Politicians are obstructing the change people voted for

The Leave vote was driven by exasperation with the status quo but politicians only talk about trade

Exasperation with the paralysis in our political class grows by the day. Bogged down in the technicalities of customs arrangements, backstops, implementation periods, transitions, deals and no-deals, the debate around Brexit has descended into a state of monumental irrelevance that utterly fails to address the underlying discontents that lie at the heart of the vote to leave the EU.

These were many and varied, but they had one overarching sentiment in common – growing anger with the political and economic status quo. The vote was a popular rebellion that united elites and “left behinds” in grievance against a system seen to be failing on multiple fronts.

Looking at the current chaos – a snakepit of self-interested infighting that makes even Italy’s perennially dysfunctional politics look purposeful by comparison – only confirms the inability of our political class to bring about the meaningful change that people voted for.

It is a quarter to midnight, and there is still no sign of consensus on how to move forward. It beggars belief that two and a half years after the referendum, and with just months to go before the Article 50 process comes to an end, we are still no nearer to knowing what sort of future we are trying to achieve than at the beginning.

One of the many, many problems with Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement is that it provides so few answers to that question. It merely extends the uncertainty, and worse, threatens to leave us in a no-man’s land of dismal sameness, bound into customs arrangements over which we have no say or even any unilateral right to leave. For a once proud nation, and, let it not be forgotten, still Europe’s second largest economy, this is indeed a dreadful fate.

Did anyone, when they voted for Brexit, seriously think that the debate would come to be defined not by how to answer legitimate complaints but by which type of trading arrangement would damage the economy least? With publication this week of government and Bank of England economic impact assessments, that regrettably seems to be the deeply dispiriting level of discourse.

Trade, for heaven’s sake, is an entirely mechanical human activity which ought to happen like clockwork and whose deeper machinations prior to the referendum were only of interest to anoraks and policy wonks. When writing about the interminable General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations, as dutifully I used to, it was always with a feeling of futility, knowing that hardly anyone would read it. Yet here it is, apparently centre stage in the most important national decision in a generation.

Beyond the freedom to do independent deals as a metaphor for taking back control, Brexit was never about trade. It was a scream of despair across a wide variety of complaints, a massive protest vote in which citizens dared to dream of a better world more rooted in their own individual and local concerns, and it was a rejection of a European project that is evolving in ways that voters do not wish to go.

By addressing these discontents head on, Brexit could so easily have served to catalyse the required spirit of national renewal; indeed, that is what Theresa May aspired to when she spoke of the “burning injustices” in her first speech as Prime Minister back in July 2016. “When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you,” she said. “When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you... As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold new positive role for ourselves in the world, and we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”. Does a deal that seeks merely to reconcile the pursuit of immigration controls with maintaining the bare bones of our trading relationship with the EU serve any of these ambitions? Hardly.

Instead, Brexit has turned into a damage limitation exercise where the Government sets out to preserve as much of the economic status quo as it can, and warns of potentially lethal levels of harm if we don’t.

For those of us interested in the history of ideas, the fascinating thing about Brexit is the way in which it has crossed traditional political divides, bringing together people of diverse ideological allegiances. For some, it was a rejection of the neo-liberal consensus that came to dominate from the 1980s and which the European Union seems to embody. To them, the EU is a capitalist racket that allows big business to exploit free movement to keep wages low and shirk wider social responsibilities. There is plenty of truth in their complaint. A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded that it was those on the margins of society, living on low incomes, with few qualifications and without the skills required to prosper in the modern economy, who were more likely to vote “Leave”.

Yet at the other extreme, Leave voters included those who were clear winners from globalisation, with high educational qualifications and incomes. For them, the EU represents a bastion of welfarism and crippling regulatory intervention. There is plenty of truth in that view, too.

Uniting these grievances is the belief that the EU is a deeply undemocratic, homogenising organisation which denies selfdetermination and intentionally or otherwise has become beholden to vested interests that no longer properly serve citizens as a whole.

In a recent essay on the causes of Brexit, Armine Ishkanian of the London School of Economics concluded that the most powerful driver of the Brexit vote was a sense of despondency, betrayal and hopelessness. Above all, it was an expression of anger over the failure of political leaders to in any way challenge the status quo and make fundamental changes to people’s lives.

This has again been forgotten in the intensity of narrow argument over backstops and customs arrangements. It was never about trade. It was about the need to belong and for people to have some sense of control over their lives. Inability to deliver meaningful change further feeds public disillusionment with established sources of power and reinforces the sense of fin de siècle. Anarchic endings become ever more possible.