for myths or misinformation, especially on complex subjects and even more so if emotions get attached to them.
As I said I had my doubts during out ascension process and might even have voted against joining had I been a couple month older and met the voter eligibility threshold for our referendum.
I can also now only look back and see that many fears were unfounded, could be mitigated or even resulted in EU side improvements.
The irony of immigration concerns being a contributing factor to the Brexit referendum result is that EU membership has kept immigration down as many of the job vacancies had been filled by EU citizens instead of immigrants.
Well, I guess it didn't help that the UK Home Office had such messed up statistics that they had mixed EU citizens and even foreign students into their immigration numbers.
Can't really fault normal people if the started to think that EU Freedom of Movement of People was just another form of immigration when the government's own official numbers make the same mistake.
Anda, I remain unsure how Freedom of Movement "isn't" immigration. I realise in pure terms it means the "potential" for immigration, people coming here to study etc.
Seems a mute point when long term settled levels migration over a century trebled by the time of the E. European accession nations coming into the UK, and that figure doubling ahead of the referendum.
You'll have a hard job convincing anyone in UK that 300-500k annual migration figures, over half of those being from EU, to mean that Freedom of Movement is NOT an immigration mechanism.
The economy and public safety of France and Germany doing rather better than GB, so proof that not leaving EU is a good idea? That denying reality and letting populists in power is bad? That EU members do have enough national sovereignity that some make better decisions than other countries?
I’m guessing this article, which is excellent, is focused on those Brexiters who either inhabit the political circle eg commentators, think tanks, and politicians, but not the ordinary voters, even though they can inhabit those five spaces as well.
What the country has to actually come to terms with before rejoin becomes an option is that the really, really big elephant in the room, actually the invisible mammoth behind the economical-political pachyderm, is immigration.
Immigration is at the heart of the Brexit issue and covers a wide range of spaces.
1. The ‘Too many people’ space
This is the largest group of general Brexiters. They can be from any class, but are largely middle class. They may be immigrants themselves. They work with immigrants, they buy services from immigrants. They even socialise with immigrants. They used to regularly go on holiday to where the immigrants come from. They have friends who are immigrants. BUT you understand they don’t have a problem with ‘those’ immigrants, its all these others coming over and clogging up our public services. Sucking up Daily Mail tropes, finding that the NHS is becoming harder to access (austerity), that their schools have lots of children of immigrants, seeing local services under pressure (austerity) convinces this group that there are too many people in the UK and something must be done. They don’t necessarily agree with the likes of Farage, but they were convinced by good old booster Boris and his ‘had enough of experts’ sidekick that they could have their cake and eat it. We’ll leave the EU, control our borders but pretty much carry on as before, including our twice a year trips to the sun. (Possibly with our immigrant friends)
2. The ‘immigrants are cheating us’ space.
This is the second largest group of Brexiters. Generally they are either working class, or retired working class. They have much less social contact with immigrants and whilst not actively hostile to, for example an Eastern European living next door, their xenophobia is strong and enhanced by what they see as the economic advantage the immigrants hold over them. Immigrants are taking jobs for ‘less money’. Immigrants are claiming benefits. Immigrants are working for cash thus avoiding tax. Immigrants are thereby influencing the economy against us. This group were highly susceptible to the likes of Farage and bought heavily into the idea that Turkey would join and release a fresh horror upon them. Highly dependent on the NHS they were immediately ready to embrace the message on the side of a bus and border control was a must.
3. The ‘we don’t like immigrants thank you’ space.
This group is almost exclusively retired seventy somethings. They worked (hard) all their lives, and have retired, occasionally comfortably. During their working lives they were not exposed to the EU workers, but the Windrush generation and the Asian corner shop. They were in that generation who didn’t like people of colour, because they were different. They didn’t mix with them, and always checked their change twice when served by one. Now they’re retired they find themselves being cared for by a new set of immigrants. White people, nice, but with funny names who suddenly talk rapidly to a colleague in a strange language. This group have children in the ‘Too many people’ space. This means they have many stories to share about the pressure on local services that mean their grandchildren have to learn about Muslims at school. This generation will also tell you that we didn’t fight a war to be….. If you pushed this group into a corner they would be appalled that you might view them as racist, but the fact is they are, either openly or unconsciously. Again they can be very polite to immigrants, and even welcome those that they personally know as carers or providers. But for this group the vote to leave was a no brainer.
4. The ‘we hate immigrants’ space.
A sizeable minority group, across all classes but mainly working class or unemployed (unemployable). Often male, but with a surprising number of women, this group hate immigrants with a vengeance. Almost exclusively racist, they view people of colour as unequal to white people. They also hold prejudices against other faiths, especially Jews and Muslims. They also hold many of the same views as the ‘immigrants are cheating us’ space. Amazingly they often view EU immigrants as brothers in arms against the ‘great replacement’ myth that they subscribe to. Where they have joined a right wing minority, and often minute, political party they will enthusiastically attend events where speakers from the EU holding the same prejudices are the main attraction. However for this group border control was the very, very top issue that they believed could be resolved only by leaving the EU. Many of them also believed that Brexit would mean all immigrants, even those children of immigrants born here, would have to ‘go home’.
Of course these four spaces I personally see are not exclusive and within each space is a spread of intensity of feeling. People in all of the groups are capable of analysing their views and modifying them in the light of new facts, and altering their stance. However this takes time, and needs understanding and nurture to encourage change. The Brexit disaster is focusing almost exclusively on the economic fall out, and the political struggle within the Tory party. Once that elephant has been properly acknowledged or ‘eaten’ we can then tackle the mammoth behind it.
While immigration serves in many countries as a convenient scapegoat to hide governmental failure, there is at least one distinct aspect in the UK not seen elsewhere.
At some point someone created the myth that the EU had somehow control over its members immigration and thus allowed anti-EU agitators to milk the much broader anti-immigrant sentiments.
Maybe that is because the UK is one of the few countries that have no actual immigration control and thus have a much more massive failure to hide than other governments.
Or maybe because people in the UK are less aware (or not at all) how strict and effective some other EU members control their immigration.
In any case the puzzling thing is that this myth is still alive, despite it now being obvious that Brexit spectacularly failed to "improve" anything in that regard.
Chris Grey on his Brexit blog, as well as other journalists (Byline etc.) have pointed out several times that it's only in Britain that Freedom of Movement is mixed with immigration at all, and continental Europeans are continually puzzled by this.
It's not that Germans, French, Scandinavians etc. are less racist in general; but from simply crossing the border for 1 week summer vacation in Italy, to spending one semester abroad while studying with Erasmus, to falling in love and moving across the border, FoM is never seen as immigration.
It is tempting to ascribe this to the specific island geography creating an island mindset - the channel tunnel is still very new; and that most Brits don't have a passport, and GB was not in Schengen, means that a casual travel is a bit more difficult than for continentals, where just driving in your car straight for +4 hours often crosses a border.
And long before Schengen made this easier, people used it:: back in the 50s and 60s, there were "Butterfahrten" - butter voyages, where Germans in the Rhine region took a bus trip to Netherlands to buy butter and other stuff cheaper (Scandinavians still do this for alcohol because of high, but different, taxes in each country), due to different VAT and custom-free for x amount of stuff.
I found it strange to read that on the one hand, Brits mention very quickly how the last time they were conquered was 1066 - then reading Rosemary Sutcliff how one group of people after the other came and settled and married and mixed before. (Plus the weird blindspot that, having no foreigners to fight against, Brits had 3 different Civil wars!)
On the continent, even paying cursory attention to history in school, one running thread is that borders changed every century, because there was a war between reigning houses, long before World Wars displaced millions; e.g. Prussia became strong by accepting French Hugenots, since the King didn't care about confession as long as people paid taxes and boosted economy.
So identity is always overlapping - it's not German vs European, it's Munich and German and European, because it's all our heritage and common culture and where we grew up and which guarantees everybody the UN Human Rights (EU Human Rights Charta added to make it explicit, but it was implicit before), and it's really better that we get along and understand each other and no longer have wars.
Whereas e.g. in Dorothy Sayers crime novels of the Interwar period, there's the same racism against anybody not coming from x generations of English - even naturalized British citizens, who grew up in England, went to school etc. are not really English, but foreign (Have his carcase). Which is weird and sad to read, and much sadder that this hasn't changed in the almost 100 years since for many many Brits.
I think you made a good point about the borders here - that is an "island mentality" thing, because Britain *is* an island, that makes a natural border which doesn't change in the way you describe for continental Europe, where as you say, that means everyone is aware of people who stayed in the same place while the borders moved around them and made them part of different countries over the centuries. You've also got the fact that united Germany and united Italy are both pretty recent, so that difference between "culturally German" and the political entity that is Germany is a real thing for you. There is something of that kind of thing in Britain, but probably more with people from, for example, Scotland, or the North of England, where there are strong regional or country identities and people don't like to be lumped in with the Southern English as if they were all one thing.
I've just recently read a Dorothy Sayers book, but I guess it didn't have any characters of the type you noticed in Have His Carcase - I read "Busman's Honeymoon" which *did* have casual anti-semitism in it where a debt collector character turns up and Peter Wimsey makes some allusion to whether this man might be Jewish. He turns out to have a Scottish name so Wimsey jokes that that is a "difference that makes no difference", because Scots like the Jews are also characterised by a stereotype of being mean, or penny-pinching.
Of course, Rishi Sunak is a perfect example of what you are talking about. Sunak is clearly as British as Boris Johnson, he was born in Britain, and his parents sent him to an establishment posh British private school (Harrow iirc), yet there are conservatives phoning talk shows to express how disturbed they are that he has become their leader, because he's not really "British" is he.
Paul, island mentality a big part of it. Our political culture is also ossified. Germany national government can devolve from the nation to the states, and up to the EU, depending on what's needed.
The UK? We struggle to devolve from London to the regions/cities (London mayor doesn't have tax raising powers), the SW, North, feel totally ignored, Scotland always raging. And as we all know, hated devolving up to Brussels.
Indeed, British govt is set in aspic in Whitehall, minimal transparency (see Windrush scandal, the joke of £37 billion wasted on centralised bogged down Test And Trace during Covid).
A big part of the Leave vote was irritation with opaque Brussels, but also with distant and unresponsive and secretive Whitehall culture.
Ironically, Mr. Remain, Keir Starmer, will address this as he wins in 2024, finally starting to break the stranglehold of Whitehall.
"Take back control" indeed.
It's certainly the case that a lot of the post-Brexit fallout is resulting in power-grabs from Westminster. This was noticeable in the bill that was notorious for the "breaking the law in a limited sense" debate, where I recall Nicola Sturgeon was vocal that powers which during the EU membership had been devolved to Scotland were basically being re-patriated to Westminster as a side effect of that legislation, and currently, the "bonfire of EU regulations" bill which will automatically destroy thousands of laws if Parliament doesn't have time to scrutinise them properly. One of the problems with that bill is that it allows ministers to make law without parliamentary scrutiny - so there it's not just power devolving to Westminster, it's power moving from parliament to the executive.
Local government has weakened in the UK over the decades, and we do have no comparison to the German federal system.
Very good points Marc!
The British only really have experience with centralised governance as even the current devolution setup is relatively new (compared to countries like Germany, let alone Switzerland).
If you grow up in a nation with distributed governance, especially in a federal union such as Germany or Austria, the concept of having another level of shared governance is nothing extraordinary.
With only experience of full on centralism it is understandable that the primary assumption would be that "all" power had moved from "London" to "Brussels".
As you said a potentially improved distribution of power hinted/suggested by Starmer might ironically also help with understanding of the EU's approach to governance.
At some point the British might even appreciate the difference that in the UK the central government "allows" devolved ones to do something, while in the EU the member governments "allow" the commission to do things.
Essentially an inversion of who holds the power to change the setup.
Anda, we're gonna need to go thru a period of hard adjustment as Leavers like my best friend die off (sorry, V) to drain the toxin, we find better ways to run our democracy, lose our WW2/supremacist mindset, and allow a generation of totally Eurocentric Gen Z to grow up and push for Rejoin.
It'll be up to euroskeptics to prove their case that the UK can prosper.
But I believe that'll be a variation on a Swiss arrangement. And of course, Single Market membership may be a halfway house to a later call to Rejoin.
Very thorough comparison of the difference in mind sets!
I think the term "island mentality/mindset" is often just used as a short cut for "not having to deal with borders unless for vacation travel".
Because Ireland, for example, is also an island but a lot of its people have to deal with border crossing all the time and the rest are still very much aware of it.
This effect was also very visible in the voting behavior across the UK. People directly (or closely) impacted by a border voted to remain with considerable majorities (almost two-thirds in NI and over 80% in Gibraltar).
Ironically Brexit will have increased the number of British who are now aware of the impact of borders on their daily lives.
Fishermen who are now aware that the end of FOM (of goods) means fish needs to be exported rather than just sold.
Similar for farmers who, alongside fishermen, were vocal Leave proponents.
Worse for anyone working for a business that uses a significant amount of components from outside the UK+EU in their products as these can easily run into Rules of Origin limitations and even incur tariffs.
Let alone people working the UK's large services sector.
And even more people who know someone from these groups.
It will be interesting to see if this awareness will persist, maybe even grow, or if the "insular" mindset will regain its grip on British minds.
I think Ireland has a very different mindset because they have for centuries been the victims of English colonialism, so any system where all countries are equal are of course preferable to them of the British system of English master-inferior other countries.
And that so many young urban Brits have overcome this mindset because it was EU that offered a young person from the city blocks the opportunity to work 3 months in Austria ski resort, while GB is still socially stratified so that Oxbridge 1% go on ski vacation, the rest stays put.
So young people experienced how EU puts money to give people from poor backgrounds chances, while GB... gives money to Tory donors.
They meet young Europeans and talking with them, they are all fed up with how old men in government block needed reforms, lack of equality etc., so they have more in common with them than with a British Tory-voting sun-reading pensioneer.
That's true to a great extent. But are the youth of Southern Europe, especially Spain, Italy and Greece equally happy with EU membership. Euro membership hasn't particularly helped endemically high levels of Spanish youth unemployment come down, and I recall massive riots from the youth of Greece as EU and Merkel imposed swingeing austerity a decade ago.
EU Membership approval from https://europeelects.eu/eu-membership-approval/
Spain: 85%
Italy: 71%
Greece: 75%
Euro membership approval
Spain: 85%
Italy: 71%
Greece: 72%
The youth usually has even higher approval rates than the median as they are more likely to make use of or wanting to make use of opportunities like working or studying elsewhere.
I think that is even visible in the UK.
I vaguely remember a report recently that had a significant majority of 16-24 year old in favour of rejoining.
Don't remember the exact numbers but could have been 75% compare to still somewhat 50/50 overall
Yep Anda, Bxt is like a truth serum, a ripping away of the curtain. We're finally going to see our place in the world, how hard it is to keep the cogs running when you throw a rock into the machine.
And critically, no more ability to blame Brussels.
British governments always hid behind the accusation of not getting on with modernising Britain or facing down criticism of immigration by saying "don't blame us, blame the EU"...especially Cameron.
Well, now that fig leaf is removed. We're now on our own two feet with no EU crutch. How long can we stay standing?
MK, you have to see this as the Brits considering themselves "IN Europe, but not OF Europe". Or is that "OF Europe, but not IN Europe"? Basically, the UK never joined the early EEC because of our WW2 history where we were never directly invaded by Germany (despite Battle Of Britain nearly not going our way), so we never "lost" the war, and despite much carnage from Doodlebugs, we didn't have quite the carnage much of continental Europe had. We viewed ourselves along with US and Russia as having been instrumental in winning the war, saving Europe, and thus we didn't need to align ourselves or look to integrate into the new peace project.
And this was mainly the view from the Left, the all powerful Labour Party that won a landslide in 1945 put all it's energy into creating the NHS and Welfare State, and it's paymasters the unions wanted nothing to do with mass immigration, despite of course the Windrush generation effectively helping build early modern Britain from the rubble of WW2. Plus not compromising Commonwealth trade, including agricultural from Australia and NZ. Indeed, what is commonly considered racist attitudes of Leave voters disliking EU migration was mirrored by the Left after 1945 re Commonwealth migration. Xenophobia was not exclusively on the Right. Indeed the Conservative Party saw the benefits to business of migration 70 years ago.
Only when Suez ran an oil tanker thru our national pride did things start to change.
Though the French also won the war; also lost their colonial empire, also brought over cheap workers from their colonies (and fought bloody wars to keep the colonies, yet lost them).
Germany especially started very early the friendship- and school exchange programs both with France - especially because of the Erbfeindschaft = inherited enmity, which nationalists on both sides deliberatly stoked from Napoelon through Prussian-French war to WWI and then WWII - but also with Britain. Hundreds of school kids spent holidays visiting each other - not just to learn English because English is what everybody in the world speaks, or to see Paris and eat good french food - but to overcome the old prejudices and learn to like each other so we'd get along once we were adults.
This "a part, not really belonging" is really weird when compared to France which enthusiastically rebuilt not only their country and modernized their industry, but also went into the Montanunion -peace through economy - because they wanted to avoid another war.
Maybe it is because the Brits also believed in this special partnership with the Yanks, so one foot on Europe, one foot on the American continent?
Was it because of centuries of Britain playing "balance of powers" - deliberatly interfering underhanded on the continent so that no other nation could grow big enough to threaten? (Perfidious Albion - is that why Brits saw spanish/ catholic conspiracies in every corner? Or because it was even back in 17th century easier for the 1% to blame spanish catholics for starting a fire, instead of neglience by authorities and self-interest by the rich hindering the fire-fighting?
I've heard that because Britain was bombed less, they kept their old machinery, while Germany and France had been bombed extensivly (and in East Germany, Soviets had taken machines as reparations) so industry had to build from scratch, which had the beneficial side-effect of having the most modern and efficient machines to start post-war consumer boom and then export.
British socialists as upper-class twits dabbling in theory without ever looking at how it played out in reality and without morphing into social democracy, that is, a moderate version that works, is a very sorry chapter. Even more sad that it didn't die out in the Interwar period, but was chugging til Corbyn!
Here, the social democrats had a long tradition of trying to change the system for people, and unions working with the employers; partly because employers were afraid of revolutions like after WWI, so cooperation was in everybody's interest.
MK, that's a very cogent overview. I have to tell you, apart from the most enlightened middle classes, mainly in London, few in UK had this outlook. I might be wrong on that, but there was never a dialog of enthusiasm on free movement, save for all the au pairs that were now available, and cheap flights to Spanish beaches.
What also didn't help was De Gaulle twice scuppering our applications to join in the 60s, creating real emnity during this period, the theory being that he wanted as irreversible an integration of French agriculture in the CAP, so that Brits entering the EEC would have to sever ties with the Commonwealth for meat, dairy, wheat etc. And battening down the EEC infrastructure of rules, so we had no say in their creation or utilisation. Meaning that in early 70s in finally joining we quickly dropped most of our trade with Australia and NZ. And on joining, we were told this is the club, now we have to accept it, no Q's asked.
That created the first anti EEC sentiment in the late 70s and 80s as I remember news coverage of "wine lakes" and "butter mountains", whilst Commonwealth farmers went to the wall as our £billions of trade dried up overnight.
EEC membership in the UK continued to be seen thru this prism of a club created to suit German manufacturing interests (cars, obviously) and French agricultural interests. And thus there was nothing positive promoted in our media on membership, the increasing mood was that we were in Europe, but apart.
Exacerbated as Thatcher fought her battles to get our membership free rebate, and pushing Brussels in a neo liberal/free market direction away from predominabtly France's socialised/regulated direction.
Thus was set in the 80s and 90s further anti-EEC sentiment that we were funding the French model with no benefit to Brits.
At no point was there any momentum of enthusiasm that travel had opened up, food choice was wider, greater opportunities for our youth.
Certainly I didn't see this, and my personal animus to the EEC only grew in the 70s 80s and 90s.
Whereas in Europe, you were all getting on with cross fertilisation of travel, trade, study and friendships.
Not so here in Siege UK.
Partly I see the purely economic outlook from the Brits "our economy is going down the drain, so if we must, let's join the EU (EC)" which is different from "lets make sure this time that peace through economy works" (because despite nationalists stoking the Erbfeindschaft, there was already a peace initiave after WWI between France and Germany - Stresemann and Briand - which didn't reach enough population).
Partly it's that unholy alliance for over 4 decades of right-wing tabloids and politicans - both Tories and Labour - blaming everything on Brussels to deflect from their own mistakes.
Which ties into the "politics is for gentlemen, not for normal people" attitude that seems to be accepted as normal in British society: Europe had the 68 revolution, which was political both behind the Iron curtain: Prag, Warsaw etc., and in the West and which beyond demonstrations changed society and made a lot of "radical" ideas: feminism, equality, more democracy, widely accepted.
The Brits had the Beatles: yes, good music, but I have not heard of social protests?
Which also ties in that Brits never had a proper revolution: neither farmers revolution like we had during Reformation, nor later for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.
Cromwell's Glorious Revolution, from what I glanced at, was not started by common people, and the goal was not to give power and rights to the common people, but it was still a struggle of the 1%, between nobility via parliament and the King/Monarch.
Which also goes way back, that many Brits boast about Magna Charta being start of democracy because the king lost some rights to the parliament.... that's nothing unusual, kings had privy councils, ministers, senior councils etc. through all of history. King Hammurabi wrote down that the law was above the King (I don't know how much he followed that principle in reality, but at least he said that principle), whereas Britain today still has the Monarch above the law, and all allegiance to the Monarch - not to the principle of Law.
So the Monarch can never commit treason, because he is the Law, whereas in Europe, following the Code Napeolon principle instead of common law, the Law is above all, and treason is breaking the fundamental law.
This principle to the law could apply even if GB has no written constitution, but the whole idea seems foreign even to the anti-monarch/republican-thinking Brits.
I agree that the fabled "special relationship" with the USA and the similar mythical concept of "anglo-sphere" has had held the UK back in realising its potential as a member of the European communities.
It has definitely not helped that British Conservatives, sometimes even Labour, have tried to copy US models for a wide range of policy areas instead of adapting or at least learning from European models.
For example trying (and failing) to control immigration through hostility and at point of entry instead of through diligence and at interaction points between people and state agencies.
Or subjecting workers to a race to the bottom instead of wage security and stability via collective bargaining.
I guess this preference for exploitation and confrontation over partnership and collaboration will, as long as it exists at its current strength, remain a major obstacle to any form of rapprochement with European organisations, nations and their peoples
I have to fully agree, hurtling twds my seventh decade, pretty much Thatcherite in outlook over that time, it's taken leaving the EU and reconciling the phenomenon of small boats landings, to get me to reconsider a lot of previously-held fixed views.
It seems that from the post War lefts antagonism to the European project, to the post Thatcher antagonism to expansion, to long held Anglo Saxon diffidence at best and downright hostility at worst attitudes to influx, we can really be summed up as "in Europe, but not of Europe".
I suspect this will change. I think Starmer is on for a historic epoch making tectonic plates shift at next GE, as Tories are wiped out, including most if not all the hard euroskeptic group of MPs. He will tentatively explore closer ties with Brussels. He'll win big again in 2028, and at this point the Tories will have to go in one of two directions, One Nation, Europe-friendly maybe with Rory Stewart as leader, or RedKIP euroskeptic route likely with Kemi Badenoch as leader.
By early 2030s, the hardcore older Leavers will be dead, and Rejoin momentum will be in ascendancy.
Starmer or whoever is leader will then move to a Rejoin tack, mid 2035 is when it might happen.
I believe that euroskeptic fantasies of Hitler defying independent Brits needing no relations with "defeated" Europe will wholly be replaced by Bxt and the whole euroskeptic movement being deeply unpatriotic, the period 2015-2035 bring viewed by vast majority of population in over a decades time as directly damaging to UK and it's citizens' interests.
Effectively a corollary of the post Suez period where UK had to look long and hard in the mirror.
Yes, it's interesting how from a European perspective, Brits are much closer to US in many important points than to Europeans (which is not a positive thing here)
during the first industrial revolution, the direction it took, with mass poverty (and poverty laws before) was manchester liberalism: let the markets rule everything, no restrictions at all, which was (subconsciously apparently) based on Calvinism's doctrine of what the Yanks now call prosperity gospel: if you're rich and sucessful, it's because God blessed you, so you deserve it, and should not be restricted by laws; so if you're poor, it's because you sinned, are morally bad or just because God doesn't like you, so any help would be useless and wasted.
Which is of course very nice to hear for those who are at the top because they can be as greedy as they want; nice to hear for politicans, because they don't have to try and solve poverty, they can blame the victims instead.
(Yes, I know Britain is Anglican, not Calvinist - but this idea that it's people's own fault for being poor comes from Calvin's idea but is widespread both in UK and USA).
In Europe, while protestant work ethic meant that people should work hard, at end of 19th century scientists did collect a lot of numbers: weekly wage of labourer, weekly rent for a room, cost of a loaf of bread, a kilo of potateos and a liter of milk, and found that the bare cost was higher than the wage (as Dickens did point out in English!), so they lobbied to change the laws. While it was not minimum wage yet, at least social insurance: pensions and accidents, were covered.
Partly from fear of Bismark that because the situation was so bad, full socialists/ communists would gain masses and do a real revolution, so with one hand he made strict laws forbidding anything looking like socialism, with the other hand he generously improved the worst of the conditions.
Because intentions matter less than the outcome: improving conditions worked, and people got interested in social democracy instead, of changing the system without a full revolution.
It's interesting how both Brits and Yanks mention so often early on that their land was "never" conquered, as if this is some great achievement, instead of simple geography, and as if being stuck in an isolated island mindset is someting to be proud of, instead of something that needs to be overcome. (No man is an island ... often-quoted British writer, but a whole nation is okay, apparently).
Another similarity is that, while the time is shifted between when GB was an empire and when US still is, both got used to having wars abroad for their own interests, which the common person wasn't bothered by; whereas the French, while having a colonial Empire, too, when they had a war again with the Prussians/ Germans or anybody else, the common person was directly affected.
Both wars between High Houses, e.g Spain, and wars for ideology/ religion, eg Thirty years war, afflicted many countries in Europe. Also again driving home how much chance influenced which country a person was born in.
Note: Europeans still sadly have racists, about 30% through all of society, but it seems to have broadened. (Even under the Nazis, while Aryans were the Master Race, Aryans were not limited to Germans! Brits, Irish, Scandinavians were also part, everybody not black, not Jewish, not Slavic). So instead of "French/German people are superior to everybody else by virtue of being French" it's "Western Europeans are better than lazy Southeners (Med. people) or corrupt Eastern Europeans, or not-educated lazy Africans, because we have good edcuation, good organisation, good industry". It's not said that explicitly among the non-tabloid reading middle-class, but it's thought so when German Sun, the BILD, prints about "our" money being sent to Greece to help their economy when they're just lazy, too many people agree instead of talking about the real reason - corrupt govt., 1% not being taxed (hits too close to home, and too common among other countries).
Yeah, I think this is right. So many people voted Brexit to "control the immigrants" but EU freedom of movement only affected migration to the UK from other parts of the EU, since it was part of the freedom for EU people to work anywhere in the EU - so the more logical among us found it puzzling that Farage's infamous poster had so many brown faces on it. It has often been pointed out that the result of blocking immigration from the EU is likely to be more immigration from other places, though I guess it's also possible that the outcome will be reduced immigration leading to worse recessions because we don't solve the labour shortage problems.
Anda, can you elaborate further, me and millions more like me are somewhat unaware.
I am cognizant of the fact other EU nations "enforced" free movement way better than we ever did.
From ID cards and employment quotas paperwork that meant individuals working were trackable and big fines for employers breaking the rules and gaming the system, to EU nations absolutely enforcing the small print on permitting free movement rigourously.
Whereas in the good 'ol migration and EU rules skeptical UK, workers drifted in, if they lost work, they likely didn't always return home, many will have slipped into the grey or black economy.
Our more liberal attitudes including no ID cards or work quota documentation meant that the UK, biggest beneficiary of EU migration, care and hospitality and construction fuelled by EU migration, national wealth fuelled by EU migration, also had the most schizophrenic/proto nationalist attitudes to numbers and individuals and nationalities, as our system came to be seen as being full of holes, impossible to police, and easily gamed.
And of course Farage, Hannan and the rest weaponised this over a decade long process leading to 2016.
You have already listed many examples of how EU nations have over the last century developed and instantiated major improvements to their employment laws and immigration systems.
However ID cards are not a very good one because they don't relate to either.
They are essentially just small form factor versions of passports and convenient for daily live identity proof situations (bank, parcel pickup, voting, etc).
What you probably meant is are various forms of residency registration as that provides an interaction between a governmental agency and people who are not (necessarily) employed.
It not only allows for automated checks on things like visa status to be done in regzlar intervals, it also provides means to contact people and make them aware of requirements (e.g. visa renewal) should a change in status be coming up.
While not strictly related to immigration control, it does certainly help that employment regulations are, as you mentioned, actually enforced.
In the UK, especially under conservative government, such rules are often just considered "red tape" and even if kept as law simply ignored and rarely enforced.
And that's not even considering advanced employment laws such as national collective bargaining to prevent wages being undercut by people coming from lower wage countries.
Alistair, my overview of all this is as a "reluctant Remainer > Rejoiner". I fit somewhere in your checklist, but I think you may need another category (or three!). Pride comes before a fall, and on reading responses here from Anda and Münchner Kindl, I'm reminded how narrow and biased my lukewarm view of EU membership was, in particular Free Movement.
So, there is another category for Leavers that needs to be addressed. That's for those like me who saw the cold supranational aspect of the EU, distant law making, endless bureaucracy (monthly trips to and from Strasbourg), and Britain's very specific situation of century-long settled migration figures doubling, and doubling again, in less than a decade of the Single Market/Free Movement ramping up.
My opinion was based (unreasonably or mistakenly, maybe) on a quadrupling of average levels of inflow being unsustainable for wage levels in UK (indeed, British builders took a hit to their wages as Poles and Roumanians flowed in by the hundreds of thousands since 2005), the pressure on non urban communities (a town near where I live has doubled in size in less than two decades, relations between Brits and Poles and Lithuanians there are no model for live and let live).
So, unprecedented population flows, whether it's a myth or fact that this pressurised the NHS, housing, social services, was the corollary to the UK forging ahead in the latter Thatcher era, and especially under Blair (Cool Brittania period), our wealth as a nation surged, and we built built built, and finally filled vacancies in burgeoning public services, agri, hospitality, care, construction.
I guess this is a RedKIP take. That "Global Britain", the result of making full use of Free Movement, Britain fully plugging in and leading Europe economically, also created fragmentation socially, as "forgotten Britain", the Red Wall, what would be described in US as "Flyover America", "the deplorables" were left with underinvestment, fracturing social bonds as thousands of "the other" moved into their rundown towns, took every poorly paid, back breaking job going, and exacerbated disconnect not just with Brussels, but also London and UK government.
The RedKIP take is that wealth creation is not the only measure or should not be the only driver, unique and rapid changes in population couldn't be sustained without some need for counterbalance.
Of course Farage tapped into this, allied with hard euroskeptic MPs, and when Cameron PM couldn't square this circle with his laughable "renegotiation" primarily with Merkel, the die was cast for the 2016 vote.
RedKIPPERS thus view the policy to Leave as justified that the majority of non metropolitan Brits (English and Welsh in particular) never signed into their towns being changed so dramatically, wealth, GDP, economic dynamism could not hold sway exclusively over feelings of inexorable change. And thus if Free Movement could not be ended or significantly modified (it couldn't), then we "must" Leave...
So many thanks for your constructive commentary. I'm interested in your views. However I'm not convinced that I need another grouping/space. My first group 'too many people' covers a huge multitude of issues/concerns/attitudes. I would suggest to you that this very large grouping was giving no thought whatsoever to our membership of the EU before the 2015 election. That only changed as a result of Cameron's weakness and lack of strategic planning. Cameron had no idea how to win the 2010 election other than not being Gordon Brown and I think was very shocked by the hung result. He therefore approached 2015 in a complete funk that UKIP would/could decimate his blue shires vote and responded with a badly thought through promise of a referendum.
It was only once that particular cat was out of the bag that the leaver's opinions began to be heard more loudly amongst the 'too many people' group and the thinking that the EU was possibly a bad thing began to take hold. You can then follow this with the "the cold supranational aspect of the EU, distant law making, endless bureaucracy (monthly trips to and from Strasbourg), and Britain's very specific situation of century-long settled migration figures doubling, and doubling again, in less than a decade of the Single Market/Free Movement ramping up." And, all of that only began to be talked about during the referendum period, by the biggest leavers group, as most of them were certainly not worrying about it before.
BUT, my point is that all of that thinking was dwarfed by the 'too many people' effect. Nobody in that group was voting out because of distant law making, or unelected officials. They just agreed, because it was a discussion point, that too many foreign voices were being heard on their high street, and they were unable, or unwilling, to see that Tory austerity had crushed their public services regardless of who was actually using them. And I have to stress again that they were NOT expecting anything to really change. Because they were told, again and again, that it wouldn't.
With regards to the 'red wall' voters, they include all of the four spaces on immigration. But, probably the second group of 'immigrants are cheating us' had a larger presence, and a louder voice. On top of that the 'immigrant haters' and their political movements targeted those voters, fanning the flames of the debate with their vitriol, even if they didn't benefit at the ballot box.
Finally, I'd like to repeat my central point. I don't care about distant law makers, or straight banana stuff, that particular elephant in the room is dwarfed completely by the enormous mammoth of immigration. We need to have a very honest and healing conversation about that subject before we can think about rejoining any part of the EU. And, that is why Keir Starmer is avoiding any talk of single market membership or anything else which might be a softer Brexit position, because he knows full well that great big hairy mammoth is still there in the background and one day will have to be eaten.
Alistair, I mostly agree with you. You're talking to someone who fitted at least a couple of your categories.
I believe the constant promises in the 2010 GE to keep annual immigration to the "tens of thousands" ie no higher than 99,999...pretty much agreed by all three parties (who can forget all those "I agree with Nick" replies from Cameron and Brown), set an impossible pressure.
And then when Cameron/Clegg presided over immigration figures 3-5x higher than the maximum they all promised, and Farage turbocharged UKIP to laser focus on Tory seats in the 2015 GE, Cameron caved to the euroskeptics in his party.
One of the great ironies being that a clear majority of the 300-500k annual influx numbers were non EU migrants, the very group that the British govt COULD say no to (no Free Movement from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ghana, Philippines etc). But of course saying no to brown and black people from outside EU and yes to white people from inside EU would be viewed rightly as racist.
So Cameron cornered himself in a trap of his own making, and then sprung it.
He decapitated himself voluntarily and then the Tory Party with the willing participation of the British people went on to spring a bigger trap on themselves.
And thus Cameron's tactic to prevent maybe a half dozen defections to UKIP and avoid another Hung Parliament in 2015 with his policy announced in 2014 for the referendum will mean that a decade later in the 2024 GE, Cameron not only didn't stop the termination of 6 Tory MPs, but likely will facilitate the termination of hundreds, and effectively the termination of the world's most established and over time most brutally successful election machine, the Conservative And Unionist Party.
The ironies are radioactive.
I think lack of planning and investment by local government is a much larger contributor to all of these pressures experienced by people.
Given that this has hobbled the UK for decades before EU membership it is troublesome that the population would suddenly believe the excuse that its "Brussel's fault".
Especially since EU funds were helping regions that were totally ignored by "London".
We'll how this develops when it becomes undeniable that the Leave promises to match these investments are inevitably broken.
Agreed. Transparency on inherently bad decision making will be plainer to see.
The biggest losers will be Wales who absolutely benefitted from EU regional funding. Parts of Wales are approaching a failed state category.
Put it this way, if I accidentally landed there in a small boat, I'd wanna go back!
That's a very good list - and does indeed fit the average voters/ vox populi better than Nick's description of the politicans and public commenters.
Interesting. Where do you fit the immigrants who in large number voted Leave (Indian resteraunts owners in Leicester and Bradford etc). And the sizeable votes for racist or racist-adjacent parties in EU...Front Nationale, AfD, Swedish Democrats, various competing parties in Italy, PiS, Orbans bunch.
I think if you had Leave/Remain referenda in all these countries, you might be horrified how close to Leave the vote would be helped by the supporters of these parties.
Actually, the opposite happened: during the run-up to the Referendum, there was a lot of talk about FRexit, because Marie Le Pen rode the anti-Brussel wave (less immigration, more general dissatisfaction), then Italian right-wingers joined, and a few worried about Domino effect.
Then Leave "won", May drew her red lines (without any consultation or thinking) - and immediately, Support for FRexit and all other -exits collapsed: if you plot the poll numbers in France, Sweden, Italy, etc., the numbers rose to 40% and more, then collapsed back to 20%.
Then it went worse, bungling the negotiations, experts spelling out all the iceberg = invisible details under the surface that make current modern life possible: which 99% of Europeans never thought about before, either- "of course" airplanes fly to other countries and Spanish tomatoes are in the supermarket, but a honest detailed article on what makes it possible and how easy it can be broken (even before Corona showed how disrupted supply chains look like for everybody) was interesting, shocking and made some people appreciate all that invisble work that upholds our normal modern life.
And the total bungling, the slide from Soft Brexit to Hard Brexit, showed even a lot of moderate anti-Brussel Europeans, that the actual -exiters were ideologues both in denial of reality and having no plan whatsoever at all (because they prefered their sunlit uplands, and if you refuse to accept reality, you can't plan for it).
That cooled a lot of moderate people and made them reject -exit.
Potential Leave groups in other EU countries have a much harder time to milk the anti-immigrant support because people are much more aware that immigration is not related to EU membership.
Anti-EU themes are much more along the lines of "control of our laws" then "control of our borders" because everyone really likes the absence of burdensome union internal borders.
Land borders - and their removal - have a much higher impact on daily live for people living in continental EU countries and the absence of such obstacles has thus much higher value.
It helps that none of the continental countries rely solely on point of entry checks for their immigration control, so not having those (or only on EU external borders) doesn't impact their country's effectiveness in implementing immigration policies.
When it became apparent that Brexit was not going well, it was thus easy for the populists to drop any mention of EU exit because their core anti-immigrant support was not affected by that.
After 5 years of watching the UK writhe in agony as it tries to rescue itself from the Brexit torment you might be vastly overestimating the enthusiasm for ‘leave’ in other EU countries. Schadenfreude maybe, leave - nein Danke
Good question. So the Asian immigrants voting leave, believing that new arrangements with the Indian subcontinent would become looser as a result, fit into their own little space. I did think about this group (my local Indian restaurant staff who know me were surprised I wouldn't vote leave) but felt they were 1. Too small a demographic and 2. Making that decision more on a business practical level rather than because they didn't like immigrants. With regards to the EU right wing parties and their supporters I do not know enough about them, but I suspect that many of their members would fit into my 4th group, and have an anti Muslim agenda rather than an anti immigrant agenda. I note that popular support for leaving the EU amongst the 27 members is apparently now lower than ever according to recent surveys.
Well, referenda were held in France and Ireland over Lisbon. I seem to recall those results not being exactly glowing popular examples of peoples being totally happy with the direction of travel at the time.
I think the referendum in France was about the EU Constitution proposal which got scrapped after failing to get popular agreement.
The bits that could get approval were then salvaged and put forward for vote as the Lisbon treaty. Which then got the necessary buy-in.
In the Irish case similarly an initial rejection resulted in addressing the population's main concerns and a respectively modified treaty achieved the required approval.
The UK could have tried a similar approach of inclusive democracy by having a referendum on the withdrawal agreement and, if that had failed to get approval, renegotiate to address the main concerns and try again.
But that would have likely ruled out the hard Brexit the Leave leaders wanted to achieve.
The high profile Lexiteers also include Claire (baroness to you) Fox, Gisella Stuart, Larry Elliot and Bob Crowe (now deceased but prototype for Lynch). Socialist Worker have been long term enemies of the "Capitalist Club" EU, along with the British Communist Party. And then you have the whole Spiked nexus - who in fact are now probably the main pro Brexit media voice - since so many of the ERG have fallen silent, and the Telegraph are having a bit of a wobble. Influential Lexiteers also include ALL of Corbyn's inner circle - Seamus Milne, Carrie Murphy and Andrew Murray - so it's inconceivable that Corbyn (proteje of Tony Benn) isn't also a Lexiteer ! Worth pointing out that Milne is also an unapologetic Stalinist, whose approval of the 1968 Soviet tank invasion of Prague gives him the nickname "Tankie".
One of the greatest ever "what if?"/sliding doors scenarios in politics, is if Lexiter Jeremy Corbyn had come out truthfully to campaign for Leave, and gone into a GE promoting a genuine Lexit prospectus of renationalisation etc.
A real possibility he could have swung 2017 over the line for Labour, or certainly pushed Johnson way closer in 2019.
He also might have ripped the Labour vote apart. Remember what happened to Labour in the 2019 Euro election when they managed to get outflanked on the pro-Remain side by the Lib Dems and Greens - the Lib Dems came second and Labour only just scraped ahead of the Greens into third.
In the purest, most cynical, anti-Tory tactical terms, this would have hurt the Tories horrendously; Lexit would have defended the Red Wall (because it would appeal to RedUKIP voters better than either the Tories or actual UKIP could) but would lose (most of) the inner-urban liberal seats, probably to the Greens, while it would make the Lib Dems tactical appeal in Remain-leaning Tory seats much more effective (Corbyn would look like a no-hoper meaning it was safe to vote Lib Dem, and the tactical anti-Tory/anti-Brexit vote is much clearer).
That was the election that Jo Swinson was trying to plan for, though I think the likely result is not her as PM, but Caroline Lucas pipping her to the post as places like Islington vote Green.
While an interesting 'what if', I'm sceptical for another reason. A lot of people - especially in the Red Wall - just didn't like Corbyn. They perceived him to be someone who didn't like the UK, didn't like British people and who liked many of our enemies.
If he'd been unambiguously pro-Brexit I'm not sure he'd have kept many of those who distrusted him onside. Even though he would have been sincere, many of those people would still have trusted him less than Johnson.
I tend to think that a Corbyn who would have been unambiguously pro-Brexit would have been a different sort of Corbyn and wouldn't have scared so many patriotic traditional Labour voters.
Either that or he would utterly terrify people by being for Havana-on-Thames in so many words (in which case his own party would have turfed him out). I guess I'm imagining Graham Stringer (until recently, my MP) as Labour leader rather than an actual version of Corbyn.
At any rate, my point was mostly that this was the election that Jo Swinson was expecting to fight and planning to fight and that in those circumstances, her attempt to become PM wasn't as ridiculous as it became when Labour switched to supporting the referendum. Even the "revoke" move was designed to outflank Labour's referendum on the pro-Remain side and rebuild the Lib Dem Euro-election coalition, but it failed because the sort of people who tweet with #FPBE aren't actually representative of Remainers. The problem was that when this failed, she and the party didn't have a Plan B, and they looked increasingly ridiculous trying to prop up a strategy that had demonstrably failed.
It's also worth saying that the Lib Dems did achieve forcing Labour to accept the referendum; that period between the Euro-election in June and Labour's referendum U-turn in September has been memory-holed by people who think Labour could have been pro-Brexit in 2019: they tried it in the first half of the year and got trashed.
Good points.
Yes, but whatever faults Corbyn had, he was always pretty "honest" as a politician, in the Tony Benn mould, never succumbing to PR spin or triangulating, or checking the odds.
As Parliament's leading Brexiteer, he let himself be led by Starmer on the second referendum, and so killed any chance of a Labour Brexit.
I don't see how honesty is a virtue if it's based on that person being in denial of reality and clinging to a disproven ideology.
Whether it's Corbyn believing in "socialism in one country" or the ERG actually believing in "Britannia unchained", their honesty doesn't stem from moral value, but because they denied reality so long they don't understand that not blurting out their extremist beliefs might persuade moderates outside their bubble.
I certainly have no time, and few Brits do, for Corbyns view of society.
Britannia Unchained was in all reality the least preferred option for most Brexit voters.
Truss was an anomaly out of time, a chancer who thought had no intellectual lineage from Thatcher, despite her derangement that she felt she was the person to finish what Maggie started in the 80s.
I think it's a myth that the second referendum was a decision made on the merits by anyone in the Labour party. They'd been resisting it for a long time and the whole Legacy Remain campaign apparatus (things like "Best for Britain") and the Lib Dems had been trying to convince Remainers that this meant that Labour was anti-Brexit.
This finally achieved cut-through in the middle of 2019 when we had all the indicative votes, and also through the Euro-election campaign - at which point the Labour vote disintegrated in their core areas (they lost Islington to the Lib Dems in the Euros).
The decision for the second referendum was entirely an electoral decision; they couldn't afford to be outflanked on the pro-Remain side and if they let themselves be so outflanked, the Lib Dems would eat their lunch.
I think Starmer's strategy before that crisis was to take the most pro-Brexit position he could without costing them serious numbers of votes from Remainers. The original thought was "where else are the Remainers going to go?" and that worked in 2017 (the Lib Dems were screaming that Labour was pro-Brexit and Remainers just didn't believe it) and it kept working until April or May in 2019 and then it just disintegrated almost overnight.
Do you remember all the indicative votes for "different Brexits" that were discussed in earnest (for just one session I believe?), and then voted on, needing to get to a particular threshold?
There was the Customs Union one, Single Mkt one, EEA one, EFTA one, Oven Ready one (maybe not, lol).
Anyhowz, not one passed the threshold, and so we were back to the ticking timebomb of No Deal one, which then opened up the clear lane for the Oven Ready one to become the "only" choice.
The interesting thing is that Labour then whipped it's MPs to vote for Johnson's deal. Had this not happened, with Lib Dems help, Johnson's one may not have passed.
Just what would have happened next?
I don't buy that Corbyn actually was 'honest'. While a backbencher he never had to make any compromises and, in part thanks to repeatedly voting against his party, gained a reputation as someone with integrity. As leader he had to triangulate all over the place to try to keep the Labour coalition together. Not so different to any other leader of a major political party. And he obviously never actually got into power where he'd have faced even harder decisions and trade-offs.
And - and for me this is important - when it came to talking about foreign governments, he could be decidedly slippery.
Regardless what I think, I don't think he'd have won over many of the Red Wall voters even if he'd unashamedly advocated the kind of Brexit he obviously believed in.
You mean the kind of Bxt that would have allowed progessive renationalisation of utilities, energy, rail etc...the policies that most people in the UK now would support, seeing the Thatcher neo liberal dream come to its final fruition, meaning Mick Lynch, head of main railway union, is the most popular and well respected political figure in UK, his rail strikes having overall public support, and his fully open views that a Lexit would have led to this mass nationalisation, totally prohibited under EU membership.
Anda, in the end it really doesn't matter, Bxt is just a grind, a psychodrama for one wing of Conservative Party, that used the citizens for its own ends. It's pure Darwinian natural selection. Survival of the fittest, the weak will die.
If the powers that be were really interested in at least investigating options that would smooth the bumpy ride, and immediately get synergy to something bigger than cold isolation, then a loose trade association with no pretensions for political union that would on day one be of the highest rank re ethics and standards and quality, EFTA membership ticks every box.
I did hear that Norway initially turned down overtures for us to join because Johnson intimated he would use membership as a launch pad to something "bigger" (oh yes, that fabled Trump led US/UK FTA lol), and they didn't want their own version of "EFTAexit" psychodrama.
Anda, one of the great ironies is that as reluctant entrants to the EEC, we then went on to possibly, w the exception of Poland, derive the most benefit economically, as Thatcher's legally framed Single Market allowed particularly our service/financial sector to flourish (augmented by Big Bang), and our manufacturing to have somewhat of a renaissance via our unique portal into Europe status (Nissan in Sunderland, anyone?).
Additionally, finally our fruit could be picked, old people be looked after, our hospitality and NHS expand, as supply met demand. Certainly there was also an influx of quite the best looking and most urbane young people coming over.
In many ways, quite a few stereotypes were broken, as we found Poles and Roumanians without doubt made the best builders etc (there would have been no 2012 Olympic Stadium without them), and age-old xenophobic scares about non-Brits were busted.
Of course Farage tapped into the darker underbelly of this seismic change.
Now we find the investment is drying up (anyone want to chip into British Volt battery factory?), we're in desperate need of 500k nurses, doctors, pickers, butchers, care workers, baristas/waiters, lorry drivers etc.
And my prediction is that by the end of the decade, Poland pull alongside us in the league table of rich nations.
There is a Darwinian outcome to all this. Brits can no longer criticise the EU for our misadventures and poor decision making/governance. The cognitive dissonance as the "chickens come home to roost" will be on a nationwide level, unheard of in the modern age. Kind of like the comedown from Suez, just much much worse.
But like Suez that forced us to engage w the world, Bxt will have the same effect, two elections from today.
Interesting considerations regarding the differences between Lexiters and RedKIPers.
Until now I would have considered them the same group but you make good arguments that they are not.
One thing I've never understood about Lexiters' internal thought process was how they expected a good outcome given a conservative government would be in control of all stages of exit.
The outcome would never have been anywhere close to what they had in mind.
Assuming they had a coherent vision to start with.
Anda, there's been a long and proud tradition on the working class Left, thru the Labour Party and the unions, to argue for never joining the EEC as was (see the many speeches of Tony Benn and Peter Shore etc), campaigning to leave (Labour visited Brussels in early 80s to investigate the process that would facilitate Leave had Michael Foot won the 1983 GE), to the greatest "silent" Lexiters of all, Corbyn and McDonnell.
Indeed it was only when Thatcher cemented the neo liberal revolution over consecutive elections that Labour swung to being pro-EU as a social counterbalance (ironic as the EEC/EU remains a capitalist redoubt, no allowance made for nationalised industries or nation-centric subsidised industries), and the Tories moved from championing the business opportunities of the Single Market to being more parochial on immigration etc.
Thanks Marc, very interesting insight.
While I don't agree with their reasoning, I can at least somewhat understand their goals.
Hence my before mentioned puzzlement that they thought it could be obtained by letting the conservatives decide all and every detail of the exit process.
If they had any hope of obtaining their mythical socialism in isolation they would have had to bring Brexit at a time they were in control of the government or at least an influence on it.
In any case fell for the same lie that the EU was holding them back rather than their own governments unwillingness or incapability of making the necessary reforms.
Especially people on the top political level should have seen that other EU nations had no issues with having and supporting publicly owned businesses, having very advanced employment laws and effectively funding public services such as health care and education.
But I guess the long complicity of Labour governments in using the EU as a scapegoat for national failures would have made confronting such truths an awkward endeavour.
I think ideology at the other end of the political spectrum may be the reason for a clouding of minds as to the sense of voting alongside the Conservative party.
The clouding of minds is as prevalent on the left as it is the right, Labours capitulation to identarian politics being the most pressing example.
Yes, I think the Lexiters are in so many ways a mirror image of the Brexit Ultras on the right. They prefer their own fantasies to figuring the reality of the world, they just have different coloured unicorns.
That may be true. My gymnastics as a previous Bxt "agnostic" was to have one leg in the Lexit camp, one leg in the RedKIP camp, and one leg in the Soverignty First camp.
Hmm, a very wobbly tripod on reflection lol.
Anda, I know many Labour voting Lexiters. For them, and to me at one point, "Brexit really did MEAN Brexit".
This translates as since only the Tories were going to get Leave done, that was a small price to pay for the ultimate goal of a, to all intents and purposes, irreversible severance with the EU, both parties resolving to uphold the Leave vote, and provide competing prospectuses for a Leave based future.
Presumably a Johnson style laissez faire "all things to all Leavers" type versus a Truss "Singapore on Thames/IEA" type versus a Corbyn "regain control by mass nationalisation previously not permitted by EU membership". Of course the lack of consensus between parties, and even between senior members in parties (Corbyn Lexit v Starmer second vote, May/Rory Stewart version v Johnson break all the rules v Truss libertarian mass migration version), meant that the Bxt most likely to be least damaging, least radical, least prone to the ego of any one leader, ie EEA/EFTA type semi detached Leave, fell by the wayside.
Even in that surreal period after May's Bxt deal fell, and various incarnations were put to MPs in the Commons in a big elimination vote.
MPs on all sides badly failed the nation during that period, leading to the Cult Of Personality Bxt final result that was Johnson's Oven Ready Deal.
Ok, I guess it made sense from their point of view, though I still think it was extreme gambling that the Tories wouldn't make a complete mess of things or that any mess could be cleaned up reasonably easy.
However one needs to wonder about some parts of their motivation, given that at least their leaders must have known that nationalisation could have easily been achieved while being an EU member.
Unless they were equally unaware of reality in other EU members or (hopefully not) purposefully feeding that myth to gather support among undecided voters.
I think the prominent Lexiteers - not ordinary, fairly non-political people who just have a sense that we'd be better and fairer on our own, but political idealogues - are fantasists and always have been. That their utopian socialist workers paraside was not going to be delivered by the Tories was no more utopian than many of their other political beliefs.
Corbyn's takeover of the Labour party was a unique opportunity for them: they'd never really been serious about winning power in democratic elections and weren't worrying about the practicalities of delivering their socialist goals.
Also remember that on the far left there's a strand of thought that believes that if only things get terrible enough, finally everyone will realise they've been fooled this whole time and will come around to supporting the glorious workers revolution. Seen in that light, a terrible Tory Brexit could be a step on the way to a wonderful Lexit Britain.
I don't believe mass nationalisation is allowed under EU anti competition rules. Ditto state funding to prop up industries like steel.
Why do you think the Lexiters were so adamant Bxt had to happen. Most are not ardent Havana Caracas types, most viewed Bxt as an opportunity to regain full control of political and economic policy so that options like full fat renationalisation of the energy sector and boosting home grown steel production to benefit our economy could not be opposed by Brussels.
EU competition rules have no bearing on ownership.
This was simply used as an excuse by conservative governments to fulfill their privatisation agenda.
It is annoying and disheartening that Labour not only let them get away with that lie but be fully complicit in trying to milk the very same lie for other purposes.
I guess it is another example of lack of information by the British public on how things are done in other European countries.
Here in Austria it would have been politically impossible to do a UK style privatisation bonanza.
Aside from massive public opposition this would have been met with massive opposition by these companies. And their managements are politically well enough connected across the party spectrum.
I doubt the regulations would even have passed the EU process if they had required privatisation as that would have meant going against Germany, France and several of their close allies.
The UK might actually have been the only member that went down that route.
Anda, it's not lack of information of the (non-Sun reading, but educated) British public, it's active denial.
I'm not a British citizen; I'm a layperson, not a professor for organisation or similar like Chris Grey; I'd never looked at hundreds of these details in depth, but since 2016 there have been so many articles simply on the internet by experts, pointing out the lies, and giving the facts, that it was not lack of information.
And yes, during Corbyn times many experts called out explicity that Labours strategy was "We know Tories doing Brexit will burn the country down, which will destroy the Tories, then Labour will be voted in power and we can build socialism in GB, so sunlit socialist uplands´!" - and every rational person going "You're helping the tories to burn down the countries, are you insane?", yet being ignored.
I agree that active denial has also had a role to play and likely even resulted in misinformation being spread on purpose.
For example if a person like Mick Lynch is in active denial on rail privatisation and thus purposefully spreads falsehoods, it might lead other people to discard actual information.
If they had already had that information to begin with, it would have been much harder for these myths and lies to get a hold.
Lack of information is not necessarily caused by lack of availability thereof.
However there is a difference between having to actively look for information and it being apparent in your day to day life.
In the case of national industries, you and I are in the second category, so the notion that the EU would somehow prevent this is absurd to us.
For Marc and others in the UK, who's experience is almost the opposite, misleading information by sympathetic experts like Lynch can easily be given more weight than other available information.
I've learned a lot about the situation and inner workings of the UK since when I started to follow things more closely after the referendum's surprise result.
Before that I had simply assumed that things would be at least similar to how we do things while in reality that's not true at all.
Thanks for an amusing and interesting dissection of the diverse brands of people who made up the Brexit coalition that have brought us to the horrible place Britain is in right now.
As ever I have enjoyed this article but I think that NT misreads Nineteen Eighty Four - the Inner Party didn't really have an ideology, but was interested only in power for its own sake, as O'Brien says to Winston Smith at one point. What group does this remind you of?
Nick, I've always read your blogs with great interest, as someone who voted Remain, went on to become a "philisophical" or "jaded" Leaver, and recently wrangled back to how I voted originally.
However I feel you're classifications are way too pat and self satisfied, especially your dismissal of Lexiters.
And if you think there's only "one" type of Remainer/Rejoiner, you're mistaken.
Your tone is a little condescending, the first time I feel your words are guilty of that.
I don't think Nick is suggesting that there was only one type of Remainer and that there is now only one type of Rejoiner.
People have almost certainly had different priorities when deciding to vote Remain.
However, unlike Brexiters, their differences weren't inherently incompatible.
For example if one person voted to remain because they themselves or relatives/friends relied on Freedom of Movement of People, the goal of retaining that would not be in conflict with another person who's priority was exporting goods to other EU countries without any artificial burden.
I agree, my point is that despite my voting intention being 50/50 with 24 hours to go, I eventually voted Remain, despite having no positive feeling towards EU membership or the frankly distant politics of Brussels and Strasbourg. I'm friendly with people who voted Remain because they hate the way of government in UK and wanted more convergence with Brussels. Not a lot in common here.
Even in the anti migration Bxter side, I know those who absolutely hate free movement with a passion, and those who genuinely were concerned that a century of steady immigration equivalent to 40-50k annually, became 150k by the turn of the millenium, and 300-500k by the time of the toxic hot war of 2010-2015 as Cameron battled the twin fronts of Farage UKIP and ERG in his party.
Even I looked at 40-50k inflow annually in 1995 becoming 150k in 2005 and 300-500k in 2015, and see why Leave won.
But that's (again) putting feelings over reality, and ignoring known history.
After WWII (because many people had died), there was a lack of labourers, so Germany imported Italians, Greeks, Yoguslavs, and then a few million Turks; France imported Algerians (colony) and GB sent the Windrush ship.
All of these "foreigner" who in France and GB were colonial subjects = citizens, stayed and helped build the economy and country. And because the country and economy flourished, the 60s had themselves a baby boom.
And for the past 30 years, experts and business warned that now that the Baby Boom is retiring, birth rate has dropped, population is aging = we all desperately need new young people to do the work. The nursing work, the low-paid work, all the work.
So anybody who was worried about too many people (because GB is an island, so too many people it will tip over, as one memorable idiot said on TV) was denying reality.
Yes, of all my previously solidly held views during my adult life, my views on immigration have been the ones most challenged and found wanting. If I've done one major 180 in my opinion of things, immigration is it. And thus my views on Free Movement.
I fully concur with your analysis.
I can certainly understand some of the weariness regarding the EU, after all I had similar doubts when we here in Austria voted to join in 1994.
However a lot of issues like "distant" politics are primarily a failure of our representatives and media.
In some countries the media does not even report on votes in the EU parliament or council, let alone about discussions on regulation drafts or similar.
Same for ministers or MEPs who, given wide spread usage of social media, could do some of the reporting themselves (and some do).
On the immigration angle it is now at least very obvious that EU membership had nothing to do with the UK's lack of control.
I guess any portion of truth is helpful.
Anda, I'm of Polish-Estonian extraction, my parents coming to the UK just before and just after the end of WW2.
And my dad, like all Polish migrants, worked all the hours God sent, to make a better life for all of us. My mum never liked living in the UK, but dad provide for her too.
However as a Brit, born and bred, I imbibed typically xenophobic views, and it's only really since we left in the EU that I've reassessed my heritage as the son of a "do anything/any hours" migrant and feel somewhat ashamed of the Farage-lite views I developed over two decades of absorbing tabloid headlines and not practicing clear critical thinking.
I fancy myself as a reasonably (lol) metropolitan egalitarian type, but I still was *this* close to voting Leave.
To me personally, my mindset then and now speaks volumes.
Now I view a philisophical attachment to Bxt as naive at best and poor thinking at worst. And I realise the herd mentality and purity spiral aspects of allying to Leave in much clearer relief in 2023 versus 2016.
I think everyone can relate to falling for myths or misinformation, especially on complex subjects and even more so if emotions get attached to them.
As I said I had my doubts during out ascension process and might even have voted against joining had I been a couple month older and met the voter eligibility threshold for our referendum.
I can also now only look back and see that many fears were unfounded, could be mitigated or even resulted in EU side improvements.
The irony of immigration concerns being a contributing factor to the Brexit referendum result is that EU membership has kept immigration down as many of the job vacancies had been filled by EU citizens instead of immigrants.
Well, I guess it didn't help that the UK Home Office had such messed up statistics that they had mixed EU citizens and even foreign students into their immigration numbers.
Can't really fault normal people if the started to think that EU Freedom of Movement of People was just another form of immigration when the government's own official numbers make the same mistake.
Anda, I remain unsure how Freedom of Movement "isn't" immigration. I realise in pure terms it means the "potential" for immigration, people coming here to study etc.
Seems a mute point when long term settled levels migration over a century trebled by the time of the E. European accession nations coming into the UK, and that figure doubling ahead of the referendum.
You'll have a hard job convincing anyone in UK that 300-500k annual migration figures, over half of those being from EU, to mean that Freedom of Movement is NOT an immigration mechanism.
The economy and public safety of France and Germany doing rather better than GB, so proof that not leaving EU is a good idea? That denying reality and letting populists in power is bad? That EU members do have enough national sovereignity that some make better decisions than other countries?
I'm not quite sure what your point is.
Goodbye, lying troll.