This week in Brexitland, September 28, 2023

All that’s left of the pro-Brexit argument is the culture war. And in time, that will simply not be enough to sustain it as a project

There has been a lot of Brexit related news lately. For something that is supposed to be “done”, it sure has a way of hanging around as an issue. There was Keir Starmer talking about how he is going to renegotiate the deal with the EU, the Brexiters then going mad and hoping this would hurt Labour in the polls (and finding that it didn’t particularly), the Lib Dems saying no one is talking about Brexit anymore (except for them, at least as far as mentioning that no one is mentioning it), and of course, a march for Rejoin in central London last weekend.

The latter was immediately leapt upon by right-wing commentators as proof positive of the Rejoin campaign’s insignificance. Nothing more than a few thousand mostly older people wearing blue and yellow costumes and make up, doing interpretive dance to songs from the 1970s. We Rejoiners talk all the time about demographics and how it’s on our side, but you wouldn’t have thought so from the march last weekend, where it appeared that everyone who still cares about the issue is pushing 70.

The Brexiters could have taken this as a victory clean and simple, but sadly for them, Brexiters are incapable of thinking in these terms. Soon enough, we had leading Brexit boosters on GB News telling us that anyone who doesn’t full-heartedly support Brexit now is anti-British and anti-democratic. Funnily enough, that’s not how democracy works. In a functioning democracy, differences of opinion are not only tolerated but encouraged, for many reasons, but one is because having a functioning opposition to the government is vital in a democracy, lest we end up in a one party state. They seem to understand this sort of thing when it comes to, I don’t know, vaccine passports, but sadly, never Brexit. They only seem to think in “enemies of the people” authoritarianism when it comes to that subject - and then without a hint of irony, turn around and say that anyone who doesn’t submit to the will of the current government with no exceptions is being anti-democratic.

But that’s the thing, you see - this is all the Brexiters have left. Yelling a lot about how anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a traitor and trying to push the culture war onto Brexit as far as it can possibly go, that’s all that remains of the pro-Brexit argument. And sadly, that’s all they need for now because everything that’s taking place in Britain on the topic of our relationship with the EU is phoney war territory. Most of the public isn’t listening, whatever we’d prefer.

Eventually they will though, when the years go by and Brexit still hasn’t delivered and people wonder why they can’t retire to France or need to go through an annoying process just to visit France any longer in fact, and don’t see what we got out of the whole mess. When the next generation comes of age and wants Brexit reversed. The Brexiters don’t understand or maybe don’t even care that they are not at all prepared for that fight. The kid who will be in his or her early twenties in 2032 isn’t going to care that a decade ago some older people who liked the EU got together in Parliament Square and danced to “Power to the People” while wearing blue and yellow handmade superhero costumes. The culture wars of the 2020s will literally be the most boring subject on Earth to that person by then. What they’ll care about is being able to live, work, study and roam free in their own continent.

Today’s Brexiters can't seem to see that when the dystopian miasma of the current age passes over into something completely different over the next decade, all of their “will of the people” hokum will seem mindlessly vapid to around 95% of people in this country. An embarrassing remnant of a darker age, one in which we had a government so inept that they couldn’t even build a high speed railway line over the course of a decade, even after chucking billions of pounds at it.

There are no solid reasons to support Brexit any longer, other than “It was a hassle to get there and I don’t want to go back via the same path” and “Look at the funny old libs in their EU themed berets”. Squeezing Brexit into the culture wars, even though it doesn’t fit there at all, is vital to the Brexiters because it is the one skinny pillar holding Brexit up at the moment. But gravity will kick in eventually. And then the real campaign to rejoin the EU will begin in earnest.

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