Shifting the Blame

Peter Mandelson's recent admisson that hard Brexit is "the price the rest of us in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit" has prompted much soul-searching among remainers, not to mention eye-rolling among those who insisted that the People's Vote campaign was always as much about undermining the then Labour leadership as reversing the referendum result. Of course, blame for the Brexit outcome cannot be attributed to one individual or group. It is clearly multi-factorial. But while much of the commentariat has been united in its desire to spread the blame widely, this has introduced another form of bias: namely the belief that all are equally to blame, but some are more equal than others. Behind this sits the overarching theory that we've painted ourselves into the corner of the hardest possible Brexit because of extremism, whether Continuity Remain's demand for the revocation of Article 50 or the purity of the Brexit ultras. What this obscures is the serial failures of the political centre since 1975.

In that distant year, the Common Market debate was dominated by material concerns, such as the price of foodstuffs, rather than the more nebulous issue of sovereignty or (in the context of the era) our obligations to the Commonwealth. What was notable about the 2016 referendum was that material considerations were largely marginalised in the discourse through the (often justified) derision of "project fear" and the airy assurances that a continuation of existing trading relations would be simple and straightforward. Though Brexiteers emphasised the commercial opportunities that would accrue once freed from the burden of Brussels, this was little more than an adjunct to the central claim that the EU was an unreasonable constraint on British autonomy, a point made concrete in the current debate over fishing rights in which no one genuinely expects the home fleet to massively expand when we take back control of our territorial waters (we'll just flog more licences to the French). This was a debate about power and authority, however ill-conceived or mistaken in its assumptions.

The operation of that power was always more concerned with the domestic realm than the international. Both major parties long connived in the myth that the government's hands were tied by the EU, leading to the expectation that a post-Brexit UK will be characterised more by state activism than trade deals. Danny Finkelstein in the Times noted the contradiction this produces: "Being outside the single market while still striving to be economically successful requires us to free businesses from excessive rules and costs. We’d have to do it sufficiently to offset the disadvantages of being outside the bloc. In other words, we’d have to offer firms lower taxes, fewer rules and reduced labour costs. This, then, was the economics of Brexit. But the politics of Brexit was quite different. Voting to leave the EU would be, and has been, interpreted as a rebellion by those who felt left out of Britain’s increasing prosperity. Satisfying their demands would lead the country towards higher social spending, a higher minimum wage, more regulations. In other words, in the opposite direction to the economics of Brexit."

However, his implication, that an interventionist, pro-social state would be indistinguishable from the EU model, should be challenged. An AES-inspired Lexit may have been no less a fantasy than a freebooting Brexit, but the idea that a genuinely social democratic dispensation - as distinct from both the EU's ordoliberal model and the UK's neoliberal variant - is beyond the bounds of the possible is simply begging the question. This merely relitigates the referendum by insisting there was only ever, and can only ever be, a binary choice, which in turn plays into the narrative that the country was torn between two extremes. Unsurprisingly, coming from a centre-right perspective, Finkelstein pins the blame on the most vocal Brexiteers: "the people responsible for Brexit are the people who advocated for it. The people responsible for a hard Brexit are those people who led us towards it". But he is strangely coy about naming names, presumably because he is only too well aware that the chief advocates of hard Brexit were not Nigel Farage or the ERG but his own mates in the press.

James Kirkup,writing in the Spectator, also sees this as the product of radicalism, but in his view that label can also be attached to the People's Vote campaign: "But after [Theresa May's] early election disaster, there was genuine scope for her deal to pass the Commons on more than one occasion. ... The centre could have held. That it didn’t was down to the radicals on both sides who sought to destroy any common ground in pursuit of purity. The dance of death between the ERG and PV killed softer Brexit. Who led that dance? It doesn’t matter, because it takes two to tango, and it took two sides to destroy every attempt at compromise." Here we see the emerging myth, shared by both centre-right and centre-left (and even some ostensible leftists), that it was the fault of "radicals on both sides". The People's Vote actually received sympathetic press coverage even by pro-leave newspapers in 2018 and 2019, which reflected the split loyalties of the readership as much as the issue's utility in undermining Labour. That this impeccably centrist campaign, which pushed for a second referendum rather than outright revocation, has now been recast as "radical" is frankly bizarre.

Anand Menon and Jill Rutter provide a more comprehensive list of suspects in their long Prospect article, Who killed soft Brexit? Though this liberally spreads the blame, it does so by focusing on errors of tactical judgement rather than the inevitable culmination of a strategic failing that was decades in the making. So Theresa May is blamed for triggering Article 50 without a clear plan and for boxing herself in with her "red lines"; Jeremy Corbyn is blamed for insisting on opposing the government instead of supporting May's deal, while the PLP is accused of cowardice in not breaking the whip; and the Liberal Democrats and SNP are accused of deluded opportunism in commiting to a revocation of Article 50 and supporting Johnson's call for a general election. The charge-sheet extends to the poor performance of Britain's institutions (parliament, the civil service, the press), and even to the defensiveness of the EU. Some of these charges are justified: May's wounds were clearly self-inflicted and the smaller parties' opportunism gave the lie to their cant about "the national interest". But some is unjustified: the EU27 had every reason to be defensive given their experience of the UK as a negotiating partner, while Labour had good reason to believe after 2017 that it could bring down the government.

Menon and Rutter's conclusion is that a soft Brexit was there for the taking but also that it was a compromise that was simply too unpalatable for too many: "For all the various culprits that conspired to kill it off, it may be that soft Brexit always carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. At least some of those around the top table feared that it was in fact not the obvious compromise, but instead the “worst of all worlds,” where you are locked out of the room but still locked into most of the rules. Soft Brexit was something, in other words, that all sides could agree to disagree with". The reason for this antipathy was not simply the shortcomings of being a rule-taker, but the difficulty of securing a trade-off in a political environment unsuited to such pragmatism: "could a political mindset that prizes adversarialism over collaboration ever buy the inherently unsatisfactory compromise of a soft Brexit?" This theme was expanded on in their summary for the Guardian, which pins the blame on "our wantonly destructive politics" (amusingly, this shorter piece omits any mention of the Liberal Democrats, who were the most wantonly destructive party at Westminster in 2019).

Though they come from different points on the ideological spectrum, these interpretations share the belief that what has led to hard Brexit is the failure of the political centre to cohere and collaborate. But rather than taking this as evidence of the centre's intellectual poverty and incompetence, there is a tendency, particularly with Menon and Rutter, to view it as the tragedy of an antiquated political system that lacks both a consititution (which might have prevented the 2016 referendum being embarked upon so blithely) and the collaborative practices of proportional representation. This means that the hunt for the deeper historical roots of the tactical mis-steps of the last four years is diverted into the conventional territory of constitutional and electoral reform, something that many on the left have been happy to buy into too. Such reform may be necessary, but what the abstraction of Brexit boils down to is power over our own lives: for most leavers, autonomy is a more relevant concept than sovereignty. Providing the political class with more modern tools ignores that the erosion of popular autonomy has been virgorously pursued by that same class for over 40 years and, as the course of the pandemic shows, the question of power over our own lives remains central to popular concern.

I think Menon and Rutter are right that while a soft Brexit was plausible - and even popular, as they concede - it was politically impossible, but the reason for this has little to do with a preference for the adversarial (except in the limited sense of factionalism within Labour) or an inclination towards the wantonly destructive. British politics between 1992 and 2016 was characterised by triangulation and pragmatism, so the charge that collaboration and compromise were too alien really doesn't stick. A more plausible explanation is that the British political class lacked sufficient imagination to see the UK as anything other than either a wholly independent nation or a fully-integrated member of the European Union. The UK has always been a hybrid state, both in its constitutional form (the peculiarities of devolution and the anomalous situation of Northern Ireland) and in its geopolitical role as a bridge between the US and the EU. But it has managed to absorb both of these into a worldview in which Westminster remained dominant and the UK was seen as a first-rank global power. Soft Brexit would have required us to adopt another hybrid self-image, and one that couldn't be so easily finessed to satisfy our collective ego. Becoming Norway, or even Canada, was seen as too much of a step down in the world.