This week in Brexitland, May 18, 2023

Brexit has a terminal disease and the symptoms are starting to become unavoidable

The National Conservative conference has played out this week, often times coming across as a party political broadcast for the Tories’ political opponents. In trying to import an American style of conservatism, the whole thing has been an advertisement for why the Conservative party is going to lose the next election very badly, and further, why it deserves to do so.

It also signals the next phase in Brexit’s evolution: it is becoming attached, both in terms of those who advocate most strongly for its continuation as well as in the minds of the public, with hard right politics of a particularly regressive sort. The conference has been reflective in many ways of how the dialogue around Brexit in the country has got away from the Brexiters, mirroring the electoral downfall of the Conservative party more generally - most people want the practical elements of their lives to get better and and care way less about culture war items than the Brexity NatCons would like. Although there was the occasional nod to things like the housing crisis at the National Conservative conference, so much of the discussion there was given over to “wokeness” and its peril to western society.

Brexiters feel like they can keep belief in Brexit alive by attaching it to the culture wars and getting round the practical downsides of their project as much as they can via obfuscation, whataboutery and when cornered, downright falsehoods. This will fail (and is visibly failing already) for several reasons. One is that, as alluded to above, people wanted their lives to get notably better when they voted for Brexit. It was sold as something that would improve people in Britain’s quality of life; no amount of culture warring is going to distract them from the fact that their quality of life is declining.

Another is that the Brexiters completely overreached this week, even keeping in mind their target audience of natural Tory voters. Yes, they can probably reach some of these people on the trans activism, protestors gluing themselves to roads and statue stuff; it’s another thing to be talking about taking women’s rights back to the dawn of the 20th century while mentioning Germany and the Holocaust in ways that are a little on the nose. Most people in Britain, even on the right, are reasonably liberal on a lot of things and in particular do not want the UK turned into some sort of poxy version of the United States of America.

The most ardent Brexiters on the right currently seem to be engaged in a campaign to try and make Brexit look outdated, reactionary and most likely a terrible mistake. They are doing our work for us, which is charitable of them. They are making Brexit look old hat and even a little thuggish and inappropriate in ways that are way out of the reach of anti-Brexit campaigners to achieve at present. Why they are doing this is an interesting thing to psychoanalyse.

Part of it that they seem to believe the victory of Brexit in 2016 was an ipso facto victory for their brand of reactionary politics. Part of the way they saw Brexit back then was as a sort of Trojan horse, a way to create an environment so that they could get some of the policies they wanted enacted, knowing that these policies would be unpopular with the electorate if spelled out - yet they have now swallowed their own messaging. This is more common than you’d think. I worked on a campaign myself over a decade ago where there was a lot of astro-turfing done by the main campaigns team to make the issue we were trying to promote seem like it had a lot of interest amongst members of the public. This was obviously done with the knowledge that it did not in fact have the required level of interest and so it had to be artificially created. Yet later on down the line, the same team then made plans based around the idea that loads of people actually did in fact care about the issue, essentially being fooled by their own astro-turfing. I think some version of this has happened to the Conservative party and the Brexit faithful.

This is the road towards Brexit’s eventual death, without question. One of the things I keep coming back to is how comprehensively the Brexiters have failed to win the peace. Particularly after the 2019 general election, they needed to make as many people as possible feel like Brexit was a project of national renewal, divorced from partisan considerations. How they might have done that, I’m the wrong person to ask given I have never believed in it, but surely they must have had some ideas given they feel so strongly about it? Instead, it’s been three and a half years of “drinking liberal tears”; an antagonism directed at anyone who disagrees with anything the Brexiters say about anything. This has predictably caused a backlash against Brexit, with the polls solid now for rejoining.

Is it too late for the Brexiters to try and turn things around? It’s a moot question anyhow given they show no signs of understanding the level of damage they are still doing to their project. Yet even if they suddenly saw the light, it probably is too late. Brexit needed to get off to a flying start and instead, it tripped over itself out of the gate and laid there, defecating on the ground. The journey towards rejoining the EU will be slow and painful, filled with false starts, but I think the Brexiters themselves have made it inevitable, as aptly demonstrated by the National Conservative conference in London this week. Thanks, guys, for all your service to the cause.

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Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.