This week in Brexitland, September 14, 2023

Matthew Goodwin says there are five big advantages to having left the EU. Unsurprisingly, they are all rubbish. Here’s my breakdown of why every one of them falls apart under inspection

Debunking the latest round of Brexiter myths can get tiring. That’s the whole point of what the Brexiters do, in fact - spout rubbish in order to wear people like me down, sending another avalanche of dreary bullshit that has to be shown up for the tissue of nonsense that it is, hoping one day that the only people still complaining about Brexit will be the Brexiters themselves.

Matthew Goodwin has anointed himself recently as a sort of Grand Poobah of the intellectual Brexiters. Therefore, taking what he says on the matter seriously is a perfectly valid way of debunking Brexit myths. I say this because Brexiters constantly accuse me of having a go at ordinary Joe pro-Brexit types on social media, a sort of “pick on someone your own size” type of thing, which seems to go against their “Everyone who voted Brexit knows exactly what they voted for” line, as well as the whole “We’re tired of experts” shtick. By their logic, shouldn’t we take the word of @Brexitrulzlol5824390584 to be just as valid as anyone else’s?

Anyhow, this week, Matthew came up with five Brexit advantages he thinks will shame the Remoaners into silence. They are all rubbish and as such, easily debunked. I would give him points for not mentioning either the vaccine rollout or Ukraine - but he later went on to expand his list to ten benefits, most of the extra items just covering the Ukraine and vaccines nonsense, plus some sovereignty boiler plate and a mention of losing freedom of movement, the latter of which is definitely not a benefit.

So, here we go, I’ll take each of them on, one at a time, as usual:

1. Brexit strengthened our representative democracy

Come on, Matt, seriously? It’s this sort of thing that makes me wonder if Professor Goodwin is simply taking the piss. We’ve had four changes of prime minister in the seven years since the Brexit referendum. Our representative democracy has almost fallen over several times in that period - ah yes, Matt and his buds chime in with here, but so much of that is down to Remainer MPs trying to foil the referendum! Except, that only weakens the “strengthened our representative democracy” argument even further. In a representative democracy, MPs run on a platform they want to see enacted and then if they win, they vote for this platform to become law. We elect MPs to do what they say they are going to do on the tacit assumption that this is what they believe in.

The result of the EU referendum created a clash between direct democracy (the referendum result) and representative democracy (the will of parliament). Now, you can make the argument that the referendum result trumps parliament’s will, but you cannot then turn around and say that representative democracy was “strengthened” as a result. It was directly weakened by the referendum and Brexiters cheered that on.

This is before we get into how much the ministerial code has deteriorated since 2016, or how we ended up in a situation in which a score of Tory ex-ministers publicly called into question the result of a parliamentary scrutiny committee hearing (i.e., questioned the very will of the House of Commons), or again, the four fucking prime ministers we’ve had to endure since the referendum came and went, the last one with the weakest mandate yet.

2. Brexit has given us trade deals without having to pay the EU

Since the first argument of Matthew’s was so spurious, I’m going to try my best to engage with the substance of this one. I suppose because we managed to roll over the terms of 67 of the trade deals we had with countries when we were still an EU member, this means we’re all set now and don’t need to “pay the EU” any longer since we have all the trade deals we really need. Except, we got them all by being a member in the first place, which means we did technically pay for them.

Add to that the fact that we are still looking for trade deals, which means we still need them, presumably. And the deals we’ve managed to get outside of the EU so far have been vastly inferior to the ones we got as a member. Even Tory ministers involved in striking these deals agree (See George Eustice and his comments on the Australia deal). The UK appears so far to be fairly awful at striking trade deals; using them as evidence that Brexit was a good idea is extremely ill-advised.

3. It allowed us to make new deals not possible in the EU

This is almost exactly the same point as “benefit” number two above. It’s like Matthew could only think of four supposed benefits at the time and so he just slipped one in that was a photocopy of another and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Word to Professor Goodwin: if you’re going to try this trick again, don’t put the ones that are pretty much exactly the same right on top of each other. Makes it easier for the lay person to spot. Sort of like when you want to expand your list of five Brexit benefits to ten and throw in the Ukraine and vaccine rollout horseshit combined with several iterations of what amounts to “sovrentee, init.”

4. Allowed us to have a points based immigration system

Matthew’s biggest gripe at the moment is how immigration has got out of hand since Brexit, with non-EU immigration skyrocketing and everyone in “real Britain”, you know outside of the New Elite wokerati, thinking this is a terrible thing. Well, the fact that we have a points based immigration system now has a huge amount to do with this issue.

Countries that establish a points-based system tend to have higher immigration. This only makes sense - creating a points-based immigration system is like putting a “help wanted” sign out in front of your country. Sure, the whole point is to attract a certain kind of immigrant - highly educated, highly skilled, likely to earn a high salary - but a points-based system makes it simpler for this type of immigrant to come to the country in question. It also makes it much more difficult for countries that then want to limit immigration to turn them away at any point, at least without doing away with the points-based system.

More than that, the points-based immigration system we have implemented in this country post-Brexit is mostly going to attract global, citizen of nowhere, super-educated liberal types of the kind Matthew is always talking down. Points-based systems tend to limit the migration of working-class, salt of the earth, socially conservative people, the kind that you’d think Matthew would want to see more of coming here. So, this points-based immigration system Professor Goodwin is touting as a “Brexit benefit” seems to be the cause of most of what he is currently railing against every week.

5. Brexit allowed us to align with faster growing parts of the world

Professor Goodwin has ended his list of five (four, really) Brexit benefits with one almost as ridiculous as the one he started with. I can only imagine he is referring to CPTPP with this one, although the use of the word “align” is interesting here.

The whole, explicit point of leaving the EU and signing up to something like CPTPP instead is that we don’t have to “align” with anyone. CPTPP is thin and light touch, mostly dealing with lowering goods quotas across the signatory states. This is in contrast to joining the EU, which requires a high level of “alignment” of laws and regulation. This makes me wonder: doesn’t Matthew using the word “align” here give away the game that even signing up to relatively light-touch trading arrangements such as CPTPP involve losing some measure of sovereignty?

Anyhow, this isn’t a Brexit benefit because we’re not aligning with anyone on anything. Except the EU, ironically enough, slowly but surely in order to continue trading with our closest neighbours.

If this is the best the smartest guy in the Brexiter stable can do in terms of laying out the benefits of Brexit, I’d start preparing for the day we rejoin the EU because it could be coming faster than anyone currently believes.

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