This week in Brexitland, June 1, 2023

Here’s what the big impediment to rejoining the EU is in reality

The polling on Brexit at the moment is nothing short of a miracle. That we could be in a position, against a backdrop of both main political parties being vocally pro-Brexit, of over 60% of voters wanting to rejoin the EU is unbelievable. In one sense, pro-Europeans are in a good place.

In another sense, we’re all at sea, and it involves two things in the main. One goes back to the official Remain and Leave campaigns in 2016 and continues to the present, never getting any better; the other is what I am starting to think is something deep within the left and the right, at least in Britain.

Remain should have won in 2016. Forget all of that, “The tabloids had created a certain atmosphere and the people were ready to explode” bullshit - Remain were better funded, had both the government and the official opposition on its side, had better arguments at their disposal and had the luxury of being the status quo. Leave won because their campaign was 100 times better. It’s that simple. It was that much better because they did something fairly straightforward: they thought of the best people to run the campaign and put them in charge. Remain, meanwhile, was run by the centre-left, meaning it mostly resembled someone’s Hampstead dinner party if everyone’s glasses of Pinot Noir had been spiked with mescaline early in the night.

2016 is receding into the past now, yet pro-European campaign groups have yet to learn most of the valuable lessons required to get us anywhere near rejoining the EU. A few months ago, I had hoped that perhaps something resembling a campaign around eventually rejoining the EU could come together semi-organically, out of organisations that already exist, each learning from the mistakes of the past and finally starting to campaign to win. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen of it, we are a million miles away from such a thing. If there is an emerging eco-system that is going to campaign to get us back into the EU, I haven’t seen any sign of it - I just see more of the same stumbling blindly that I’ve witnessed since 2016.

I am not unique in having worked in Westminster for both left-wing and right-wing organisations, but I am reasonably rare. Most people pick a side early on and stick to it, for good reason: Westminster is unbelievably partisan and has way more to do with being part of one team and being fiercely loyal to it than anything else. On this Substack, I have complained a great deal about the Tories; said again and again how I want them to be removed from government. However, I am now about to say some positive things about the centre-right in Britain and contrast them with some negatives about the British centre-left, at least as I have experienced them, then bring that back to campaigning to rejoin the EU.

I think I can summarise the worst of what I’ve experiencing amongst the centre-left in this country by telling you a story of what happened when I was working at a centre-left think tank and we were looking for a young researcher to help with a particular project. I had taken all the CVs we’d received after advertising the position - there were a lot, more than 50 - and I was going through them all, trying to narrow them down. I was finding it difficult, as the vast majority of them looked good.

While ploughing through this task, someone I was working with on the project came into the room, a senior employee of the organisation. I told him I was struggling to narrow my search down. He smiled and then lightly chuckled, before grabbing the pile of CVs off me, proceeding to file through them quickly, putting a handful to one side while placing most of them straight in the rubbish. ‘It’s easy,’ he told me, ‘You just look for the ones who went to Oxford or Cambridge and you bin the rest.’

This particular person was older and not careful with what he said as a general rule, but I have thought about that moment a lot since and come to the conclusion that while most other centre-left people I have worked with would never have said the line about Oxbridge out loud, they would have thought it and acted upon the same impulse. I hate to say this, but centre-left people who work in Westminster are by and large exceptionally snobby. Let’s be clear: I’m not saying everyone who is centre-left and works in Westminster is a horrible snob. There are loads of lovely, down to Earth people on the centre-left who work in London. I’m just saying, unfortunately, a huge chunk of them, perhaps even a majority, are horrible snobs, and I’ve learned that the hard way.

They seem to categorise people into two types who they feel able to treat as equals: one, those who come from upper-middle class backgrounds and went to Oxford or Cambridge; two, people who are working class but have worked either in trade unions or the Labour Party or Labour affiliated NGOs for a long period of time. People in these two categories need to be treated with respect and are serious people. Everyone else in the world fits into two categories as well: those who can be openly scorned, and those who they have to pretend to be nice to because they fit into a category of some description that it is verboten for the centre-left to be openly scornful towards (so instead, they are silently scornful towards them).

Meanwhile - and again, it truly gives me no joy to say this - the centre-right aren’t like that. On a one-on-one level, they are much, much nicer, partly because wherever they went to school, they aren’t generally snobby at all. In fact, in large part because they are Tories, they are trained to try and be as modest as possible most of the time. There is a general sense of always being treated as an equal around centre-right people. They don’t generally care where you come from or what your background is - they care what you might be able to do for them, now or in future. In other words, their motivation to be nice mostly derives from self-interest, but it’s a much more human interaction in my experience than the usual centre-left one.

This isn’t to say, I need to stress heavily, that centre-right people are wonderful and centre-left people are horrible. For a start, it was the centre-right who put Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss in charge of the country, which is fairly unforgivable, however charming they might be to have a drink with. They have also allowed the Conservative party to be overrun by ideological, far-right psychos without so much as a fight. The moderates in Labour may have struggled against Corbyn and his bunch, but at least they struggled.

Yet if you asked me who I would rather have a drink with, it would probably be a Tory every time. With centre-right people, at worst you feel like you’re still being treated like a person; with centre-left people, all too often it can seem like you’re being talked to as if you are someone who is beneath being engaged with at all. You aren’t part of their dinner party circle, so you are no one and you’re not even a no one that one could feel virtuous for engaging with.

This all feeds back into campaigning to rejoin the EU. Most of the Remain campaign was made up of centre-left people; since June 2016 came and went, the centre-left bent of pro-European campaigning has only increased. This is a very bad thing for those of us who wish to see the UK rejoin the EU as soon as possible. One reason it’s such a bad thing is that more and more, pro-Europeanism becomes the preserve of only snobby centre-left people in London who are out of touch with everyone else in the country. The other is that centre-right people who might have an inkling that Brexit is becoming a complete disaster still have nowhere to go and more to the point, don’t particularly fancy abandoning the Tory ecosphere to be ignored by a bunch of snobby centre-left types who will treat them with contempt.

There are two huge reasons why I think we need the centre-right to embrace rejoining the EU, if we want any chance of seeing it happen. One is that in order for it to make sense, both internally in terms of UK politics and externally in thinking about how the EU treats our desire to rejoin, we need the whole thing to be as cross-party, non-partisan as possible. The other is that the centre-right are much, much, much, much better at political campaigning than the centre-left. If we had more centre-right people working on pro-European campaigning again, it would improve dramatically, instantly.

To summarise the different approaches to campaigning by the centre-left and centre-right: centre-left campaigns work on the principle of patronage, basically identifying those who are part of the gang and paying them to hang around; the centre-right tries to identify people who can win things for them and then hire those people to do it. I am of the opinion, having watched both of them close up, that the latter is infinitely superior.

I’m feeling down about this at the moment, but I’m trying to stay positive and think of solutions instead of complaining. I don’t particularly want to have to set up my own pro-European campaign group from scratch, but I think I might be forced to. The ones that exist are just not up to the task at hand, sadly. I have been avoiding admitting that to myself for a while now, but in the end, it’s better to be honest.

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