It is said that a fish rots from the head down, yet in the shift of British public opinion on Brexit it seems that the head is the last part to go.
It seems that with gathering pace we are being treated to the spectacle of right-wing commentators and politicians doubling down on Brexit. In this narrative, food prices should be dealt with by even looser rules on imports and fewer checks, the struggles of British life sciences should be solved by snubbing EU cooperation and creating our own ‘global’ science programme, while stagnant growth just means we just need more deregulation.
Rather than reflect on why large swathes of the public agree that in hindsight leaving the EU was a mistake or why the proportion who wish to rejoin the EU continues to creep ever closer to the two-thirds mark or why support for Brexit is so catastrophically abysmal among the young, Brexit’s defenders argue that we really need is an even bigger dose of Brexit.
In some instances, this takes the form of a belief that the original Brexit has not been delivered yet. In spite of us having very much left all the EU’s institutions more than three years ago, it remains incredibly easy to find Brexiteers who say that Brexit has still not come to life, constantly shifting Brexit’s definitional goalposts as critics highlight the failings of what Brexit has meant so far. For the most part, people think like this because in their minds Brexit must be successful – therefore, if we are not seeing success, it cannot be Brexit. It is structurally a fairly unsophisticated repeat of the old argument that ‘communism has never really been tried’.
Those with more reasoned arguments may point out that in some areas, like in tech and digital regulation, we remain quite close to EU law. Yet they miss that this is mostly due to the fact that the general public rather likes the principles and provisions of these laws. Successive Brexiteer governments have stayed away from large-scale divergence from EU regulations for the same reason they stay away from raising taxes – voters won’t be happy about it. It also represents a confusion over whether Brexit means a specific set of policies that we must enact or whether it is simply the freedom to legislate however we wish.
Elsewhere, others realise that it is futile to say that Brexit didn’t happen. Instead, they claim that Brexit wasn’t enough, that what we need is Brexit 2: Brexit Harder. And so the same people that told each other and the world that the UK could leave the EU with little cost and plentiful benefit are now saying the same about quitting the European Convention on Human Rights. And if that doesn’t work, no doubt they will find another international institution or agreement to stand in as a simple scapegoat for complex problems.
Regardless of individual reasonings, the vast majority of the Brexiteers who fill the newspaper columns and our halls of Parliament are bound together in a tight ecosystem. Within this ecosystem there is only good news about British exports and doom-laden prophecies of the ever-imminent collapse of the EU (especially Germany). Negative stories or unfavourable comparisons to our neighbours can hardly penetrate the near-mystical fog that surrounds this ecosystem. They live in an information space that is so intensely divorced from the experiences of most people in this country that when asked why someone today would support rejoining the EU – again, a view held by almost two-thirds of the electorate – it is unlikely any of them could muster an answer beyond some kind of imagined threat of brainwashing.
It is, bizarrely, an ecosystem in which many of our opposition politicians also find themselves, deliberately steering away from tapping into public anger on Brexit due to a misplaced belief that Brexit is somehow an area of strength for the government (a view seemingly also wrongly held by the government itself).
In the end, this will all mean two things for Brexit. First, it will be a painful and drawn-out affair as its principal advocates refuse to recognise its shortcomings and as even other parties fall short of offering meaningful changes. Second, and following logically from the first, Brexit will be impermanent, as a lack of compromise pushes more and more people from simple scepticism about the direction of Brexit to outright opposition to the whole concept.
Can Brexiteers prevent this and rescue their project? Maybe. But not before they recognise their isolation and start giving serious answers to why Brexit becomes less popular with every passing day.