Originally posted as a series of comments to Facebook after the general election in June 2017. Edited for clarity.
The binary choice of the referendum was a hard one. Many people told me that they understood my arguments regarding democratic deficits but they wouldn’t risk the economic impact of a No Deal Brexit. And it was a risk – I think we’ll end up joining the EEA but right now it’s not on the Cabinet agenda and we could still go crashing out.
But at the same time, the reason it was a risk and the reason that we ended up with that referendum when it was called by a Prime Minister who had lost control of his own backbenchers, was because the “vote Remain and we’ll reform the EU” weren’t in the slightest bit interested in talking about reform, let alone campaigning for it, before the referendum was called. Dominic Cummings, the Leave campaign manager who architected the £350m a year claim, got hammered on by bitter Remainers after he tweeted last week that it could still all go horribly wrong and that there were scenarios in which Brexit would not have been necessary because the EU reformed itself, but he was right. But who was going to make that happen? And who has itself to blame that it didn’t? It was never going to be diehard Tory back-benchers.
The Tories are going to mess this up. They’ve completely lost control of their own right wing and we ended up here at all David Cameron made a promise he never thought he would have to keep. They have, unsurprisingly, continued to mess it up since, culminating most recently in the failure of an election.
The only thing I’m surprised by is the sheer incompetence of the Tories to manage this. I know that there’s party politics to be played but seriously, the way the British negotiating team has been talking it’s like they’re not even reading the European press and how they’re coming across. I think they’re completely crazy to be still foot dragging over the divorce bill when really important things like the Irish border and the fate of resident EU nationals is vastly more important. I don’t know what they think they’re trying to achieve. I was expecting the Tories to fail because “we can tell Europe to get stuffed but still have all the nice things” was always a pipe dream, but this level of uncertainty this late in the game is really quite pathetic.
But at the end of the day, we live in a society ruled by capitalists and the capitalists are very unhappy that rampant populism has spun out of control and there’s a risk of an end to the four freedoms. We should not lose sight of the fact that the four freedoms of goods, capital, services and people were not introduced so working folks could take cheap holidays to Spain without a passport but because free movement of workers lowers business costs.
Jeremy Corbyn knows this and that’s why he’s always been a euroskeptic until his about-turn during the referendum campaign because that was bad politics for a leader of the Labour Party. He continued to dally over the issue but he’s always been outnumbered by the Remainers in the Cabinet. They have prevailed and it is now Labour Party policy that we should seek full and free access to the single market as a transitional period. There are now union campaigns for single market membership and other think-tanks producing papers, such as Nick Clegg’s new outfit, advocating this approach as well. Pressure is building. There is and always has been a majority in the House for single market membership, they just need to coordinate across parties to make a plan of action.
I don’t know how exactly this is going to play out but some potential scenarios in order of success: it becomes clear by the next round of Brexit negotiations that things are not going well. The pound is dropping and there’s no clear leadership, and people are really pissed off with Theresa May. She will probably face a leadership challenge after the next party conference. That leader will have to call an election given the disaster that occurred at the last one, and I suspect given the current winds across the world and the blinding campaign that Labour fought last time that Jeremy Corbyn will win. If he does and Labour gets into power, they will negotiate single market access for a “transitional period” and eventually that will become permanent because everyone will realise how kinda stupid it is not to keep going with it.
Alternatively, the negotiations could run into trouble and the Tories will be pressured by their business base to about-face. Again, Theresa May is removed as leader and a leader with a different approach is installed. They realise that the current plans are unworkable and again work to agree a transitional period of single market access, pacifying the Leave voters who wanted change and don’t really understand what the ECJ is but keeping the four freedoms. Again, the House majority and the Remain and soft Leave voters works to make that permanent and that occurs.
Alternatively, for lack of any game-changer, Theresa May stays in power and the negotiations grind on fruitlessly because the British side doesn’t really understand what it means to “negotiate” instead of just nervously fiddling with pieces of papers and saying “Brexit means Brexit” over and over again. We reach a point where it is no longer possible to achieve any deal in the remaining time before March 2019 and Theresa May is forced to agree to a transitional deal of EEA membership while a more permanent solution is found. She will not achieve this because the current government position is irreconcilable and everyone just wrings their hands until 2022 when Theresa May loses power in spectacular fashion, Labour gets into power and everyone is just so sick of the whole thing clogging up our political discourse we just stay in the EEA by default and everyone forgets much of whatever it was that we were even arguing over in 2016.
The EU is open to the idea of EEA membership, and even the UK government wobbled briefly on it’s commitment to ending freedom of movement:
“Still, officials in Brussels hope that once the reality of a “hard Brexit” — of which British manufacturers and industry associations already warn — comes closer, the U.K. might become open to the Norway option, at least as a temporary solution.
Such hopes have been spurred as the British government is backtracking from its earlier hardline stance on Brexit. Late last month, British Prime Minister Theresa May indicated that free movement of EU citizens post-Brexit could be permitted as both sides “implement” their future relationship. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson last week opened up to allowing free movement for EU citizens after Brexit.
“Ideally I think it could be done, what with goodwill and imagination, it could be done,” Johnson told reporters in Athens, referring to free movement of EU nationals.”
In essence: leaving the single market makes no sense from a capitalist perspective, a liberal perspective, or from most of the socialist perspectives. The leave campaign won because of a populist narrative that captured the hearts and minds of a population primed by a right-wing media owned by nationalist conservatives who make all their money in the UK and have no interest in being able to trade across Europe. The champions of that populist narrative, UKIP, promptly collapsed at the very next election into oblivion and are currently a rump party in the process of being taken over by outright Islamophobes.
Everyone is now very tired of the whole thing, but the vast majority want to honour the outcome of the vote. The best of doing that is to leave the EU, to dump the federalism by stealth, the ever closer union towards a single European Army and currency, and stick with what Europe used to be and what we actually voted for in 1975: a free trading area between nation states who want to work together but also hate each other enough to keep state power divided and afraid of their voters.