Brexiteers will remain united on one crucial aim
As our political establishment continues its meltdown, I find myself wondering how we ended up here. David Cameron’s decision to grant us a referendum didn’t occur in a political vacuum. Tony Blair felt the need to promise in 2004 that a referendum would be held on the ratification of the European Constitution Treaty, while Nick Clegg called for an “in-out” vote on our EU membership in 2008. All political parties have, at one time or another, questioned whether to cede power to Brussels or, instead, to protect British sovereignty.
And they were responding to public pressure. Polls by Lord Ashcroft from June 2016 discovered that Tory and Labour Leave voters were united in stating that “the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was ‘the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’.” It may be true Brexiteers are a disparate group of people, who have different priorities on trade and immigration policies.
But they are ultimately united on the point of selfdetermination. Whether the UK outside the EU becomes a low-tax, low regulation economy or a socialist utopia should be decided by Westminster, not Brussels or Strasbourg.
A conversation I had last week with someone I would normally find on my side of the political divide – an economic and social liberal, if you like labels
– but who disagrees with me profoundly on Brexit, went along the following lines. Had I considered what would happen to the UK if Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell won the keys to No 10 and we didn’t have the protection of the EU to stop them from implementing their “Marxist agenda”?
I must admit, the thought isn’t a comfortable one,
but as a democrat it is not only ideologically incompatible for me to look to a supranational power to prevent a fairly elected government from carrying out its manifesto pledges such as, for example, the renationalisation of the railways. It is also dangerously short-sighted to surrender the ability to determine national policies to an opaque monster of a bureaucracy in the blind hope that it will always yield the “right decision” for every member state, sometimes with competing and conflicting interests.
Similarly, those who appear to be convinced that remaining in the EU would somehow safeguard workers’ rights forever are deluding themselves. The only certain path to ensuring a real, lasting culture change, ensuring workers’ protection, would be by convincing your fellow citizens of the benefits of such a course, so that any political party which fails to commit to those rights in their manifesto essentially becomes unelectable.
It isn’t easy, but a true democracy is a marketplace of competing ideas.
Whether you’re a free marketeer or an interventionist, set up your stall and convince your fellow citizens to vote for your ideology. If you fail to do that and look to a supranational organisation to implement it from the top down instead, it will only create resentment.
Shaping a post-Brexit Britain is the next stage of the battle. For now, disparate we may be, but we Brexiteers are united on the quest for winning back our sovereignty. Don’t write us off yet. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
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The irreconcilable Remainers must think that all their birthdays have come at once. Here at last is the beginning of the end that so many of us predicted. Donald Tusk has uttered the words that might yet deliver the country from what he would probably call a special place in hell.
A year’s extension! The first step on to an endless road to nowhere – or rather on to a road that turns round and doubles back on itself! A year in which to exhaust all the energy of the Brexit movement! A delay that can happily go on forever! And best of all, the Brexiteers themselves will carry the blame for their own defeat. They were too purist, too ideologically driven, too intransigent, blah-blahblah. They overplayed their hand and in the end they lost the game.
Oh wait. Maybe that isn’t how it will go at all. Perhaps there is an alternative ending to this story. If the Brexiteers – by which I mean all of them, moderates as well as purists – are not so deranged by now that they cannot put one foot in front of the other, this could be the moment when it all begins to come right.
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