An interesting piece by @GoodwinMJ about which much could be said. I’m going to concentrate on an issue that is in my view critical to understanding where we are but he just misses (and therefore misunderstands where we are). quillette.com/2018/08/03/bri…
The point, in a nutshell, is that at the time of the referendum there was a general failure to understand the extent to which our legal, political, and economic arrangements had become tied up with the EU.
Vast areas of our law depend on EU law. And the economic model of businesses from farming to car manufacture to legal and financial services is structured around EU membership.
Moreover, many people’s day to day lives - their choice of where to live, study, work and even whom to marry and where to bring up their children - depended on assumptions based on EU law. A minority of people to be sure - but millions of people nonetheless.
Whether you think that degree of entanglement was a good or a bad thing isn’t the point here: its existence is incontrovertible.
What was simply not explained during the referendum campaign (or before, or, really, after) was the pain and disruption that would necessarily follow from tearing that entanglement up.
Remain concentrated (and @GoodwinMJ is right here) on largely unexplained economic fear warnings. But “largely unexplained” is key here: the Remain campaign did not want to make the “entanglement” point precisely because it showed the extent to which the EU affected daily life.
On the other hand, Vote Leave consistently claimed that tearing up that entanglement didn’t matter in relation to things people liked.
We could carry on trading with a “free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey”, moving to the continent, travelling with EHIC cards, etc etc (from the critical to the less important) as if nothing had changed. Disentanglement, we were told, would be painless.
The problem with all of that is that - for reasons well known to anyone who follows me - it just isn’t true. But the fact that it isn’t true doesn’t stop it from being a key part of what Leave promised. And on a close vote it’s reasonable to assume it got them over the line.
Now, @GoodwinMJ doesn’t grapple with any of that. But I think it’s essential to understanding why the debate has played out in what he feels to be a disappointing way.
The Government has been faced with a mandate that promised both “taking back control” and responding to the world view @GoodwinMJ sets out but *also* delivering it in a way that avoids the economic shock associated with leaving the EU.
(As well as avoiding losing the other benefits of EU membership that Vote Leave were careful to promise constituencies that cared about them could be kept: eg ability to retire to the Costas with health care/ EHIC cards).
That mandate is simply impossible to honour: and it is the fact that that mandate is impossible to honour that is critical to understanding the problem we are in.
Now, @GoodwinMJ criticises the “establishment” response to the vote. But his criticism of that response fails to engage with the problem that the “establishment” has been given an impossible mandate. The political system simply can’t deliver what it has been told to deliver.
The question is how we get out of this mess without the political consequences he (reasonably) fears will follow from not honouring the mandate. But since honouring the mandate is impossible, “just honour the mandate” can’t be the answer.
Finally, the fact that many millions of people had built lives on (and structured their businesses and life plans round) EU law explains much of the emotional reaction to the vote that @GoodwinMJ finds so puzzling. /ends.
