Brexit: the bigger picture
By Pete North - October 25, 2021
One thing that I grow weary of in politics is the parliamentary parlour games. Usually it’s hoaxy bad faith opposition amendments so they can claim Tory MPs voted to put arsenic in Corn Flakes or some other such nonsense. Be it right to protest, NHS privatisation through trade deals, food standards, sewage discharge, nurses pay, Labour seek to mislead the public debate to essentially paint the Tories are evil cartoon villains.
It can be said with plentiful evidence that the Tories are grotesquely incompetent and there are plenty of things that they’re doing that an effective opposition could and should take issue with. Instead they seek to scam people into believing all kinds of dangerous nonsense. Over the last day I’ve seen leftist activists drawing up lists of Tory MPs who voted pump raw sewage into rivers. The tone is threatening. It builds into the “Tory scum” narrative.
This is one of the reasons the left continues to lose. My opinion of this government could not possibly sink any lower but whenever the left pulls this stunt, the balance of sympathy falls to the Tories, where I am reminded that the alternative to the Tories is still a magnitude worse (though the gap is closing by the day).
Where it becomes extremely irritating is when these such votes are used by remainers as evidence that Brexit is all the demonic things they always said it was. You get vessels like Bylines, with Dr Mike Galsworthy pushing the narratives that Brexit means rivers choked with raw sewage when, like every single one of these issues, we find that it’s far more nuanced. Like the haulage issue it’s influenced by decades of maladministration, Covid and systemic problems with supply chains. Brexit might have been all it took to push it over the edge but then you have to ask why so much has been living on borrowed time and teetering on the brink for so long.
What’s particularly grating is the hypocrisy in that Bylines sets itself up as an honest broker yet spins toxic remainer narratives to its excitable and quite deranged following of FBPE fanatics – the very same ones who caution us about language, civility and truth in politics. I can imagine in the not too distant future that MPs will be harassed by mobs who believe what they’re spinning, yet they set themselves apart from the extremist end of the “antivaxx” protesters.
Ordinarily I would probably dig into the sewage discharge issue in that these things are often quite interesting, but the moment I saw that all the noise was on the back of an amendment, I lost all interest in the issue. It tells me all I need to know. Lefty remainers are lying. As much as it does them no favours, this is precisely why I’ve started to tune out of Brexit politics. If I want to know what is happening and why, the mainstream of Brexit discourse is best avoided entirely.
As to these tedious disputes about what is an isn’t caused by Brexit, I’m increasingly not interested at all. We are out of the EU and we shall have to deal with problems on our own terms in our own time and in our own way – which is largely the point of Brexit, and we can now re-regulate and respond as problems arise. The urgency itself brings about much needed reform. In particular the government can no longer afford to sit on its hands as regards to the long growing crisis on the haulage sector.
What matters to me now is the bigger picture, where we find that Brexit has made no real difference. That is where Brexit is failing. Though the mandate for Brexit in the most sterile interpretation was merely to leave the EU, it carries with it certain peripheral sentiments such as controlling immigration and addressing the political imbalances in the country. In respect of that, the Tories have learned nothing. They are set to inflict electric vehicles and heat pumps on us without consultation or consent, and there’s nothing very much voters can do to stop them. We have government by diktat – as though we never left the EU.
That pretty much reinforces what we said from the outset; that EU membership was a symptom of a far greater problem largely to do with the complete absence of political power over our politicians. We have yet to address the fact that representative democracy in the Westminster model simply isn’t democracy. We may have forced them to take powers back from Brussels but there is nothing to stop MPs giving them away again, and though we left the EU, our politicians are more concerned with implementing global agendas, quotas and targets than addressing the everyday concerns of the pubic. Government doesn’t answer to us.
Then, as we so often remarked, that the EU was only part of the problem. As the daily invasion of migrant boats shows, our politicians are hamstrung, politically unable and unwilling to exercise essential sovereignty as they bump into a galaxy of international treaties and conventions. The politicians tell us they will stop the boats and send them back, yet we can see from the hard work of citizen journalists that the reception facilities are being upgraded and made permanent in anticipation of a perpetual influx. Only Ukip is willing to withdraw from the various global accords.
Meanwhile, when it comes to COP26 and Net Zero, the Westminster parties are agreed they will inflict whatever is decided on us irrespective of the practical improbability and the unfathomable costs. Their reality does not intersect with ours. They will do untold damage to our living standards and the economy and we won’t get a meaningful vote in any general election.
Ultimately Brexit wasn’t going to resolve the intellectual and moral collapse of UK politics, and for what good it does, it has come far too late. With our votes rendered meaningless and our voices increasingly silenced we are looking as an exponential erosion of the civil contract, already evidenced by a collapse of law and order, as our political class retreats from reality. The consequences of that are far graver than Waitrose running out of iceberg lettuce or a shortage of Christmas turkeys. The stakes are far higher.
As much as anything, there is a prevailing sense among Brexiteers that their vote, for the little it did mean, has effectively been neutralised by a Tory government that played a game of bait and switch. Though it’s hard to find sympathy with anyone who actually trusted the Tories, Brexit was supposed to be the turning point. Instead we find the same agendas are still in play and this supposedly conservative government is continuity establishment on all but a handful of peripheral issues.
Brexiteers have now learned their lesson and Johnson is by no means guaranteed a working majority next go around. And that won’t be because of any fundamental improvement in Labour’s performance, rather a complete collapse of faith in our political process. I cannot say what the consequences will be, but we can say with certainty we are headed for an unhappy place with far graver fallout than Brexit.
