Bring on a year in which Brexiteers can revive our national democracy

Our politicians look small because they have pursued economic growth at the expense of sovereignty

Brexit will take place on March 29 of this year. Assuming there is no delay, everything will change. We’ll go from endlessly debating whether or not we should leave the EU to discussing what kind of country we’ll be outside of it – and, accepting all the mammoth administrative challenges, my deepest hope is that we don’t waste this golden opportunity. Here is a once-in-acentury chance to revive our national democracy.

Brexit has highlighted two very different approaches to liberty. Many Remainers see freedom in universal terms, existing outside national borders. It’s just as wrong to call them anti-liberty as it is to call them antipatriotic: for them, the EU extends the freedom to move and to trade, while the rights of the individual are protected by treaties and courts.

There’s a bit of “ends justify the means” about this philosophy, in so far as Remainers aren’t too bothered who runs the show as long as the outcome is enlightened and liberal. How often have we heard that the EU, for all its faults, keeps our waters clean and protects workers’ rights? Or how often have we been told that British voters can’t be trusted – particularly the older or less educated ones – or that, by voting for Brexit, these people threatened the rights of others?

Leavers, by contrast, see give-and-take as a key element of democracy: sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but I always accept the result because I am part of a national community. To the Brexiteer, freedom is defined by the literal boundaries of the nation state: it begins at the Scilly Isles and ends at the Shetlands. It’s about self-government, and the ultimate test of a democracy is not the society you end up voting for, but the process by which you get there. We each have a vote; each vote counts the same as the other. The nation is in charge of its own destiny.

During the holidays, the journalist Iain Martin tweeted a fascinating quote from the diaries of Tony Benn, written in 1977, when Benn was a minister in the Callaghan government. “I loathe the Common Market,” he wrote. “It’s bureaucratic and it’s centralised, there’s no political discussion, officials control ministers, and it just has a horrible flavour about it. But of course, it is really dominated by Germany.”

The important phrase here is “there’s no political discussion”. The other complaints (bureaucratic and centralised) are boilerplate, but what Benn seized upon that is novel is the notion that the EU exists to make debate unnecessary and reduce policy options to a set of guidelines previously agreed in committee – and that is what really ground the gears of the Seventies Eurosceptics. A curious alliance of conservatives and socialists, each with totally different visions of what kind of country they wanted, were united in the belief that reform should be achieved through the ballot box and via the Commons. And when they talked about defending sovereignty – which Europhiles to this day dismiss as an airy-fairy concept – what they meant in completely practical terms was maximising the powers of the British people to make a choice and to implement it.

This is why the first great test of Brexit is Brexit. Will we actually do it? The Remainers calling for a second referendum are, once again, showing that for them the ends justify the means: hold one vote after another until you get the result that is concomitant with your vision of the just society. For the Brexiteer, fulfilling the promise made in 2016 that the result, whatever it was, will be implemented is a truly democratic act – proof that the people rule.

But even if Britain does embrace Brexit, does it have what it takes to self-govern? We can’t just attach ourself like a limpet to the EU’S bottom and follow it wherever it sails. We need to leave the Customs Union and have the power to pursue new trade deals with other nations. We need to invest properly for a no-deal outcome; we need to prepare the country for potential sacrifice. When you vote to leave a political-trading union that you’ve been embedded in for over 40 years, letting it write your laws and govern your trade, you don’t just walk away with a “hail-fellow-well-met”. It’s a rupture, possibly traumatic. It will only be worth the pain if our people are left with the tools necessary to build the future they want.

The direction of policy throughout the West over the past few decades has been anti-nation state, anti-democratic. Sometimes this is appropriate: a problem like global warming requires a worldwide strategy. But too often, national politicians have ceded their own powers in the hope that the wealth and opportunities created by so doing will outweigh the loss of sovereignty.

Freedom of movement is the classic example: yes, identity is eroded, along with a little security and a few well-paid jobs, but you do win the right to travel in search of work and gain a massive pool of labour that makes the goods on your shelves cheaper. In a similar vein, we have deferred to European solidarity, while betting everything on free trade, globalisation and even privatisation, in the hope that trans-national government and big business will make our lives a little richer (which they probably have). We have tried to strip the nation state down to its bare essentials, preaching liberal virtue while at the same time rejecting the language and instruments of democratic, moral responsibility. No wonder the British state constantly seems unfit for purpose, or our political class looks small and silly. Citizens of nowhere get the weak and woolly governments they deserve.

Well, March 29 is a chance to reverse this tide of history. If we pull off a proper Brexit, we will be in charge again, and already you can see the challenges ahead: immigration, ageing, homelessness, education, health, welfare reform. There are socialist solutions, there are conservative solutions, and while I have my own preference I am happy to live with the decisions taken by my fellow countrymen on the basis that nation is family and what makes a family work is respect and, yes, love. Let 2019 be recognised as the year that Britain woke up from a long slumber, and defined itself not by bread and circuses, or meaningless metrics of growth, but by the transformation of the democratic will into a genuine effort to build a new Jerusalem.