Despite COVID-19, Brexit is still a hot topic for debt

Four years ago, I got a bit of a surprise. Something I’d voted for actually won. Yes, I was a mildly pro-Brexit Leave voter. Rather like Boris Johnson himself, according to his earliest contributions to what was very much his campaign, I wasn’t sure it would actually happen even if there was a Leave vote.

The assumption was that David Cameron and the EU would swiftly organise a new package of reforms, favourable to Britain. Then there’d be another referendum on the improved “renegotiation” of the UK’s terms of membership. That was, after all, standard EU procedure after a population had been asked something in a referendum and they’d said “no”. The EU kept asking the question until the voters returned the “right answer”.

They’d done this with the Irish, French, Dutch and Danes. Why would it be different for Britain? Besides, even if Leave meant Leave, the mutual interests of both sides would mean a deal for Britain that allowed us to get hitched on to faster growing economies such as China and India.

No one was denying that the EU had some formidable flaws and problems of its own. The dynamic, rapidly expanding bloc had had its best days; Britain would exit all the political complications and be permitted the trading relationship, having our cake and eating it too. Isn’t that what Norway and Switzerland do? It hasn’t quite turned out like that.

I did not vote for — or desire, at any rate — a so-called “hard Brexit” that will have a hugely damaging effect on the economy and jobs. We don’t have free-trade deals with anyone else, and even if we did, they would not — cannot — make up for the loss of trade with the single market.

Even now, four years on, we don’t know our terms of exit. When they become knowable, they will still lack democratic legitimacy; we really should have that second referendum — the “final say” on Brexit.

If I knew then what I know now, I’d never have voted Leave. I can only reflect that it is still what the majority of my fellow citizens might have wanted, though probably not in this form.

The key to the question is immigration, which undercuts the rest of the politics of Brexit. Back in 2016, it seemed that there were people — and I exaggerate a little — who didn’t care a damn about losing their job or watching their kids being made redundant, provided that immigration came down. (The biggest Leave votes were in areas with the most to lose in terms of jobs, such as the northeast.) Allied to that was the argument that Britain was being pushed around by some alien imperial bureaucracy. That was why the “take back control” slogan had such a visceral appeal.

And, to be fair, no one could argue that the EU is some sort of democratic paradigm. There is no continent-wide polity, no real pan-European party system. There is no single language, and no popular demand for Europe-wide debates.

 In the media, our political discourse is still entirely national; we don’t watch an EU finance minister, say a French centrist, arguing with a Spanish leader of the EU opposition about cutting taxes.

The customs union, the single market, the euro, the flag, the anthem, and direct elections and powers for the European parliament have all failed to create a European political identity that commands wider respect, let alone loyalty. And that is what went wrong four years ago.