From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

Ten years after the Brexit referendum, its long-term impact on British politics is evident. Not so evident is why this is the case. Every
general election sees comparable debates. So too did the 1975 referendum
on membership called by Harold Wilson. But none of these other elections
has ever produced such an extreme and long-lasting reaction, or a
concerted attempt to use both informal and formal methods rCo
constitutional and legal rCo to block the result.

Imagine after a general election, MPs, the Speaker of the Commons, the
Supreme Court, the BBC and well-funded lobby organizations coming up
with a series of expedients to prevent the new prime minister from
governing. Before 2016 that would have seemed a banana republic fantasy.
In future, it is all too easy to imagine. Since 2016, our politics has
become more extreme, more tribal, and in peril of losing the very
foundation of constitutional democracy: willingness to accept the result
of elections, however unpalatable.

If I try to come up with an analogy, I can only think of the 1832 Great
Reform Act, which the political class was forced to accept by popular
unrest, but which it deliberately framed to thwart the democratic
impulse, causing a generation of political unrest.

Part of the responsibility for our post-2016 turbulence certainly rests
on the Cameron government, which behaved disgracefully in fomenting
rCLProject FearrCY to try to bully the electorate into voting Remain. No
less disgraceful was its marshaling of foreign politicians to interfere
in our domestic politics by telling us how to vote, with Barack Obama threatening to place us at the back of the queue. A leading Commonwealth politician told me that his countryrCOs prime minister later regretted
having been induced by Cameron to oppose Brexit. The least that can be
said is that the governmentrCOs efforts must have reduced the Leave
majority, and this made the result seem inconclusive and encouraged
rejection of the result.

In 1975, when Harold Wilson called a referendum on membership, there was
a similar attempt to scare the voters. Then (in the words of the
pro-European writer Hugo Young) membership was supported by rCLall the acceptable faces of British public life,rCY including Anglican bishops and most of the press, echoing rCLthe golden thread of deceptive reassurancerCY: membership would make Britain more prosperous but would change nothing
that people cared about. But the Labour minister Peter Shore, in a
brilliant and impassioned speech at the Oxford Union (well worth
watching on YouTube) dismissed the promises of prosperity as hollow, and summed up the argument for European membership as nothing but rCLFear,
Fear, Fear.rCY That time fear worked. And however deeply they disagreed, opponents of membership accepted the result as binding for more than a generation.

In contrast, when in 2016 the electorate refused to vote in the way they
had been instructed by their betters, students in university towns wept
in the streets and Lord Adonis told us that there had been a rCLnervous breakdownrCY in the civil service. Even if they had believed rCyProject FearrCO, this reaction appears excessive. We were, after all, talking
about membership of a trading bloc. It was not like Henry VIII breaking
with Rome.

Moreover, as many of us found at the time, convinced Remainers seemed to
know little about the EU, and were reluctant to discuss in it any
detail. This was later confirmed by an academic study by Adam Fagan and
Stijn van Kessel, rCLThe Failure of Remain: Anti-Brexit activism in the
United Kingdom.rCY They found that Remain campaigners had had little
positive to say about the EU, no response to worries about sovereignty
and immigration and no shared view about BritainrCOs possible future in
the EU. As for wider political views, another academic study by Harold
D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley (published by Cambridge University Press) concluded that on crucial matters including
immigration, equality, ethnicity and national identity, Remain voters
differed little from Leavers.

The Oxford economist Sir Paul Collier summed it up neatly: in the
absence of strong positive feelings about the EU, had the British in
2016 been voting on whether they wanted to join the bloc, the answer
would surely have been a resounding No. Given that the popularity of the
EU across Europe had been in sharp decline for a generation, that would probably have been the result in other countries too. So at least
thought President Macron, who told Andrew Marr that the French would
probably have chosen to leave rCo had they been allowed to vote.

So why rCo to return to my starting point rCo did 2016 cause such turmoil? Moreover, why are attempts being made by politicians to reverse it even
now, when the economic and political case for aligning with and even
rejoining the EU is patently weak and likely to cause renewed political disruption?

I can only conclude that the 2016 referendum and its aftermath brought
into the open a previously unrecognized fissure in our society. EU
membership was about more than a rational calculation of costs and
benefits. For an influential Remain minority it encapsulated the
post-1980s liberal order to which they were firmly attached, based on globalization, permeable borders and post-democratic government. The
conflict of Leave and Remain persisted and deepened after 2016 because
the Remain tribe would not allow the Leave tribe to pursue the logical consequences of Brexit and rCLtake back control.rCY That the EU has long proved ineffective, corrupt and undemocratic is irrelevant for those to
whom it symbolizes a cosmopolitan ideal. Hence the present governmentrCOs eagerness to spend vast sums on an Erasmus scheme that benefits very
few: itrCOs the thought that counts.

The unresolved struggle ten years after the vote inflames and solidifies
our tribal division. Leavers and Remainers are now openly aligned on
opposite sides in a range of logically unconnected issues, on which they
are unwilling to compromise. Perhaps some such polarization was likely,
even inevitable, for we see a similar development across the democratic
world.

Nevertheless, those who have opened and widened the fissure in Britain rCo especially for reasons that were spurious, frivolous or self-interested
rCo have caused long-term damage. For politicians to seek rCLrealignmentrCY and even to talk about rejoining the EU, without balanced public debate
and a clear vote, is throwing petrol on the flames, and for
transparently party-political reasons.


Robert Tombs
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