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NO EASY WAY OUT: POETRY AND PROSE
But it reveals an underlying and important truth in this debate, which always worried me when I looked, well before and straight after the referendum, at how best we could get on and deliver Brexit if the public voted for it.
Which I always thought rather probable in a referendum where the Remain side was defending what was concrete, known and pretty unpopular – unpopular for a host of good reasons as well as less good ones - and the Leave side could offer vaulting visions of the future post Brexit, without needing to be specific about where we should end up.
Eurosceptics, despite the narcissism of small differences, could always hold together when we were in the EU. Because they did not have to define a post Brexit destination or, crucially, an exit route and method.
They could unify around the need to escape the integrationist maw, and decide that they could cross the bridge of what to do next, in the unlikely event that they succeeded in getting an in-out referendum
People - some senior names in the Cabinet, some former senior members - who are now fervently on a so-called clean break Brexit, were, within the last 3 or 4 years, to be heard proposing continuing with Single Market and Customs Union membership after we left, or arguing, as I have said, for Norway style EEA options. Plenty said so to me both when I was in my Sherpa and Permanent Representative roles.
Their real beef, after all, was with Political Union,Monetary Union, potential FiscalUnion, with European citizenship and its implications, and with the sense that issues got progressively sucked away from the national to the supranational level and never came back.
Even Nigel Farage can be heard in 2015 TV interviews toying with an EEA type destination he now completely anathematises as a total betrayal of the purpose of Brexit.
The Institute of Economic Affairs indeed offered a large prize, once David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech had dangled the realistic prospect of a referendum to decide whether to stay or leave, to help define an agreed destination and exit path. Because they could see the looming crisis over what on earth Brexiteers could ever coalesce around both as the destination and the path to reach it.
But the winner’s model was quietly, rapidly – and, I might add, sensibly, given that itobviously did not work – buried.
And the most thoughtful sceptic attempts to map an exit route – embodied, I think, in a lengthy tome called Flexcit, which is a genuine, serious attempt at least to grapple with what insider experts knew were inordinately complex issues - were spurned by the mainstream Brexiteers, despite some brief dabbling by the likes of Owen Paterson.
Why? I am afraid that is simple.
Because as soon as you have to define what you really DO want post Brexit, as opposed to what you don’t want, and as soon as you have to map out a genuinely viable very complex path to exiting an organisation you have been part of for 45 years, and which has inserted itself in every domain of UK life – which is exactly what you most object to about it - the unity completely fragments, and small differences about where we actually want to go become large ones.
Dominic Cummings, when chairing Vote Leave, shrewdly deliberately avoided proposing any plan and focussed the entire campaign on what it didn’t want, and ensuring that resonated with the maximum number of voters who might find Brexit appealing, but would have radically different ideas of what it would deliver for them.
The last thing he, or the political leaders of the campaign, wished to do was to set out a proposed destination, and a route map to reach it.
That would have completely torn the fragile coalition apart. And it would have exposed the desirability of the destination, in comparison with a status quo with which much of the public had very good reasons to feel unhappy, to close scrutiny.
It would have been unwise to disappoint people who were prepared to vote, for very different reasons, for Brexit -and I am not disparaging either the reasons or the people, I am just saying the reasons were often mutually contradictory - by specifying a clear destination which opponents could then have dismantled. Far better to keep the destination vague and to focus the assault on that people can see they do not like about the ancien regime.
And that is why, now, with the road running out, and under the pressure of simply having to specify where one wants to end, and how to get there, the option of “WTO only” - which all serious leave thinkers and politicians had themselves disparaged before the referendum - has now emerged, in various guises, as the preferred option of the hard Brexiteers.
www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/sites/european-institute/files/sir_ivan_rogers_lecture_ucl_22012019.pdf