No-Brexit Brexit’s looking better all the time

WITH a heavy heart, last week I had to correct an error made by the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg. She had quoted Keir Starmer’s line at the British Labour Party conference, that “Nobody is ruling out Remain”, and she had tweeted: “Impossible to imagine this a year ago.”

I felt obliged to point out that I was imagining this two years ago, in these pages, when it seemed to me that the only viable real-world solution was that there would be no Brexit. Or to be precise, the No-Brexit Brexit. Which is essentially Brexit with most of the bad bits of Brexit taken out — which is basically everything about Brexit taken out.

In this vision which was “impossible to imagine a year ago”, the UK would Remain for most practical purposes in the EU, though they might be pretending that they are doing something else. And life would go on.

In my imaginings, I was guessing that eventually the UK would choose a solution other than self-destruction. That however they managed it, the UK would decide “not to disembowel itself with a rusty hacksaw”, figuratively speaking. Though the purists among the Brexiteers may prefer to go for this literally, or at least to have others go for it, while they make their own arrangements which ensure it will personally cost them nothing.

Now I accept that sometimes a people will indeed become perversely self-destructive; that nationalism is such a degenerate force, it can make oblivion seem like a reasonable alternative to the making of some agreement with your perceived enemy.

But I felt that in making any prediction, especially in relation to such an advanced country, you have to regard the possibility of massive self-harming as unlikely, regardless of the result of some cretinous and — as it now turns out — fraudulent referendum.

So when Laura Kuenssberg says that nobody was imagining a year ago that Remain would still be in play, not only is she being factually inaccurate, she is not seeing that perhaps the reason for this, is that the political hacketariat seem so rarely to be able to imagine anything. So narrowly do they define what they do, it never entered their heads that this concept of Remain would still exist in late 2018.

And perhaps these failures of the imagination, help to explain why they keep getting things wrong.

They have also given energy to the Brexiteers, by neglecting for a long time to allude to the notion that the UK didn’t actually have to do this, that there might be some way out of it. That there was this other option of the No-Brexit Brexit out there, looking better all the time.

Looking like a winner indeed, given the response to Keir Starmer when he raised the matter as delicately as he could at the conference of a Labour party being led by ideologues as indifferent to the real-world problems of working people as a Jacob Rees-Mogg or a Baron Lawson of Blaby.

The applause started tentatively and then grew into an ovation, as if Starmer’s words had given the crowd permission to literally stand up against the badness and the madness of Brexit. To defy their own Euro-phobe Jeremy Corbyn, who, like any ideologue, has this pathological inability to admit that he was wrong.

And you sense that the more the No-Brexit Brexit is spoken of, the more people will be standing up for it. Because it’s just getting too real now, the delusions can’t be sustained any more. On RTE’s Prime Time, Richard Downes went to Switzerland in a juggernaut, to find a morass of bureaucracy at the border — the point being, that the Swiss model is one that is actually favoured by the Brexiteers.

The larger point, is that Switzerland is situated on planet Earth, and thus it can never supply a solution for the Brexiteers, no more than any arrangement about the Irish Border can. Indeed, we have been inclined to see our border as some kind of a special case, when in truth the only thing that is special about it, is its actual existence in the known universe.

Brexit is not a plan, or a policy, it is more akin to a disorder. And you can’t really legislate for that. It is the malaise of nationalism mixed up with a bit of disaster capitalism, and it seems to have a particular appeal to some of the worst people in the world. It is too primitive to be accommodated by the rules of modern countries. It is not a strategy, it is a fever dream.

So the moment it makes contact with any kind of reality, it disintegrates.

Yes, the odds against the No-Brexit Brexit have shifted dramatically since I wrote about it in 2016, but the case is really only starting to be articulated by the likes of Starmer — there’s been too much talk about “preparing for Brexit”, and with it the implication that it is possible for rational human beings to “prepare” for something that is little more than an atavistic con job.

Preparing for the No-Brexit Brexit is what people of goodwill should be doing, mainly by talking about it. Keir Starmer just mentioned that Remain was still an option, and it brought the house down. Last week Emmanuel Macron said that the UK could stay in the EU “for sure”, if it changed its mind. The Government should be saying this all the time.

Talk them down off the ledge, they will appreciate it in time. Unlike anything else that springs to mind at this stage, it might even work.

‘Brexit is not a plan or a strategy, it is more akin to a disorder... it is a fever dream’