I voted Remain last year. That was my democratic right. The fact that 52% voted to Leave does not change my right to hold my opinion. I was and am entitled to disagree with those who, in my opinion, committed a profound error of judgement. Despite what many in the Leave camp claim, that's how democracy works. Differing opinions are not only necessary but have to be encouraged for it to thrive. Which means that those who voted Remain now have not just a right but an absolute duty not to acquiesce in Brexit, but to hold those who both wanted it and now have to deliver it to account for what they're doing.
Saying that it's important to remember how constructive opposition (which is the only sort that effects change) works. There are, in essence, three stages.
The first task is to establish what will change. Once Theresa May triggers Brexit the task is to ask ‘what will be different?' Right now we know that we will leave the EU, single market and EEA, plus Euratom and a few other agencies. We also know many EU citizens may have to, or will want to, leave the country. Beyond that in truth we do not know a lot. There is a massive job to do in finding out what is going to happen, which we all need to know.
Second, the job is to ask why these changes will be for the better. We don't have to justify asking: despite many claims made what we had with the EU worked. It was certainly imperfect, as I said, often. But imperfect systems can still work. And if they're changed the onus is on those promoting the alternative to justify them. There's another massive job to do in holding the Brexiteers to account in this way, whether they like it or not (and they won't, because it's not clear they have any answees).
Third, the failure of the Brexiteers has to be anticipated. That's what opposition requires. Of course this may be misplaced activity. It is just possible Marie le Pen will collapse the EU and Brexit will take on a totally different complexion. It's also just possible that I and many others are wrong and Brexit will really work as Boris Johnson imagined. If it does thinking about alternatives will be wasted effort. So be it, but it's always politically reckless not to plan the alternative and when failure is as likely as seems to be the case with Brexit it would be irresponsible not to think about what comes next. When the official Opposition has already abandoned that task it just so happens it falls to others to do so. And we can't rely on the SNP, whose alternative is not universally available.
My point then is this: Nothing requires a Remainer to now cooperate with Brexit. And as the day when the Brexit reality gets ever nearer the task of opposition becomes ever more important. I intend to be a part of it.
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I have yet to hear a coherent argument for leaving the EU. If I was to try to make one it would be a justification for dropping labour and environmental protections and social security cover as a means of creating a country better positioned to compete directly with emerging economies. At least that has a logic, however cruel and harmful, but most of what we have had have been emotive arguments. So, for a country with a large trade deficit, high levels of total debt, inflated asset prices, relatively low productivity, wages and business investment and an ageing population, what is the alternative? Fracking might buy a bit of time, but without a wind change the country faces the prospect of entering a downward spiral, with a credit crisis to boot.
Labour should be developing that alternative. Frankly I don’t think they or anyone else has a clue. If the transition to a higher wage/higher tax economy was started years ago, while we had North Sea oil, we would not be where we are today,but it takes years of investment in people, infrastructure, institutions and transformative projects to bring an economy like the UK into a condition where it serves itself and the world well.
So maybe remainers without an alternative need to keep quiet, all the more to blame the Brexiteers for the misery their road entails.
As a matter of principle, I have stopped buying things from local businesses that voted Brexit. My hairdresser has changed and a number of small minor but principled actions. You may see this as petty, but Theresa May has also put advertisements out asking for people to sign up to Brexit. As a management consultant, this excludes me from fee earning so I must respond in kind.
Well done! I wish I could stop doing anything with any one who voted Brexit but it is impossible, I just hope that most of them are noticing now the big mistake they did just for not taking this matter seriously before voting. Too late I know but if we remainers unite and fight together we might be able to put Britain back in the EU again. Very good article, well said.
Well done Peter. I think you would be perfectly entitled to refuse as clients anyone who voted Brexit. We should economically and socially ostracise such people. It should be the first step in fighting Brexit and the only hope we have of reuniting the country. As pointed out by others, the referendum was clearly a blip and we don’t need a re-run to tell us what we already know. That a majority of right thinking people now know they should have voted to remain.
I’ve boycotted bigger businesses like Wetherspoons for the same reason, and recently persuaded my wife not to buy a certain well known vacuum cleaner brand. As purchasing manager on a construction site I wanted to shun hiring JCB equipment, but had to back down due to price and quality.
Shunning small or local businesses is a bit harsh though.
Also boycotting Wetherspoons…
And .. bringing forward a lot of capital expenditure I’m responsible for as I expect sterling to go down further and much of the expenditure involves imported equipment.
I know I’m not alone in this and that the collective result is helping to convince the cartoon characters who have gone over the cliff edge that remainers were scaremongering.
And as a b’and b owner, I refuse to accept bookings from people I believe are brexiteers. We have to make a stand!
Be careful…..
I think a nationwide poll will show that the remainers are substantial majority, while the leavers are an entrenched minority, sustained by the cognitive dissonance. We need to fight to stay in – by whatever means!
PS My barber and I parted company sharpish.
Indeed currently penning a piece on this which will shortly appear on the new blog. The feeling that we have had a bloodless right wing totalitarian coup and are living in a single party state bent on reducing immigration whatever damage it causes the country won’t go away
I’m not sure it’s immigration that *really* motivates them Sean. It’s the dream of binning regulation, shrinking the state and creating an irreversibly stack it high sell it cheap desocialised economy. That’s the real dream.
What’s wrong with “shrinking the state”? what does the public sector do so much better than the private sector?
Education
Health
Law and Order
Defence
Social housing
Prisons
Roads
Rail
Tax
Social care
Environmental protection
Legislation
Universal pensions
A social safety net
I could go on….
You could go on but you haven’t explained WHY the state is better at these thing, You’ve just listed a lot of things the state does… Most of the things you’ve listed are things that the state doesn’t let other people do so we have no valid comparison.
Areas where private / public comparisons can be made are education and health – Exam results would say that you are wrong about education, as would waiting times for operations on the NHS v Private.
The state does these things because
A) No one else can
B) if they did for everyone then they would be a monopolist
C) If they did partially they would have to be regulated and we do not have a market – so so the state is better
D) If the state did not do them many would be deprived of access at all
In other words the state is better because it is universal an prevents monopolistic abuse
Debate over
A) Other people can clearly run prisons – HMP Altcourse, HMP Ashfield, etc We also have private roads in this country (M6 toll).
B) So there is only one Supermarket brand in the UK? Phone Provided? Airport owner? Service Station owner? etc… Also Power grids, water services etc are all privately maintained or owned…
C) So the state would not have the same rules applied as a private company? the state doesn’t need oversight?
D) Why would they? are you saying that “many” of the UK are not capable of looking after themselves?
I do agree that the state needs to provide certain roles (Law and order being one) but why does the state have to be the “mandatory” provider of bin collections at home? how does that help anyone?
A) Outsourced management contracts: there are no private prisons. Only the state ha the right to deny Liberty. And one toll road! Come on. Why no more?
B)Did I mention those things? As for water, etc, these are all state regulated monopolies
C) It’s called democracy: maybe you haven’t noticed. That’s real accountability
D) I am saying vast numbers of people need state support, yes. Wait until you have a child nearly die, a spouse have cancer, a parent need massive social services support to live independently and more. Then pretend you can do it all
And yes, having a single bin collector really does help. Look at US health care: twice as expensive as state paid UK care and worse outcomes
Now stop wasting my time. There is not a shred of evide3nce to support your case
No-one seems to be concerned that we have no definitive and formal assurance from the EU that the ‘Article 50 process’ (whatever that means) could be stopped/reversed unilaterally by the UK once invoked by the UK. Without such an assurance, the EU would have no reason to ‘be reasonable’ in Brexit negotiations. They could/would just ‘keep saying no’, and ‘dump’ the UK into ‘hard exit’ without recourse. Without such an assurance, all the discussions about the Commons having a ‘meaningful vote’ on the outcome of the negotiations would be just ‘hot air’! The EU could/would just just ‘keep saying no’.
The whole process would be equivalent to exchanging contracts on a property purchase before doing due diligence, and leaving the price to be set at a laterdate at the seller’s sole discretion! If due dilligence turns up some bad news, tough! If the seller sets the price was way higher than the prices discussed as ‘sighting shots’ prior to exchange, tough!
Why is this not being screamed from the rooftops?
BecAuse Labour is hopeless
The Labour party is not the only, or even the most effective, forum for ‘opposition’ (to the ‘Brexit process’).
The point I was trying to make was that the debate in the Commons and Lords (and the media) about the ‘Article 50 process’ should have focussed not on the detail, but on whether the ‘Article 50 process’ should or should not be invoked without the following pair of provisions in place:
1. We must have definitive and formal assurance FROM THE EU that the ‘Article 50 process’ could be stopped/reversed UNILATERALLY by the UK at any time before the ‘Brexit process’ actually takes effect.
2. We must have definitive and formal assurance FROM THE UK EXECUTIVE that the Commons (and Lords?) must have a BINDING VOTE to chose between the two options:
a. To accept the FINAL version of the ‘Brexit process’ ON OFFER BY THE EU.
b. To stop/reverse the ‘Article 50 process’.
Everything else could/should have been left to ‘business as usual’ during the Brexit negotiations.
As far as I am aware, the above argument was not presented by anyone in the Commons, Lords or media. THAT is what I was raging about! Maybe there is still time, but I doubt it will even ‘get an airing’.
I have just completed Wolfgang Streeck’s book ‘How will Capitalism End?’.
Streeck does not write like Richard whom I think is better at making complex ideas accessible. Richard writes as if you were there before him – it’s a great style.
Streeck’s style is more like a reflective ‘inner conversation’. You have to wade through some of the conceptual lenses he uses to get to the gold. But I would still recommend Streeck’s book – stick at it and you will be rewarded with quite possibly some of the best descriptive language from the Left of what has been happening to capitalism under the neo-liberal yolk.
Some of this stuff is not new, but Streeck in my view provides the ‘glue’ to make the potential counter narrative stick together. He refreshes some established critiques. Had I not been so busy since the New Year I would have been writing on my copy of the book highlighting key phrases and paragraphs of which there are many and reproducing them here. Weirdly, his concluding paragraphs are also a good place to start!!
Streeck mentions Europe (the EU) quite a lot and one is left with the overwhelming impression that the EU HAS to be reformed. His analysis and his conclusions are compelling and very well argued.
I voted to Remain because I felt it was the wrong time to come out of the EU as we had still not recovered from 2008 and all that.
But I was and still am very critical of what Streeck identifies as the neo-liberal streak in the EU infrastructure – read for example about his concept of the EU as a ‘consolidation state'(Chapter 4). I could actually have seen us turning our backs on the EU because of its neo-liberalism – not because of free movement and immigration. The former would have been my basis for telling them that we had had enough.
He also does his homework and it transpires that some of the big beasts in the EU set up have close working ties with the big beasts in the global financial sector – something I was unaware of and is too big an issue to ignore.
But of course the EU just reflects the embedded neo-liberalism in each of the Governments who make up the membership – a crucial thing to remember.
So why am I mentioning all of this? Well, if we are to work against BREXIT or even improve BREXIT we must also consider what might happen if it does not work and we are faced with thinking about some sort of post leave working agreement or going back into the EU eventually. And all I want is to go back into an EU that is better than it was before we left it!
In my view no Remainer or pro-EU citizen can avoid the challenge that the EU must be reformed – made more accountable, more responsive to the citizenry it governs. We must be assured that the EU is not an arm of global private finance.
I can assure any Remainer with conviction that no more hollow a victory could be imagined than that of staying in a Europe or going back into a Europe with the EU remaining unchanged. We must be thinking much further ahead than just staying or going back in.
The following is an excerpt from the penultimate chapter in Streeck’s book where he as been discussing the failure of varieties of capitalism that have been tried to deal with its self destructive tendencies (and failing time and time again. This sentence could also apply to how we deal with BREXIT and in addition validates Richard’s own work:
‘(Or)… would it not be much more constructive to be less constructive – to cease looking for better varieties of capitalism and instead begin seriously to think about alternatives to it?’.
Thanks.
@ Pilgrim Sight Return
This article from John Weeks in Social Europe nails a lot of what needs to be done:
https://www.socialeurope.eu/author/john-weeks/
Why thank you muchly Andrew!
Agree entirely, Richard, and William Keegan makes similarly excellent arguments in The Observer/Guardian online this morning – including pointing out that only 37% of the adult population of the UK voted leave – which puts the lie to the claim the vote was ‘overwhelming’.
This piece is quite long but also very good, and includes much on similar lines to topics you’ve blogged on. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/11/brexit-kibasi-ippr-article-50-referendum-remain-leave
What’s beyond dispute – indeed I heard it again only this week but sadly from a young person rather than from the mouth of an elderly Tory (all of whom only ever seem to remember the rosy things about the past and not the shite many people had to contend with) is that we’re heading back to a golden age of free trade. As we all know, and as Tom Kibasi nails head on, all such claim are utter nonsence and if we’re to survive after Brexit we need to stop thinking this bollocks and focus on developing entirely new, forward thinking, policies for a new age. Only then might it be possible to deal with the raft of disasters that will hit a post Brexit UK.
Ivan
I agree – both good articles
Richard
The Kibasi article in particular is very fresh, as it points out that the stereotypical Remain narrative – that everything was fine with the UK’s economy and social arrangements until those idiots voted Brexit – was never a reflection of either objective or felt reality for the majority.
I just wonder if a Scottish independence vote would cut through the nonsense about new golden ages. It would be much more fundamental a blow to the Anglo-British psyche, in my view.
I so agree “the onus is on those promoting the alternative to justify them.” But they never do – it is just ‘the people have spoken’ mantra.
If the old Labour Manifesto was the longest suicide note in history the referendum was the shortest – and not for a party but a country.
It is true we would probably be saved by Le Pen arriving in France but only so as to be presented with a different lot of serious problems. Whilst leaving the Euro would be good for France her next undertaking is to send the citizens of the Maghreb – and it seems their offspring – home. That is pretty much the Algerian War mark 2 so is unlikely to be good for France and risks considerable collateral damage in Europe and the Middle East.
For the UK, presuming Article 50 will be triggered, either Parliament or the electorate have to be allowed to approve the resulting settlement or lack of one. We may have voted to seek to get out of the frying pan, it doesn’t then follow that we have to jump into the fire regardless. Holding the politicians to account would involve saying nice try, but just not good enough.
If we remain in we could be soon in a position to bail out France, our off shore financial corporations could do quite well out of it.
Could you please explain what is an ‘an absolute duty not to acquiesce in Brexit’?
Are you suggesting some kind of civil disobedience until the minority vote prevails? How do we do that, even if it is a good idea to do so?
Do we deliberately flout future UK laws which are inconsistent with EU law? Do we demand the right to remain in other EU countries?
It’s called free speech and democratic opposition
There as nothing cryptic about it. That’s what opposition is in this country
Bit of a straw man, surely???
Nobody is using force to prevent anyone exercising their right of free speech.
Maybe there will be a political party springing up one day. UKIP but in reverse, arguing for readmission. Fair enough, go for it.
I have a very simple message for any MPs reading this.
You are quite rightly driven by a number of different factors when you exercise your vote in parliament, your desire to reflect the views of your constituents, you desire not to be pilloried in the press, your loyalty to your party, your career aspirations etc.
Rarely, very rarely, perhaps once in a generation, an issue arises that is simply too important for any of these parochial concerns and your duty to yourself, the constitution, the people of our country and the generations yet to come is to put these to one side and to do what you believe is right.
This is such an issue.
Please, look in a mirror, look deep into your own eyes and through those eyes into your heart and do what you believe is right. If you do that and vote accordingly, I will respect you. If you cast your vote for any other reason you are and will always remain beneath contempt.