Brexit Britain will flourish if both sides pull together
Two years on, Leavers shouldn’t crow over victory in the EU referendum – they should work with sensible Remainers
Istill remember the sunrise: jagged, yellow and cheerful after long days of rain. Everything was full of promise on the morning of June 24 2016. Hectored and lectured by their leaders, the British people had displayed their habitual bloodymindedness and voted to become independent again.
Exactly two years later, MPs and peers have formally voted to restore that independence, reversing the 1972 European Communities Act that gave primacy to European over British law. We Eurosceptics have at last secured the thing we wanted: national sovereignty. Now is not a time to crow, carp or complain. We need to reach out to sensible Remainers and work with them to make Brexit orderly and amicable.
To put it as mildly as possible, that has not been happening over the past two years. The Kulturkampf that followed the referendum was worse than anything we experienced during the campaign. Before polling day, the two sides had had relatively civil disagreements about trade, defence, budget contributions and so on. But when the results came in, a frenzy seemed to seize the nation. A mob attacked Boris Johnson at home, banging on his car as he drove away. Howling demonstrators surrounded Parliament. Leavers began to use unconscionable language: “sabotage”, “traitors”, “enemies of the people”. Remainers disseminated false stories about racist incidents, creating precisely the hostile atmosphere they were complaining about.
“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as a cause for withdrawing from a friend,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. Amen to that. Yet it has happened a great deal over the past two years, the withdrawals often initiated by people who like to think of themselves as models of broadmindedness. There is little purpose now in asking, like a teacher in a playground, who started it.
Part of the problem, paradoxically, was that the government was run by people who had campaigned to stay in the EU. The tone struck by Theresa May immediately after the vote was coloured by her determination to prove that she really was committed to delivering the result. But it repelled many Remainers, who took her phrase “citizen of nowhere” as a personal insult, and who couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t immediately guarantee the rights of EU nationals already in the UK – something all Leave campaigners had promised before the poll.
Leavers, for their part, were furious to see pro-EU politicians, who had solemnly agreed to accept the result, working to overturn it. Perceiving that the fact, rather than the terms, of Brexit was in doubt, they closed ranks, calling their opponents anti-British. A captious nation divided against itself. Every dot and comma of policy was contested disproportionately, like some desolate strip of mud between dreary trench lines.
Eurocrats looked on in joyful disbelief. All they had to do was keep saying “no”. Whenever Britain offered friendly collaboration – on policing, intelligence, satellites, you name it – Michel Barnier would dismiss it out of hand. You’d think that his intransigence would have upset the people claiming to want close co-operation with the EU. But, locked in their pre-referendum mindsets, they couldn’t bring themselves to criticise Brussels. So each Barnier “non”– and they were delivered with increasingly flagrant contempt – was bizarrely cheered by British Europhiles, or at least seized on as another club with which to whack the Government.
Any lingering concerns in Brussels about having a competitive neighbour on their doorstep evaporated. Britain, incredibly, was manoeuvring itself into a position of voluntary servitude, subject to EU rules with no vote, no voice and no veto. Eurocrats couldn’t believe their luck. As Chris Kendall, a British diplomat working in the European Commission put it, “We want to you to fail, hard. And if you do somehow pull this off, do not expect us to roll over and accept it. We won’t.”
The way to “pull this off ”, of course, is to get behind a reasonable position and then stick to it. The Commons vote last week gives us one more chance to pull together. Although it has been reported as preventing fringe Remainers from blocking an eventual deal, it also prevents fringe Leavers from doing so.
Both sides, in short, have cause to compromise. Leavers should be pragmatic about a measure of regulatory alignment with a near neighbour, about phasing and implementation, about participation in EU programmes (paying our share, obviously), and about the ability of EU nationals to work or study in the UK, albeit without subsidies from our taxpayers.
Remainers, for their part, must be prepared, viscerally rather than just verbally, to walk away if the EU insists on offering Carthaginian terms – because otherwise, that is precisely what it will do.
Snarled in our two-year quarrel, we have given pitifully scant thought to how to prosper after Brexit. We should be cutting taxes, not raising them. We should be making takeovers easier, not harder. We should be repealing regulations, not fussing about gender quotas and workers on company boards. But these discussions have not even begun.
We have a recurrent national vice. We tend to leave things until almost too late. We arguably did so with Brexit itself: it would have been far easier to disentangle ourselves from the EU when the Maastricht treaty was passed in the early Nineties; had we left it another decade, the opportunity might have passed altogether. We are doing so again over the disengagement process.
It’s time to raise our eyes. There is a whole world out there. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @ DanielJHannan;
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion