My Brexit

Two years ago I went, as usual, to my work Christmas Party.  We’re a peripatetic bunch at my place, so we normally convene somewhere in the Cotswolds, at one of the many rather nice country hotels in the Cirencester-Malmesbury-Stroud triangle. That year I had the pleasure – not meant sarcastically – of sitting next to the boss’s wife.  The conversation on our part of the table drifted on to the Brexit vote of a few months previously, as it did in those pre-walking-on-eggshell days. Now, we’re a small management consulting firm operating almost exclusively in financial services sectorally, and London geographically (though I live in Macclesfield, Cheshire). We’re not posh, but if you want to judge us by our shopping habits we are, for the most part, probably more Waitrose than Aldi. So it was perhaps no surprise that the general tenor of the Brexit-conversation was “yes, extraordinary result….complete clusterfuck of course….who are these people who voted for it?” It was the latter question, posed rhetorically, that shook me out of my pre-Christmas, slightly-sozzled reverie.  That assumption, that sheer disbelief that anyone present would have a different view – I couldn’t let them go. “Me, I was one of them, I voted for it” I blurted out.  There was a slightly stunned silence around the table for a few seconds, before said boss’s wife, doing the mine-host bit to smooth over the awkwardness, said “oh Stuart, I thought you were such a nice boy” (I was 50 years old at the time).  Cue much ah-ha-ha-ha-ing around the table, and a quick change of subject.

But it rather stung.  It was the moment when I realised a few things – the depth of the divide between those on different sides – and the surprising fact the dividing lines weren’t where I for one had assumed them to be; the complete lack of comprehension by some quite posh Remainers why some less well-to-do folk might have voted differently; but most significantly, the different factors that drove people’s votes. These realisations triggered a curiosity that’s been hanging around since, and which I think I can only resolve by writing.  So this is my Brexit story, and my Brexit analysis.  I’m not a politician, a political journalist nor a commentator, just an ordinary bloke who’s spent quite a lot of the last 30 months in a state of bewilderment.  I need to try to explain to myself why people whose work I’d previously thought quite sound (e.g. Andrew Adonis) appear to have had personality transplants, but more particularly why Brexit continues to dominate so much of our national discourse when frankly, there’s plenty of other shit to worry about.

Let’s go back to earlier times though. I’ve always been right-wing politically, ever since I read the Tory and Labour general election manifestos back in 1979 as a slightly precocious 12-year-old.  I was never a ‘headbanger’ about Europe though, or rather the Common Market/European Community/European Union as it progressively became.  It irritated me slightly, and looking back I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps because it didn’t seem sufficiently grateful for Britain’s contribution, or perhaps it was because of the diet of ‘interference’ stories that we were regularly fed by the British press, slightly unfairly I suspect – for every EU piece of nonsense I suspect there were actually many perfectly sensible directives on a variety of subjects. Reflecting back to 1985, I think the main reason was my limited understanding of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which I studied as a first-year economics student at Cambridge. It was clear that CAP was blatantly protectionist, clearly designed to maintain a particular version of rural French life, and frankly, in its British guise, was a licence to print money for all but the most inefficient farmers. It just bred a cynicism in me. But as I say, the whole thing didn’t really keep me awake at night.

Fast forward to the general election of 2015, the Conservative outright victory, and Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum.  The question of Europe still wasn’t one that detained me a great deal.  And that remained true in the early part of 2016 when Cameron went off to see the EU in search of a better deal.  Hard to believe looking back, but at this stage I was genuinely neutral between In and Out – while I had my prejudices against the EU, I thought the hassle of leaving probably outweighed  the upsides, and some of the opt-outs the UK had against ‘ever closer union’ insulated us against the worst of the EU project.

But then two things happened. First, Cameron basically said to the EU (or at least this is my interpretation of what he said): “look, give me a few minor concessions to work with. They’ll be enough for me to win the referendum, that’ll shut up the headbangers in my party, and we can get on with business-as-usual”.  Those minor concessions didn’t materialise, however. Whether the EU didn’t believe Cameron, or didn’t understand the tide of sentiment in the UK, or genuinely believed no part of their agenda could be sacrificed, what Cameron came back with was the thinnest of thin gruels.

Second, even then, I’d have had sympathy with Cameron and been prepared to listen to his recommendation had he been honest.  That honesty should have taken the form of either or both of refusing to present the EU’s ‘concessions’ as a triumph, which he did initially, before being engulfed by a tide of “you’ve got to be joking mate”, and saying “these aren’t significant changes by the EU, but overall, the benefits of membership still outweigh the downsides of leaving, and I still recommend we stay”.

But neither of those things happened.  The overall impression created – at least in my mind – was of a democratically-elected prime minister behaving as a supplicant to a variety of unelected EU officials, who were either so blind or so arrogant that they refused to see where their intransigence could lead, and then that prime minister returning to the UK and behaving so disingenuously that not only did it shake the faith of those of us who’d already voted for him twice, but sowed major seeds of doubt in our minds as to whether we could believe what he told us in future.

But still it wasn’t too late for Remain as far as I was concerned. I was still a swing voter when the Referendum campaign cranked into action.  But at every twist and turn the Remain campaign managed to alienate me.  Let’s be honest – the overall quality of debate on both sides was pretty low, with a few honourable exceptions (Daniel Hannan for example).  But the idea that Leave voters swung that way because of ‘lies and misinformation’ from the Leave campaign is just ludicrous.  Yes, they existed, but my goodness, they were dwarfed by those coming out of the Remain side.  Quite with whom the final decision to invoke ‘Project Fear’ lay I don’t know – maybe it was Cameron himself – but the decision to campaign negatively for Remain was another massive strategic error.  For four reasons: first, some of the stuff that came out of the Treasury and the Bank of England was just so outlandish it broke the trust in those institutions. Second, some of their predictions were counter-productive (“House prices will fall by 30% you say?  Well as a 32-year-old on an average salary and no immediate prospect of getting on the housing ladder that sounds quite attractive thanks”).  And third, if the government, the Bank of England, all major political parties, the CBI, the BBC and so on are all saying the same thing, the British public detect a whiff of conspiracy, which they clearly don’t like. And fourth, again within the public I suspect there’s an element of bloody-mindedness that recoils against perceived threats: “bring it on then, and let’s see, shall we?”

But even as the Remain campaign cranked up the doom-and-gloom, I was undecided.  While my heart and emotions were reacting strongly against the Remain, I still hadn’t definitively decided to vote Leave. All three options were still on the table – In, Out and Abstain.  I decided that the best way of making my mind up was to try to ignore both sides of the mainstream debate, and think things through from a few basic principles.

The conclusion I came to, after reminding myself of a) the bodies that make up the EU (the Commission, Parliament etc.), and the structural relationships between them, and b) exactly how the EU had conducted itself in Greece, was that the functioning of the EU was not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic – and there’s a difference.  It might reasonably be argued that the EU approach to making legislation is merely undemocratic, as the European Parliament reviews and amends new laws, rather than initiating them, which is the role of the Commission.  But it goes further than that; I think it’s anti-democratic.  Look at “ever closer union” as an example. It’s a stated aim, and EU policy drives that way, but it just hasn’t been voted for explicitly by any major population within the EU. And in fact, has been actively voted against in referendums in Ireland and the Netherlands.

So I don’t sense that the EU’s fundamental aims are aligned to those of its peoples.  While I think that on mainland Europe there is a much stronger sense that mingling across borders is normal than in the UK, talking to nationals from a number of EU countries, I also don’t detect any reduced attachment to national culture or the right to self-determination.  There’s an absolute acceptance that people in different places are not so different and it’s great to be able to trade and travel freely, but that sits absolutely comfortably alongside a determination to preserve and celebrate national cultures and national self-determination.  My suspicion is that for many in the upper echelons of institutions like the EU, both parts of these feelings are understood perfectly well, but they both ascribe the second set to ‘populism’, and completely fail to understand that for the majority of ordinary folk, they co-exist perfectly happily, and without any internal contradiction, in their minds.

We’ve also seen time and again now, either via the re-running of referenda, to the treatment meted out to Greece, to the interference in the democratic affairs of nations like Poland, how the EU has its own set of values and priorities that it will seek to impose whenever and wherever it deems it needs to in order to further ‘the cause’.  And because the democratic link is broken between what/who people vote for, and what actually happens as a result of their votes (nothing), there’s no safety valve.  If there’s no safety valve, then sooner or later the EU will explode under the pressure caused by its own democratic deficit.  It’s possibly too simplistic to say that all empires eventually collapse, and the EU will be no different, but on the other hand I find it hard to escape that logic.

When the EU does collapse, ran my logic back in 2016, it won’t be pretty.  I’m not suggesting for a second there will be war – I think we’ve come way beyond that – but I suspect that what we’ve seen via the gilets jaunes protests in France recently will be reasonably indicative of what will happen – street violence and resistance toward governments who are still seen to be supporting or at least acquiescing with the EU project, and a surge in support for parties who are against it.  And many of those parties could be new ones, non-establishment ones, like has been seen in Italy recently.

If all the consequences of the EU’s eventual break-up were to be felt within nation states, however, there would still be limited logic in seeking to exit the EU now.  I don’t think that the consequences will be limited to internal states however.  It seems to me that the EU is something of a King Canute when it comes to the ongoing process of post-industrialisation.  It has no idea to react either to the multinationals that dominate our online world (beyond fining them) or how to stimulate and nurture the small businesses that are vital in all developed economies.  It understands and can accommodate large national corporates through regulation, which those corporates are perfectly happy to go along with as the regulation represents pretty significant barriers to entry in many cases, but that’s about it.  So when the EU breaks up, there’s going to be a large policy vacuum around competition, regulation and taxation that national governments are going to have to fill.  It’s going to be messy – they’ll all be figuring out their own policies around how they want to run themselves (and many of the smaller EU members are going to be simultaneously working out how to fill the holes on their coffers), and interact with the rest of the world.  It will be a time of turmoil and unrest.  And I think Britain is better off pre-empting all that by going through its own turmoil now.  It’s for that reason that I’m implacably opposed to Theresa May’s deal – I’m not actually that bothered by the question of the backstop (I just don’t feel that strongly about the status of Northern Ireland, though I recognise that many do, on both sides), but I am very bothered indeed by the fact the deal ties us to the EU in many very real ways in perpetuity.

So going back to 2016, about a month before the referendum, I reached my decision – I was going to vote to Leave, which I duly did.  I didn’t expect, however, to be on the winning side.  I thought it might be very close, but I thought that when push came to shove most people would take the same approach as my wife – there’s nothing that wrong with the state of the world, so let’s vote to keep the status quo.  How wrong I was.  I lay in bed in France on the evening of 23^rd June 2016, and remember listening to Radio 4 in a combination of joy and astonishment as it’s 10pm news announced the likely result.  I then had to stay awake for another hour just to make sure.

If the result itself surprised me, that was as nothing compared to how astounded I felt to the reaction to the referendum.  The insults, the vitriol, the accusations.  They poured out.  It was a strange and weird feeling – being part of 17.4 million people who’d won a democratic vote, yet being vilified, scorned and dismissed; almost being made to feel shame. “Justify yourself!” seemed to be the implicit – and quite often the explicit – demand from Remainers, and that hasn’t changed in many cases over the course of the last two and a half years.  Well – no, I won’t.  Not anymore.  I’m not going to criticise, insult or mock Remainers, but neither am I going to get stuck in an endless re-running of the arguments.  Not least because, though we’re yet to know all the practical details, as the owner of a house in France, and travelling frequently between there and the UK (and with pets), Brexit actually has the potential to add a reasonable amount of administrative hassle to my life.  Arguably, I voted in a way that is at odds with my personal, short term interests – so no, I won’t be justifying my decision any longer.       

Back in 2016, however, I was so taken aback by the reaction to the referendum that a week later that I wrote a blogpost called “Seek first to understand…”.  It’s here (http://monmarduman.blogspot.com/2016/06/seek-first-to-understand.html), and I stand by every word of it.  But while I was exhorting other people to look at the reasons for why there were so may Leave votes, over the past couple of years I’ve been trying to get my head round why the Brexit division has been so deep, and the two sides in many cases so irreparably far apart. Here goes with my explanation.

It comes down with which set of factors mattered most to you when you voted.  I think there were three broad criteria people voted on the basis of.  They were:

Economic – by which I mean a combination of your view of the economy generally, and your place/success within it.  If this was the prime determinant of your vote, then my suspicion is that if things were pretty ok for you, no need to rock the boat, you’d have voted Remain.  If, however, you felt that you weren’t where you wanted to be – whether through lack of disposable income, whether you had a meaningful job at all, or whether you had a decent place to live – then you voted Leave.  In this case, you didn’t necessarily directly associate the EU with your lack of fortune, more that it represented the system, and that system had failed you. Going back to an earlier point, seeing the government, the Bank of England etc, i.e. prime representatives of ‘the system’, pushing Remain, just reinforced your view and your vote.

Political – by which I mean your view of democracy and governance, and the relationship between the UK’s government and parliament, and the EU’s various bodies.  My suspicion is that this was the main determining factor for very few Remain voters.  For the most part they just didn’t see it as an issue, and for those to whom it did matter most, they were probably entirely comfortable both with existing arrangements, and for the move towards ever-closer-union, representing as it did the leadership of technocrats and social democrats, compared to the messy outcomes that democracy can bring, and the risk of populist parties.  Governance by those most qualified to govern in fact.  On the other hand, for those to whom this subject mattered most, it mattered deeply.  There was/is an almost visceral attachment to the principles and ideals of democracy; a tie that stems perhaps in part from a genuine belief that democracy is the best form of government, but also from a strong sense that it’s this system that sets the UK apart.  Our democratic tradition has grown and thrived as the franchise has been extended, and for all the peculiarities of our first-past-the-post system, it’s created and maintained a remarkable stability over the years. It’s how we do things, it’s what makes us ‘us’, and the EU and its direction of travel represent a major, existential threat to that.  It’s why this group voted Leave so heavily, and would do so again, almost regardless of what economic counter-arguments are presented.

Social – by which I mean a combination of several things:

•         Your self-perception: are you (little ‘l’) liberal?  Do you see yourself as progressive, open-minded, a citizen of the world?
•         Which tribe do you belong to?  An extension of the above – which way are PLUs (people like us) voting?
•        What’s your attitude to immigration?  Is it a good thing, to be encouraged, or do you see it as one of the sources of your troubles?

Again, my suspicion is that was the prime determinant of voting patterns for a large proportion of Remain voters, and a surprisingly small proportion of Leave voters.  To explain – for whatever reason, the Leave argument came to be associated, for many, with Nigel Farage, intolerance and definitely not People Like Us.  Even if you harboured doubts about the EU’s objectives, and even if you thought that the economic impacts of Brexit would be pretty neutral, there was no way on God’s earth you would ever have voted Leave; it would have made you a heathen by association.  For these folk, Brexit was a test of personal- and national morality, and one which was failed miserably on both counts.  It’s this set of factors that has created the depth and duration of the division over Brexit in my view, as it speaks not just to a rational (or otherwise) assessment of political and economic factors, but values – people’s own view of who they are.  Those that voted Leave, on the hand, didn’t see the vote as a judgement of their values, or if they did, they were comfortable with the answer.  Yes, of course, I’m sure there were some that voted Leave primarily to reduce immigration, but I simply don’t believe that old-fashioned racism motivated more than a few thousand out of the 17.4 million; for the most part, resistance to immigration was caused by a perception that it led to worse social, health, employment or educational outcomes for the indigenous population in areas with relatively high numbers of immigrants.

All the above is, of course, an over-simplification, and very few people probably analysed things in the way I’ve described.  I also think that there’s been a certain amount of co-opting of arguments on both sides. For example, Remainers who saw the vote primarily in social terms have suddenly become uncharacteristically concerned with the long term prospects of widget exporters from Coventry.  And Leavers who find it hard to be convincing about what ‘taking back control’ actually means now point to the sunlit opportunities that will come our way once we’re out of the single market and customs union (if indeed that’s where we end up).

Bringing the story up-to-date, I sense that the reason we’ve ended up with Theresa May’s ‘deal’ is down to the misinterpretation by essentially Remain-thinking negotiators as to Leavers’ motives.  They think that by achieving an end to freedom of movement and a reduction in annual payments to the EU, Leavers will be accept any conditions that go along with that.  That’s now proving to be a disastrous miscalculation, on both the part of the UK government and the EU.  Those things only ever mattered above all else for a tiny proportion of people.

The rest of us just wanted out of the EU political institutions.  Whether for essentially negative reasons like mine (the whole thing’s going to come crashing down eventually, and we’re best off being long gone by the time it does), or more positive ‘take back control’ reasons, many Leavers just wanted the feeling that the UK was clearly in charge of its destiny.  In my case, until recently I would have swallowed all manner of compromise to achieve some degree of exit, including a variant of the ‘Norway’ option, which I accept that only really loosens the hold of the ECJ over us, and very little else.  I was prepared to accept that leaving could be a process rather than a one-off event.  But no more.  What’s on the table and will be going before Parliament next month is manifestly a terrible deal – Remaining on existing terms would be better.  But I sense, and hope, that weight is shifting behind No Deal.  It’s been painted as a terrible outcome – ‘crashing out’ is the loathsome cliché used constantly – but it needn’t be long term, and with the right set of policy responses by the UK government.  Of course our trade, aviation and travel are governed by complex sets of treaties and agreements that need re-negotiating once the UK becomes a ‘third country’, but with the right will, it can be done.  We need to have the confidence that the UK is fantastically placed, as evidenced by its top placing in the recent Forbes survey of the best places in the world to do business.  I confess that back in 2016 my vote to Leave was primarily determined by political considerations, as I’ve described, and I thought the economic impacts were something to be managed and tolerated.  I’ve changed – I now think Brexit could be the catalyst to let Britain loose economically.  There’ll be a small reduction in our trade with the EU probably, but that’ll be offset by the continuing investment inflows in distribution, IT and life sciences, among other things.  We’ll be fine. We’re flexible. (Oh, and both the UK and the Irish governments will miraculously find a way to avoid a hard border in Ireland).  I now really hope No Deal is the way we go.

So what of my journey?  Well, I refuse to buy in to the commentary that what’s been going on in Parliament for the last month or so is a sign of weakness or chaos, or something to be derided.  Sure the proposed deal is a heap of manure, and I can’t ever remember having less faith in our front bench politicians, but what we’ve seen is our democracy at work, and for that we should be eternally grateful.  For every European newspaper mocking events in the UK, I bet there’s tens of thousands around the world wishing that’s how things were addressed in their country.  I also think that despite the general cynicism that surrounds politicians, there are still significant numbers of MPs who want to do the right thing, and whose views are honestly held.  Not a majority perhaps, but enough to mean we’re not lumbered with Mrs May’s deal.  So if we get No Deal, I shall champion it. I’ll certainly refuse to apologise for it.  And if anyone suggests that my Leave tendencies mean that I’m not ‘nice’, I may be tempted to point them in the direction of France, Italy or Greece, and say that I prefer being right to being nice.  

But am I any less bewildered as a result of writing this?  Yes, I think so.  It comes down to that values thing.  Those of us that want Brexit don't see that preference as indicative of either stupidity or a lack of moral rectitude; lots, though not all, on the Remain side, do.  Fair enough; it's time to shut up and let history play out.