The slow death of “Brexit”
By Pete North - March 2, 2021
A new survey has discovered feelings are no longer running high over the wisdom of Brexit, with only one-quarter of people saying they mainly defined themselves politically as a Remainer (13 per cent) or a Leaver (12 per cent). Instead, the public is reverting to traditional loyalties, with 53 per cent saying they identified with a political party, while 21 per cent said they did not identify with any particular party or cause.
It’s only natural that with our departure signed, sealed and delivered, things would move on. The Brexit wars are over. The conscripts are demobbed and return to the fields and factories, leaving only a legacy standing army on each side.
This, though, is no reversion to the norm. The parties themselves have become very different animals thanks to Brexit. Labour can no longer credibly call itself the party of the working class. Wider Brexit divisions are here to stay and we certainly haven’t seen the last of the Brexit bickering. Leaving the EU has not resolved the disputes. The labels may fade but the conflict lives on.
From here, remainers have a vested interest in clinging on to Brexit divisions because pretty much all Brexit news is going to be bad news. Every new report is vindication fodder to broadcast to those still listening. It’s their strongest card.
Meanwhile the Brexit brigade is busy with the war on woke and spinning alternative Covid narratives. The culture war right has lost interest in Brexit – like I always said they would, not least because they were never that interested in it to begin with. For the Brexit tribe, our departure from the EU is just an adjunct to a wider war on the forces of progressivism – be it open borders, Net Zero, and anything else that fits under the globalist tag.
Essentially, the same trench warfare exists, only Brexit is no longer a focal point. The die-hard brexiters staying behind to do the mopping up are largely concerning themselves with the Northern Ireland Protocol, which won’t be solved any time soon, but is massively politically useful to both sides to keep picking at the scab.
In the meantime, the remainers will gleefully seize upon any morsel of news that puts Brexit in a bad light, and though they have a captive audience on Twitter, they themselves are turning people off. There’s being Brexit critical and then there’s the sort of naked high society Anglophobia that ultimately drives FBPE, and always has. For the legacy remainer tribe, this is barely anything to do with Brexit or even EU membership. I’m starting to think their interest in the EU was only ever a flag of convenience.
In that respect, the primary right/left animosity behind the Brexit wars has not gone away. Whatever the Brexit news, the Brexiteers won’t care. Remainers will work themselves up into a lather but they’ll mainly be talking to themselves. There’s nothing to be done with it. There’s no vehicle for them. There’s no single issue party that can stand in Euro-elections, and there’s no national party that can touch it.
For Labour to regain any ground it has to somehow reconnect with working class voters, and that means burying its disapproval of Brexit. More to the point, there are few Labour MPs who can speak on it with any credibility. Just about every MP I catch whining about the consequences of leaving the single market voted against remaining in the EEA in the indicative votes. Meanwhile, the more they obsess, the more objectionable they become.
More problematic for them is the way in which they overplayed their hand. They sexed up the consequences of Brexit to the point where they were expecting immediate food and medicine shortages and price hikes, and though there is indeed a major economic contraction in play, it just isn’t grabbing the headlines the way they wanted it to. The bad news will come in dribs and drabs, and will be conflated with, or eclipsed by Covid. One almost feels sorry for them.
Another factor now in play is the sheer boredom of it all. Public morale is collapsing as lockdown fatigue sets in and nobody is in the mood to bicker over arcane trading rules. The subject is dull at the best of times. People generally prefer clear cut issues which is partly why the culture wars are self-sustaining. The war on woke is something everyone can participate in.
Though Brexit is a done deal and the issue is no longer a flashpoint, the ideological/class divisions remain roughly the same. There is only a lull in hostilities. We’re a long way from an election, it’s all been said, nobody’s listening, and for whatever’s going wrong, there’s not a great deal anyone can or will do anything about.
The reversion to the norm, though, is the one thing that unites us. Our interest in the EU as an entity is on the wane, and the debates of technical substance are no longer fashionable and Brexit’s self-appointed experts are scrabbling for a fading limelight. When the next big kick off happens, it won’t be over tariffs or food export rules. There is a running sore that won’t be put to bed until it’s out in the open.
In this, we can expect to see more upstart parties eating into the Tory base. Remainers wish the Tories were the hard right fascist coup they’ve been railing against but they know damn well it isn’t. And Brexiteers know damn well it isn’t a conservative party either. Immigration and asylum is still a concern, while wokeists have captured just about every arm of the state and the Tories do nothing. The Tories have never looked more Blairite.
Once suspects this temporary charm offensive is to keep Scotland from going its own way, and with the SNP currently at war with itself, the danger may pass, but England’s class dispute won’t stay on the backburner. Brexiteers thought they were getting a conservative government with Boris Johnson, but now the penny has dropped. Johnson cannot depend on his Brexiteer base at the next election. Brexit was good but it wasn’t enough. Brexiteers are not done yet.