Why I have given up on Britain rejoining the EU, at least for now
I know this headline will bring many long-time readers down. I’m sorry, but at all points, I endeavour to tell the truth, as I see it, even if what has to be said won’t be popular. To stress, I am as against Brexit as I ever was, seeing it as the worst mistake this country ever made. However, the state of anti-Brexit campaigning is now so dire, I don’t see a way forward. I have tried to do what I can by myself, but ultimately, that’s not how politics works. You can try and steer a movement, but only if the movement well and truly exists. As it stands, I don’t think that’s the case.
If you want all my reasons for this, click on the video above. It’s only 20 minutes long and should answer any questions you have as to my reasoning. If you’re a long-time reader especially, it covers a lot of the nuance.
Anti-Brexit campaigning over the last decade is like a “how not to campaign” guide like no other. At every turn, almost the exact wrong decision has been made, every single time. The Remain campaign was lackadaisical (that’s putting it politely), with a baked-in assumption that it couldn’t lose, so it didn’t need to try that hard. After the referendum had been lost, anti-Brexit campaigners asked for too much in wanting another referendum to cancel out the first - then after Brexit happened, they swung way the other way and asked for too little. If they’d asked for less between 2016 and 2019, we might have had a chance at staying in the single market; if they asked for more now, rejoin might have some steam behind it. But like I say, always the exact wrong approach.
And I think it’s getting worse now. Some of the most self-defeating elements of the modern left have crept in over the last couple of years - the idea of purity tests at every level (“we don’t care if you agree with us on Brexit, what’s your view on Palestine?”), the sense of overwhelming moral and intellectual superiority, morphing into ugly prejudice (“you aren’t a Remainer? That’s because you’re a poor idiot who probably lives in one of those shithole towns up north”), and a complete lack of ability to figure out the other side’s arguments and then figure out how to counter them.
A couple of years ago, I wrote here what amounts to a book on “How Britain will Rejoin the EU”. I said I thought we could rejoin in under ten years. What’s amazing to me is that the basics haven’t changed - the polling on people thinking Brexit was mistake has stabilised around 60%, Brexit itself keeps proving its own folly - and yet we feel way, way further away than we did even then. There is no space on the centre-right to talk about Brexit as a bad idea, and the centre-left and hard-left have moved onto other things that interest them a lot more than our trade relationship with the European Union. And the anti-Brexit campaigns have got notably worse (from an already low base) - the last rejoin march was genuinely embarrassing and I think actually did some damage to the cause. And it looks like we might have another one this year, dragging things down even further.
To make things worse for me, I have been travelling around the country a lot over the past year and a half. I’ve been to a lot of the sorts of towns that so many Remainers look down upon (and that we would need to vote for rejoin, if we ever got there, I hasten to add). And I think many people in these “left behind” towns across Britain would be up for an anti-Brexit argument - in fact, it might be the one thing that could stop the Farage revolution from taking place. But none of the political parties get it and neither do any of the anti-Brexit campaigners. We are stuck.
So, I won’t be writing about Brexit at all for a while, unless there is some sort of major intervention. I feel sad about this, but I can’t keep imagining that somehow the situation is going to magically change. I’d love for you all to stick around - I will continue to talk about the state of the world and the nation, calling it as I see it. And you never know - sometimes miracles do take place. I might let go of Brexit only for things to change all of a sudden. Stranger things have happened.
To add to your pessimism, which in my view is entirely justified, I would say that the EU will remain extremely wary of negotiating any closer ties with the UK as long as the possibility remains of a government coming to power that wants to re-fight Brexit and put even greater distance between the UK and the EU. Of course, if the pro-Brexit forces were taken on and neutralised by the present government, along with other sympathetic political forces, EU fears might be assuaged. But, exactly as you say, there's just no sign of that happening.
I think you're right that there's little / no hope of rejoining for the foreseeable future, but I still think you're making some misdiagnoses.
The Remain campaign was awful. When the Referendum was called there was nothing in Chichester, so a friend and I started a campaign there, and over time joined up with the official campaign. Most of us thought we were going to lose several weeks out.
The Leave campaign(s) - plural - were good. And this is one of the reasons I keep coming back to PR. IN effect, the Remain campaign ran a FPTP campaign. It operated as though it only needed to win a plurality of votes (and it was indeed the most-supported option). The Leave campaigns operated as if they were fighting under PR... They ran targeted and contradictory messages and then added them up together. You say Farage campaigned loudly and clearly to leave everything... but actually that's not true. Some audiences were told a vote to leave meant we'd leave everything. Others were told we'd stay in the Single Market. Asian voters in Birmingham were told Brexit would mean we could stop Eastern Europeans coming in and replace them with Asians. Other voters were told we could replace European immigrants with Americans, Australians and Canadians - or with no immigration at all.
Which brings me to the second point. The Referendum was a proxy for a lot of other battles. In effect, it asked the question (or the Leave campaign was successful in framing the referendum as): "are you satisfied with the way things are?"
The Remain campaign's underlying, complacent assumption was that things were fine. The reality in the country was that a majority were fed up.
I honestly can't see how a political campaign that called for the UK to rejoin could succeed without demonstrating that it both understood the level of dissatisfaction in the country and offered solutions that would rebuild trust in the political process. (I very much agree with you that 'Remainers' continue to be tone-deaf.)
We are stuck for the moment with FPTP and I'm sorry, but that disincentivises parties from going all out for Full rejoin. This isn't just me offering up self-justification for Lib Dem policy... This is me having campaigned within the Lib Dems and on a non-party / cross-party basis on a rejoin platform and in recent years having campaigned on a platform that was not explicitly remain. The latter has been far more successful. Sorry, but under FPTP, that's the cold, hard truth. The 60% who want to rejoin does not translate into an electoral majority for rejoining.
Where I think there may still be a ray of hope is economics... This country is in a terrible economic place and it's hard to see how anyone can fix that without rejoining the Customs Union and Single Market (or something very similar). I will remind you that it is Lib Dem policy not just to rejoin the Customs Union but the Single Market too. It will be interesting to see if a period of power, scrutiny and perhaps accountability will dent Reform (although note that they don't talk much about Brexit these days... Now that they have a stake in the current system, they also campaign on other issues - as they have to.)