Tim Stanley:
Outdated liberal elites don’t have the courage to form a new party, so they just oppose Brexit instead
Idon’t know why elite liberals hate Brexit. It’s done wonders for their careers. Anyone who quit, was sacked or lost an election is welcome to have another go if it’s in the name of Remain: like coming out as gay or a Scientologist, it guarantees a second look. Hence yesterday, Nicky Morgan, Nick Clegg and David Miliband took to the stage to demand that Britain stay inside the single market. Cue the usual speculation that Mr Miliband is launching a political comeback.
The standard caveats to a takedown of a politician apply: I’m sure the former foreign secretary is well intentioned, and his case for remaining in the European Economic Area has its merits.
But Mr Miliband is also utterly typical of a certain generation of outdated liberal elite, to the degree that he’s turning into Tony Blair before our very eyes. As he addressed the cameras in Essex, Mr Miliband’s eyebrow arched and his hands flapped (as if directing traffic to go down the central, and thus most reasonable, lane), and he put a full stop. Between. Every. Single. Word.
The thing is, Blairism is dead. It was popular while it lasted and it even did us some good, but the moment Tony stepped down in 2007 to spend more time with his fortune, Mr Miliband was toast.
Few careers have been so disappointing. He failed to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership. He failed to beat his brother, Ed, for the job – for the very good reason that Ed, for all his faults, understood that the party was tired of third ways and short sentences.
David then left the country to work in the oddly lucrative field of charity work and since then has been rumoured to be about to return to British politics on no less than 18 occasions (as estimated by the New Statesman). Every time, we are told that he’d be a shoe-in for prime minister if he did. So, why hasn’t he done it yet?
Well, he isn’t technically in Parliament – and this habit of championing white knights who aren’t even MPS betrays how little constitutional nous some Remainers have (they think this is America where, as the Americans seem intent on proving, literally anyone can be president).
He doesn’t have a party, either. Labour has not only moved on from Blairism but Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader as an act of penance for Iraq and New Labour economics, and if Mr Miliband somehow found himself in a position to challenge him, he’d lose. That means the only serious alternative is to set up a new party – and it’s striking how few liberal politicians are willing to do it.
They tell us that Brexit is the most important issue facing the country. They tell us that the Tories are far-right and Labour far-left. So why not put up an alternative? The answer must be cowardice. It’s easy to stand on a stage in a rice factory every few months and say something mean about Mr Corbyn and Europe. Much, much harder to put your reputation on the line, raise hard cash, recruit candidates and set up a new party. So, moaning about the single market it is, then.
And here we come to the heart of the matter: the real purpose behind so many elite liberal interventions into the European debate. They claim that no one during the referendum explained the full consequences of a Leave vote, and yet on May 9, 2016 it was reported that Mr Miliband said: “The admission of the Leave campaign that quitting the EU means quitting the single market has let the cat out of the bag.”
And to insist that leaving the market amounts to a “hard Brexit” is a manipulation of language. It amounts in fact to Brexit because that’s what a powerful consensus agrees that Brexit involves.
If the negotiations have led us anywhere thus far, it’s towards a softening, not a hardening, of this logic. The British government has already agreed to pay through the nose to leave; the Prime Minister has been kicking around a “customs partnership” that would effectively leave us tied to the tariff and regulation regime that many of the 52 per cent probably assumed they were voting to cut. If anything, the voters seem to have a better understanding of what Brexit is than the Conservative Party does.
But even if Theresa May and Mr Miliband have more in common than they realise, there is an enormous difference in motivation. Mr Miliband’s ultimate goal in arguing for the Brexit soft option, we can infer, is to turn it into such an unappealing gelatinous cop-out that the voters can be persuaded at some point in the future to reverse it altogether.
And that has to be a real psychological appeal of the anti-brexit campaign, conscious or otherwise. Here’s a chance to have power again. To tinker with the levers. To stack the odds. To plant your bottom on the One Show sofa. Men and women who cannot see a path back to the top via the ballot box can get there through conspiracy against Brexit. The liberal elite returns not in a blaze of glory, but quietly, with deadly determination, from beyond the political grave.