You Lost – Get Over It

Ben Wildsmith

Last week’s 10-year anniversary of the Brexit referendum passed tellingly quietly.

Casting your mind back over the political wreckage of that decade, you might remember the unbound triumphalism of Brexiteers, or ‘separatists’ as RT Davies might have it, at the time.

The slightest qualm over the shape of things to come was derided as the anti-democratic carping of ‘Remoaners’. Support for leaving the EU, somehow, became fused with patriotism in many people’s minds.

So, you’d have been forgiven for expecting street parties and union jack bowler hats on this auspicious anniversary. Instead, it passed with barely a mention, particularly from those who were loudest in arguing for it in the first place.

Boris Johnson, who ‘got Brexit done’ didn’t abseil down Big Ben to a 24-gun salute. Jacob Rees-Mogg wasn’t dipped in ink and used to sign the trade deal with the USA that we were assured was coming our way. Michael Gove didn’t unveil a new disco routine in collaboration with Right Said Fred.

The Mount Rushmore of Brexit is looking somewhat depopulated as voter dissatisfaction has ended the careers of most who were once chiselled into it.

All that’s left is Nigel Farage and he didn’t want to talk about Brexit at all on the big day. Shrugging that the Tories had messed it up, the Reform supremo seemed keen to move interviews on to other subjects.

That is a good indicator of just how indefensible the implementation of Brexit has become, because the only other subject that interviewers had to hand was Farage’s £5 million bung from a Thailand-based crypto tycoon.

For what did he receive it? None of our business, apparently. Ok, what has he spent it on? Also none of our business. Eventually, he tetchily conceded that he’d been gifted the loot for a lifetime’s commitment to leaving the EU, which seconds before he’d admitted had worked out dreadfully.

The economic effects of Brexit are undeniable now, and Farage knows it, which is why he avoids the topic. We’re living with them for the foreseeable future, but they are only the beginning of the problems that the referendum has caused.

Consensus 

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that a binary plebiscite is the surest way to shatter consensus in society.

The axe fell on the 52% line, marooning half the country in irreconcilable distrust of the other. Terms like ‘betrayal’, ‘traitor’, and ‘quisling’ crawled out of the gutter into our mainstream political discourse and stayed there.

As Brexit itself has become harder to sell as a net positive, the language of division has been refocused on to issues that can be distorted to fit the existing divide.

Climate science, gender issues, welfare, and criminal justice have all been recast as having the potential to recapture the 52% coalition that Brexit inspired.

They are debated as all-or-nothing litmus tests of patriotic authenticity, as if nuance, admittedly a French word, were foreign to our culture.

The most emotive topic of all remains immigration. With economics a touchy subject for Brexiteers, we are now encouraged to believe that the referendum was a shadow play in which all the discredited economic forecasts advanced at the time were a polite veil behind which the British people could act out their suppressed rage over immigration policy.

Bot-farmed outrage

That proposition met reality yesterday in the Senedd which voted 52-38 to reject Reform UK’s motion to cancel the Nation of Sanctuary. The sound and fury of bot-farmed outrage was silenced by the cold numbers of a Siambr elected only weeks ago.

The application of referendum politics to Welsh parliamentary procedure simply doesn’t work. Under a system that mandates cooperation, opposing the totality of policies is futile.

If Dan Thomas’s intention is to act only as a powerless trumpet for his voting base, then the accumulation of defeats he will suffer can only serve to demoralise his party and cast them as unserious.

Ten years is a long time. Many voters have passed away since then, many others have come of age.

The politics that characterised the referendum has produced only rancour and stasis in the wider UK.

When considering yesterday’s vote, and those in recent by-elections, Reformites should wonder whether their approach has run its course; whether partisan posturing has simply passed out of style as an exhausted electorate craves unity.

If they can’t adapt to the populist moment passing, there is always their previous enthusiasm for democracy to inform their response.

You lost – get over it.