Thread by @Usherwood

While I kick my heels for a meeting, let's think about Brexit and inevitability:

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Let's start off by noting that I'm not a big one for inevitability, in any political situation

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It's a throwing up of the hands and submitting to forces beyond our control: 'there's nothing to be done'

Personally, I think there's always something to be done

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Of course, not accepting inevitability isn't the same as saying some things aren't very likely indeed, which'll feel like a semantic point, but it's still an important one

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Any way, from the general to the particular

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Inevitability has reared its head several times in the Brexit debate

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There's a whole debate about whether it was inevitable that the UK would vote to leave in #EURef: island history, the fundamental rightness of nation-states, stuff like that

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Since #EUref, there's been another debate about whether Brexit is inevitable, ie that the UK must now leave given the vote.

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This suits those who want leave, appealing to democratic norms and to the previous inevitability debate

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However, it's also much more challenged, by those who wish to remain in the EU, again appealing to democratic mechanisms for accommodating changes of mind

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What's interesting in this is the extent to which the frame of inevitability can be made to stick in public discourse

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The political advantage of owning a narrative of inevitability is that it actively disempowers your opponents: we're all just being swept along by the tide of history and there's nothing to be done

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If one can construct this as the predominant frame, then it becomes very hard to overturn

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Broadly speaking, you either have to appeal to some fundamental value or something seemingly trivial

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Eurosceptics took the former route in the 2000s when they reframed the inevitability of EU membership by appealing to 'giving the people a vote'

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anti-communists in the 1980s took the latter one by using the pursuit of environmental protests as a path to more systemic critiques

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Again, not all such efforts are successful, and often beyond on things changing in the wider context too, but equally they aren't all failures

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Not sure there's any great point to this, but worth reflecting on next time someone says something's inevitable

/end