In the echo chamber that these days constitutes my social network timelines, there are calls for the 2016 EU referendum to be declared null and void because of Russian interference. Many of us, including not a few ‘leavers’, are unhappy at President Putin’s likely role in dividing Europe in order to rule but today’s long awaited ‘Russia report’ stops short of confirming what we suspect. The report says that the government simply didn’t bother to see if those pesky Russians had been up to anything, which is much the same thing as Donald Trump claiming that COVID-19 cases in America would be much lower if the government did a lot less testing. But I’m against any suggestion that the initial referendum result should be overturned. This is why.
Most remoaners like me have long accepted that Brexit is over. Dominic Cummings got Brexit done last December and his sock-puppet Boris Johnson signed the paperwork by the end of January. We might feel strongly that people were duped, but they will tell us they knew what they were voting for, even though very few of them are able to explain a single benefit of Brexit. We certainly can’t go around saying leavers got it wrong: give them a chance to get it right next time. That merely sustains the divisions that have all but torn this country apart.
Cummings and Johnson can do what they like, now. Cummings has never wanted a deal with the EU and that’s how it will almost certainly play out. We’ll crash out of the transition into the kind of chaos Cummings doesn’t just thrive on, he believes in it. Project fear will become project fact. What we must try to avoid is the smug ‘told you so’ reaction when major car manufacturers pack up and go home to, say, Japan.
The first thing must happen is for leavers, by which I mean the leave leaders like Johnson, Gove, Farage et al, to own the consequences. Defeated remainers can offer positive suggestions and ideas but leave, I’m afraid, means leave. We’ve left, the leavers have a massive parliamentary majority, the defeated, meaning remoaners like me, have to observe from a distance, however hard it is, what comes next.
Any thoughts of either rejoining the EU or negotiating a strong Norway Plus arrangement with the EU – and I prefer the latter, at least to start with – would have to come about because the national mood will have changed to support a more constructive arrangement. I’m afraid that if the national mood stayed as divided as it is now, no amount of good intentions will unite the country.
That we have now left the EU is enough for many people. The transition period has merely ensured that although we are outside of the decision-making processes, life has gone on much as before, allowing obviously for the arrival of COVID-19. But a large number of people want that full rupture with Europe, to end free trade within the single market and the customs union, and give us the opportunity to do close trade deals with the likes of Turkey and India. If no one compromises – and that includes remoaners and well as leavers – then we let Cummings and Johnson to get on with the hard Brexit they so desire.
I’d like to think that, at some point in the future, Britons would come to a consensus, that Brexit happened because of a variety of different reasons, which included immigration, inequality in the UK and a desire to bring back the apparently great days of the British Empire. Perhaps one day, we will once again share a common belief in the united Europe that Winston Churchill believed in so passionately. More a common market rather than a European Union, at least for starters, but pulling up the drawbridge will make Britain a lonely place.
Since we have left the EU, our standing and prestige around the world has already declined. We are no longer one of the Big Three of the EU28 but a middle-sized island on the periphery of Europe. Prisoners of the myth of exceptionalism, our decline is likely to continue, slowly but surely, as we become bit players rather than key players. It did not have to be like this.
For now, we have to accept where we are and where we are is a country in crisis from COVID-19 and a crashing economy, which will be compounded by the hardest possible crash-out from Europe when the transition period ends. The losers of the referendum campaign cannot choose what happens next unless we begin to unite around something better. In any event, if we crash-out of the EU transition period in December, we will still have to negotiate trade deals and the like because our economy cannot function without them.
We all know what President Putin is up to. An ex (?) KGB man, he misses the Soviet Union. Anything he can do to put some form of it back together again, whilst at the same time disrupting his rivals, as he might see Europe, he will do it. It’s hard to imagine Russia was not hard at work helping the leave groups in the EU referendum and it is not hard to understand why the Conservative Party benefits so much from Russian cash donations.
We either all go forward together in search of unity and compromise or we carry on divided, to the delight of our enemies. I very much hope we choose the former.
