This week in Brexitland, May 4, 2023

The strange case of how Brexiters think Remainers won the argument in 2016

A common refrain from Corbynistas is: “Jeremy won the argument”. It’s the bizarre idea that even though Labour lost two elections on the trot under Corbyn’s leadership, on some level, Corbyn changed politics so that his style of politics won the day anyhow. It’s a silly stance to take and ignores a basic idea that is central to democracy: that the party which wins an election by default wins the argument. At least for the time being. That’s just how democracy works.

I found out this week that Brexiters have their own version of “Jeremy won the argument” that makes the Corbynista version seem sane by comparison. It puts forth the idea that even though Remain lost the referendum - and they don’t dispute that, of course - somehow or other, we sort of won the argument. At least, a significant portion of it.

It goes like this: the Remain campaign in 2016 argued that if we left the European Union, we’d be poorer. People heard that message, believed Remain were right in their assertion but decided to vote to leave the EU anyhow. The framing of the 2016 EU referendum was therefore a choice between staying in the EU and saving ourselves from economic downside, or leaving the EU and taking the economic hit, all for a greater good.

The ramifications of this idea are so mind-bending, they need to be unravelled. Particularly as this gets to the ugly heart of Brexitism, I think.

The reason this thesis is gaining ground within the dogma of Brexitism is that it is becoming unavoidable that Brexit has caused, is causing now and will continue to cause economic harm to Britain. Therefore, what they want to do is reframe the argument as the economic harm was always anticipated and further, the 2016 referendum made that explicit and people voted for Brexit despite being fully aware of the economic harm that it would cause. In fact, Brexiters want to take it a step further and say that in 2016, people voted explicitly to be poorer, knowing that it was worth it for sovereignty.

This is obviously rubbish, so let’s deconstruct the argument. The first problem with this idea is that it conveniently ignores the fact that the Leave campaign - in fact, every Leave campaign - explicitly said that not only would leaving the EU not cost the UK economically, leaving the EU would be economically beneficial. No Leave campaign ever made the argument that Brexit would be tough and hit people’s wallets but that it would be worth it. They said that Remain’s argument that it would be costly was “Project Fear”, in fact. Further, the sovereignty argument barely featured in the Leave campaigns of 2016. It was sort of there, but way in the background; the central Leave argument was that we were wasting money being in the EU and could save that cash and make more of it by making our own financial decisions outside the bloc.

My next point is more crucial: when one side argues one thing and the other side argues the exact opposite, you have to believe that people believed in the argument of the side they voted for. More than that, when one side wins in a democracy, that side should be held accountable for what it promised.

Only in a situation as screwed up as Brexit could you have the losing side argue we’ll be worse off if we go ahead with something, with the winning side saying that’s all bollocks, only to go ahead with it, for the losing side to be proven correct, and then for the winning side to say that they always agreed with the losing side’s argument and that’s in fact why they won in the first place.

This gets to the heart of why I care so much about all of this. It’s way more than the fact that I don’t think leaving the EU was a good idea and that rejoining would solve most of the problems Brexit created. It’s that Brexit has fundamentally poisoned our politics and the only way out of that I see is by reversing as much of it as possible. How did we get to a point where people in Britain can argue with a straight face that the winners of a democratic vote have no responsibility to deliver on what they promised? And that the loser’s argument in fact backs up their project completely? Or that people, when presented with one argument that said something would be economically harmful, another that said the precise opposite, would then conclude the first argument was correct but vote for the second one?

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