I always meant to have some major epic planned for today’s post, but alas. What I have instead are some shorter, compartmentalised thoughts on the whole debacle.

Why Brexit?

There’s a fair bit I could talk about: The evolution of the European Communities to the European Union, worries of the EU overruling domestic decisions, immigration concerns, or decades of weird fearmongering and lies from the press.

I could talk about our role in Europe, centuries of foreign policy spent interested in Europe while being distinct from it. Leading to us not caring about a union we were part of, seeing the EU as an amorphous blob outside of us that laid down rules & restrictions.

But above everything else, Brexit was a short-sighted gamble by David Cameron. He promised a referendum to stop Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party from taking Conservative votes. He assumed that it’d be a walk in the park and that we’d never ever vote to leave. Thanks Dave.

How & why I voted

I voted remain¹. I didn’t vote remain because I was some sneering europhile, but because I couldn’t see us leaving the EU in a way where we’d better off. I also felt like Brussels cared more about our rights than Westminster.

That, and it just made sense from a trade standpoint. The closer your trading partners are, the less you spend on fuel, and the more & quicker you can trade. The whole free movement of goods & services between EU nations helps.

It was the first vote I was eligible to take part in, and ouch. Waking up the following morning was a kick in the teeth.

What was Leave?

When you look back at the leave campaigns², one thing becomes clear: there wasn’t a serious discussion on what leaving entailed. Sure you had your platitudes over taking control of our country back, but no-one knew what leaving would actually entail. Depending on who you talked to, leaving could’ve been any of the following:

• Leaving the EU but remaining part of the Customs Union
• Leaving the EU but remaining part of the Single Market
• Leaving the EU without a deal or arrangement at all

For all their talk about recovering power from EU bureaucrats and striking it free, the truth is that if we wanted to continue trading with the EU, we’d have to cede power in some way or another – much like how everyone does in any agreement.

But the Leave campaigns had an advantage: they could promise the world. Quite literally with all their talk about striking global free trade agreements. Without a solid idea of what leaving entailed, Britain’s prosperous future was in the eye of the beholder. They also could provide a future of what Britain would be like in the EU, namely overrun by Turkish immigrants.

If you want a quick laugh, check out Dan Hannan’s prediction for Britain after Brexit..

How do you champion the status quo?

While the Leave campaigners were able to project whatever they liked, the Remain camp had a problem: the status quo was boring. Even though many felt like remaining in the EU was the better idea, it’s not like there was any fervour for it.

What didn’t help was that Britain in the 2010s was falling into decline. We were still battered by the 2008 financial crisis, and David Cameron’s austerity politics were taking its toll on everyone.

Worse still, was that Cameron prominently attached himself to the remain campaign, which didn’t provide much hope – and if anything, fuelled leave sentiment as a protest against his domestic policy. Cameron even begged Barrack Obama to say we’d be ‘at the back of the queue’ for a trade deal if we left. People didn’t react to it well.

Not providing hope says it all. There were weak platitudes about how we’d be able to push for EU reforms while we’re a member, but they felt like hollow words. The discussion shifted to the dangers of leaving the EU and, despite the merit of those warnings, the leave campaign successfully handwaved it away as ‘Project Fear’.

Oh, and everything I said earlier about the EU seeming like an amorphous blob. Even though we were part of the EU, we never truly cared about it or understood its processes. As much as we were part of it, every discussion ever about the EU made it out to be a completely separate entity. You just can’t just undo decades of that.

Division, division, division

People online have this idea that the Brexit vote came down to simple divisions; left vs right, progressives vs conservatives, young vs old, etc. While the latter certainly has merit, it’s not the complete picture.

Brexit didn’t fall across the usual political fault lines. If anything, it fractured perpendicular to them: the left turned on the left, the right on the right, and the question of EU membership lead to some strange bedfellows:

• Old-school trade unionists would often be at arms with free market liberals. But their respective scepticism for the EU’s neoliberal policies and the want to slash red tape had them happily standing side by side.
• Business owners who relied on EU integration for seamless trade & supplies found themselves allied with young progressives who leaned on the EU to protect worker’s rights.

What made it truly ridiculous was the two main leaders were at odds with their parties: while David Cameron was doing all he could to promote remaining in the EU, a good chunk of the Conservatives were all for leaving – including close allies Michael Gove & Boris Johnson. On the other hand you had Jeremy Corbyn, a long-term eurosceptic, leading a Labour party who were clambering to remain.

Ultimately the final referendum result, ~52-48 favouring leave, proved how divisive the entire ordeal was. I don’t think you’d be able to find any other topic that could split the British public completely down the middle in any other way.

Press toxicity & hype on the margins

Division is great for the press, it drives engagement, clicks, purchases, etc. But something changed with Brexit, the rhetoric became too heated, too toxic, and the press couldn’t help themselves.

It was to the point where those favouring remain were often called saboteurs, traitors. A few months after the referendum the Daily Mail had a front page declaring judges enemies of the people. And during the referendum campaign itself, MP Jo Cox was murdered for her beliefs, including being in favour of remaining..

I wish I had something better to say, but something changed in the run up to the referendum, and I don’t think we as a society have properly healed from it. Just look at how easily we get worked up at everything now.

Another thing about the press and the referendum were how the results were treated. You don’t need a PhD to know that 52 is a larger number than 48, but to uproot ~40 years of transnational integrations on a ~4% vote margin felt… A little odd.

But if you looked at how the press responded, you’d think there was a monolithic mandate for ripping up everything with the EU. The half of the country not in favour of it were ignored afterwards³, with no consideration given to their perspectives. After all the decades of publishing euromyths and anti-EU stories, any victory had to be viciously clawed at.

There’s also a slight hypocrisy too. To quote Nigel Farage in a Mirror article:

In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way.

It’s funny and sad how this would be a minor setback if remain won the vote, but because leave edged over, it became the undeniable the unchangeable will of the people.

“We hold all the cards”

There were a lot of optimistic stock quotes barrelled about by prominent leave supporters, all of which were lies. Michael Gove’s ‘we hold all the cards’ claim fell flat on its face when it became apparent that we’d suffer more without a deal. David Davis’ claim about Brexit having no downsides was fluff. And we’re still waiting for the sunlit uplands Jacob Rees-Mogg promised us.

The sad thing is that leaving would always be a mess. You can bluster about how the EU needed us more than we needed them, but when push came to shove, not even Boris Johnson wanted us to leave without a deal. I still can’t believe the exceptionalism that went on display, and while I don’t want to talk this country down, it felt like it’d always hurt us more than it’d hurt the EU.

If we really had all the cards, why did we spend ~3 years dilly-dallying with negotiations and ending up with a deal that nobody was happy with? And despite everything, why did we repeatedly decide that it’d be catastrophic to leave without a deal?

‘We knew what we were voting for’

A common refrain I saw from leave supporters in the years after Brexit was ‘I knew what we were voting for’. While they had their reasons for voting to leave, it was the sort of sentence you couldn’t pry specifics out of. It felt more like a thought-terminating cliche than anything.

Again, I think the problem with leaving is that there was no serious discussion on what leaving entailed. Those who were sure on what we voted for seemed confused that we’d be leaving Euratom, had no idea that we were risking a border in Northern Ireland and ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, and many were outraged when [as a third country] we’d be unable to use the Galileo satellites for encrypted military purposes.

Anecdote: I worked with an older bloke who was pro-Brexit, and despite our differences our conversations on it all were pretty chill. When he found out that due to us being out of the EU that he’d need a vaccine certificate to take his dog to Spain… Well, I couldn’t resist the cheeky jab.

There was also the common phrase ‘You lost, get over it’. Another thought-terminating cliche. But as the tides turned and the complaints piled in about Brexit becoming a mess, ‘You won, get over it’ became a common retort. We all knew it wasn’t helping with the divisions between us all, but after constantly hearing it, can you blame those who wanted to mirror it back?

Change UK

This is out of the blue, but I have to mention this amazing anecdote. In 2019 a bunch of MPs from different parties formed a new group to try and reverse Brexit. They called themselves Change UK, and within 30 minutes they had a racism scandal.

They presented themselves as revolutionary. They were anything but. They were basic neoliberals who could only agree on reversing Brexit, nothing more. The folks at Change.org complained about their name, so they rebranded to “The Independent Group for Change”. Inspiring stuff.

When the 2019 European Parliament elections rolled around, they created a logo for themselves. It was rejected for having a hashtag. But their second logo would be the truly bland exceptional icon for them: Four horizontal black bars.

The kicker? They were too late to submit the logo for the European elections.

Throughout their time grandstanding at the anti-Brexit party, they had a deep feud with… The Liberal Democrats, the actual anti-Brexit party. You can’t make it up. In the end not even the hardcore remain folk could get behind them.

To make a long story short, they got nowhere. They all lost their seats in the 2019 General Election. To this day they only exist as a scant footnote in Brexit, and it was fun watching them crash and burn in slow motion.

Death of the Conservative Party

Silver lining to Brexit: it proved how unserious to govern the Conservatives were, and it practically killed the party (for the time being).

Despite promising he’d stay on as PM after the referendum, Cameron immediately resigned. Theresa May kickstarted the leaving procedure, called an election where she lost her majority, then failed to do anything with her term. Boris Johnson culled his MPs who were favourable to Europe and replaced them with clueless sycophants, then his scandals caught up to him. It left a vacuous party where Liz Truss happened, and Rishi Sunak had no idea how to pick up the pieces.

As of today, the Conservatives are lost, scrambling in the opposition as their voter base splits off to Farage’s Reform UK. It’d be funny, if not for how they left the country in a right state.

The present and the future

Let’s be real, most of us have moved on from Brexit.

The predominant feeling across the board is that it happened, it was a mess, and it could’ve gone a lot better. Those who voted remain don’t like it because it happened, and those who voted leave don’t like it because it was handled spectacularly poorly.

Do I think Brexit was a mistake? Yeah. Between not having a plan, and having the most self-serving bunch in charge of it, it was doomed from the get-go. For all the talk about ’taking back control’, it’s obvious that this country’s problems are more to do with how its governed day-to-day, rather than decisions made in Brussels.

We’re not particularly thriving outside of the EU, I guess at least we haven’t crashed & burned. God, I haven’t even mentioned its estimated effects on the economy.

It sucks really. Culturally we had a nice thing going on in the early 2010s. Despite us struggling with austerity, we made it big on the world stage through another British Invasion: the 2012 London Olympics, Doctor Who, Sherlock, One Direction, etc. And then Brexit happened and put an end to it. Shame.

Do I think that we’ll reverse Brexit? Despite the fact that ‘Bregret’ seems to be kicking in and that more people believe leaving was the wrong idea, I doubt we’ll rejoin any time soon. When we were in the EU, we had a cosy position where we enjoyed concessions not given to any other member. I doubt we’d be able to get that again.

Considering how much political deadlock was brought upon us because of Brexit, I don’t think anyone wants to reopen those old wounds and go through the burnout again, especially when we spent so much time fiercely arguing over it.

Maybe if in 20 years we could roll back the clock to 2015, we might go with it. But applying as a regular member? If we were desperate, maybe. Adopting the Euro? No chance in hell.