So about that tweet

By Pete North - July 6, 2020

I sparked something of a debate on Twitter by claiming that remainers own this mess as much as the Tories do. By mess I mean the no deal Brexit we’re heading towards.

For those of you who don’t know, The Leave Alliance has always been implacably opposed to a no deal Brexit and was among the first to spell out in detail what that would mean for UK trade. We always favoured a graduated exit via the EEA and Efta. That, until about a year or so ago, was still within the realms of possibility.

In hindsight, had I know the tweet was going to go viral, I might have been more specific in saying remainer Members of Parliament own this mess as much as the Tories. That case is certainly easier to argue.

Over the course of the last parliament, we watched in dismay as various splinter cells went to war against each other, and at no point did a coherent consensus emerge even among the remain side. We were dealing with a gaggle of MPs on both sides of the house who couldn’t give us a functioning definition of either the customs union or the single market.

Over the course of many weeks we watched ineffectual squabbling spilling out into the media which bizarrely centred on the spectacularly ill informed views of activist youths from various corners of the Westminster cesspit. At no point did we witness an informed debate.

When it came to Mrs May’s series of indicative votes there was nothing approaching a majority for any option save for a customs union which failed to pass by a handful of votes. But then as more attentive observers will know, a custom union of itself solves very little and, according to that infamous slide from the European Commission, is only a bit part of the problem. The regulatory border formalities are the more significant headache.

It’s fair to say that that ignorance was evenly distributed across the two camps when it came to the nuts and bolts of trade. It is, to a point, forgivable. It tends to be the domain of policy wonks and prod nose nerds. MPs, though, with their staff budgets and access to the Commons library and all the research facilities therein, had no excuses for their breathtaking ignorance.

It didn’t especially help that the A-list journos of the BBC and Sky could only fumble their way through the issues. There were plenty of times when assertions by the ERG could and should have been challenged but sailed over the heads of gormless network hacks without raising even the slightest query.

The inability of parliament to arrive at a consensus is in our view a collective failure of our politico-media establishment which prefers lightweight trivia and conflict between personalities. Our politics is a soap opera. In that regard we have all been cheated.

That said, we are still of the view that so much energy was wasted on what was, by that point, a whole futile Stop Brexit campaign that could have been better directed at a “What Next?” campaign. I am aware Dr Mike Galsworthy made some attempts in that regard but ultimately met resistance from both sides. We know the feeling.

Any which way you look at it, the extremes of both sides did everything possible to antagonise the other, burying the moderate compromising voices in the middle. There is toxic intolerance to be found on both sides and most of us who feel passionate about this issue have let anger cloud our judgement at times. We all failed.

Ultimately the failure to reach a consensus is the reason Boris Johnson is in charge. The previous parliament had whittled Theresa May down and boxed her in and had they managed to overcome their narcissism of small differences they could have agreed to back an Efta based solution. Instead, factionalism in the Labour party stood in the way and in the end Labour surrendered the power they had by agreeing to an election.

Now that the no dealers are steering the agenda there is zero hope of a viable deal. The Tories are about to learn that the notion of “free trade” that exists in their imaginations, exists nowhere in the real world past, present or future. All they’ll succeed in doing is destroying our single most important export market for goods and services while making Britain the first involuntary regulatory colony of the EU.

They never understood the concept of regulatory gravity and being in such close orbit of the EU, Brexit was only ever a matter of deciding from a limited array of options what mode of governance that would take. By opting not to have a deal they’ve essentially given up control and now the private sector will choose their regulations according to which regime affords them greater export potential. And that won’t be whatever the Tories dream up.

I still don’t regret voting for Brexit. I could bore you at length why I still think this is a necessary step for Britain, and you’re unlikely to agree, but Brexit was always going to be a long and messy process in order to renew our politics. Brexit has its own “BLM”esque dimension, resulting in a privileged middle class declaring open war on the working class.

The old left was about empowering working class people. The modern left is all about ensuring they stay in their lane, don’t question anything, and don’t have a say in how society is shaped. Without first resolving that schism which branches into the wider culture war, there is no basis for a coherent national consensus on anything. The Tories are just taking advantage of the distraction to implement their own ill-conceived economic experiment. There is after all nothing to stop them.

It seems that the direction it’s taking will result in the highly necessary humiliation and destruction of the Conservative Party eventually. I think perhaps on that score, we might find some common ground. When the fever burns itself out we will need to revisit the European question because, as the reaction to the original tweet shows, this is far from a settled issue. No deal cannot stay no deal.