This week in Brexitland, June 27, 2024

Why what’s about to happen in a weeks’ time is a lot like what happened in June 2016, even though no one (but me) will make that comparison

It’s one week to go before the general election, and the polls refuse to budge in the Tories’ favour. In fact, the whole thing feels like it’s over already. I have never known an election campaign to feel this dead a week out from polling day.

In one way, it feels not only different from most recent general elections, but also the 2016 EU referendum, which felt tight down to the wire, something that was reflected in the close result. However, in an entirely different but crucial way, what is about to happen at the 2024 general election is remarkably analogous to what took place in 2016.

The result of the EU referendum has long been misunderstood by both sides of the Remain-Leave debate. It was neither some sort of Russian PSYOP project gone wild, nor a rational choice for a better future made by the British electorate. It was a cry for help, a wilfully destructive act by the section of the British electorate who made the difference. They were handed a brick and told not to, under any circumstances, throw it through the store window - and they went ahead and hurled it through as an act of defiance. “Deal with that mess,” was the collective voice of Brexit. “Now maybe you’ll be forced to fix things.” The chaos that consumed parliament in the years following the vote was not against the “will of the people”, but a furtherance of what they wanted to happen when they voted for Brexit. They wanted to disrupt the “natural order” and make the political classes squirm. The electorate succeeded in this goal.

In a sense, the Tories getting annihilated by the electorate is the 2016 result coming full circle, back to the only place it was ever going to end up - the Conservative civil war that created Brexit eating the mothership. The same impulse that drove people to do something slightly crazy, slightly drastic, stepping into the unknown in 2016 has driven them to do the same again in 2024 in a very different direction. “You think we won’t destroy the Conservative party? Watch us.”

The warnings about “super majorities” sound remarkably like the “Brexit will cost every household £4,000” scare stories from eight years ago. People aren’t listening. They don’t care. They feel angry and betrayed and they finally have a chance to do something about it, namely destroying the governing party in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The electorate are being given numerous ways to do it, as well. If you feel angry from the right, you can vote Reform and destroy the Tories that way; if you want to make sure they get destroyed, you can vote Labour; if you feel angry from a different angle, there’s the Lib Dems to consider. So many ways of destroying the Conservative party out there to choose from this time round.

What is humorous to watch is Conservative politicians, about to have their careers ended in many circumstances, who cannot begin to fathom that the same destructive forces which gave us Brexit in 2016 have now turned around and are set to annihilate them as well. The winds of hell they unleashed have blown back and obliterated the Tories. You could almost feel sorry for them, if you really tried to.

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