Brexit is our last chance to restore trust. If we fail, we will never be forgiven

From tech to voter apathy, the Government is bungling the existential challenges of our time

Harold Wilson once said a week was a long time in politics. At the moment, weeks feel like eternities. Since early July, I appear to have morphed, against my will and without actually changing my views, from a moderate member of my party on Brexit, to a rebel: from a supporter of the Government’s approach to one who now has real concerns about its direction. All in a few short weeks.

But the key conversation we should be having – one that has really been absent for too long – is what the next 15 or 20 years looks like; what we actually should do now, beyond the platitudinous mush, to ensure our children have a better life than us.

Deep down, all politicians know that there is something amiss in the body politic today. Populations are restless. People feel left out and ignored. The traditional levers to improve the world are malfunctioning; slower growth, foreign policy chaos and domestic budgetary stricture. The status quo appears brittle and worn. And yet there is no clarity about what to replace it with. The world is turning and, for many, it appears to be turning away from them.

Underneath that sense of foreboding are two existential issues. The first is technology. In my lifetime alone, I have seen the advent of the home computer, the internet and the mobile phone. Millions of jobs have been created by a medium that was invisible a generation ago and which, most likely, will have changed beyond recognition by the next.

Yet, even in normal times, politicians’ answer to technology is to either ignore it or grandstand on it. Take the tech giants and their questionable data practices. The elite have gone to town on them in recent months. CEOS have been chastened. Companies run warm adverts saying “we’ve changed” without proper public consideration of what, over the long-term, we all need to change to.

Our focus on Brexit has meant we’ve missed the underlying, hard questions. Are they platforms or publishers? Are they monopolists or innovators? How do individual nation states regulate cross-border activity? The amount of time we spend in legislatures debating the philosophical, economic and social impacts of artificial intelligence, big data and the loss of privacy is inversely proportional to their coming impacts.

I am a huge evangelist about technology and its ability to change lives. But we have to ready citizens to take advantage of those opportunities through skills, flexibility and attitude. Well, why should we do that when we can trot along to yet another debate about the merits of the EEA? We must do better. There are huge potential changes coming, which will reshape our economy and our labour market. If we do not talk about them properly, and prepare the electorate to deal with them, we will store up tremendous problems for the future.

I can predict this because it has all happened before. The European Economic Community that Britain joined in 1973 was a very different beast to the EU we were part of in 2015. Few people expected then that an economic union would also become such a political one. Nor did most voters predict how fundamentally globalisation would reshape our economy and our communities. People felt they had not been consulted on massive changes that had achieved a bipartisan consensus in Westminster. And so we come to the second existential issue for British politics: trust.

Out there, beyond the M25, those who have borne the brunt of these changes feel ignored and patronised. Their security has been undermined and their way of life transformed. The years since the crash have been especially hard for many – to say nothing of the toxic cacophony of expenses scandals, dodgy dossiers, spin and the obscuring of hard choices. Now it seems to many that the system is not only untrustworthy but also fundamentally rotten.

Against that backdrop, Brexit was an opportunity to restore that trust with a large section of society. By granting the referendum, our political class seemed to have recognised the need for a new democratic input – for some kind of check from the people of Britain on the consensus MPS had established. “The Government will implement what you decide,” said the booklet dropped through every household letterbox, and many millions of voters believed it. Their decision was close but clear: Britain must leave the EU. The definition of that result was distilled last year, by both parties, into departure from the single market and the customs union. In the general election of 2017, 85 per cent of people agreed.

In the months since Brexit, I have seen a tentative change on the doorsteps of the people I proudly represent. Distrust and disengagement was replaced by curiosity. People hesitantly dared to hope that the political class was actually going to do something they requested. Perhaps the duck house could finally fade from a deeply suspicious collective memory.

Then along came Chequers. At a stroke, that emerging engagement with politics was dashed. Government spin proclaims that we are taking back control. The reality is that we are ceding it, at least on trade, in perpetuity. The document is a clever, legalistic, splitting-the-difference tome; the product of a process driven by a civil service never fully reconciled to leaving and, ultimately, not wanting to grasp the nettle.

Whatever you think about the referendum, and whatever your own personal view on Chequers, the key measure is one of trust. Does this proposal properly embody the decision of the British people in 2016? Can you sell it to the disengaged of Dronfield or the exasperated of Eckington? And, when this offer is inevitably salami-sliced away into irrelevance by the EU, what should we tell our electors? That we gave it our best effort but came up short? That Brussels is right? That our masters know best?

If we allow the jobs of truck drivers and call-centre workers to be automated away without consultation or compensation, we will not be forgiven. And if, after years of globalisation and European integration, we MPS do not honour the pledge on which we hung our entire profession’s credibility, and implement the orders we have been given, we will lose our voters’ trust for a generation.

I became an MP last year, for my home area, and the truth is that I ran for Parliament for a much wider set of reasons than Brexit. I am not madly obsessed by the intricate nuances of the acquis or think everything that comes out of Europe is bad. And I’m willing to compromise on money and timelines if necessary. Yet my bottom line is this: I need to be able to go back to my constituents – the people I grew up with and call my friends – and say we did what they asked us to do.

So, my message to the Government is this: you have a big job to do, and a big decision to make. Chequers is about to undermine what I thought we all wanted – to restore the belief that the disengaged had in democracy to deliver. In doing so, it will create an anger so great that there is no chance we can give existential issues like technology the focus they deserve. Drop Chequers and deliver what the people voted for.