Brexit ‘liberation day’ is self-serving fantasy
In Cambodia it is January 7. In Kuwait, February 26. In the United States it is March 3, it is May 8 in the Czech Republic and July 4 in Rwanda. In Turkey it is celebrated on August 30 and the following day by the Lithuanians. In Bangladesh it is December 16. National liberation day in these nations commemorates, respectively, the defeat of the murderous Khmer Rouge, the expulsion of Iraq, the emancipation of slaves in Charlottesville, Virginia, liberation from Nazi Germany, the deposing of a genocidal tyrant, the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the withdrawal of the Russian army after half a century of occupation and the creation of a brand new nation out of Pakistan. None of these days of national liberation describe the voluntary departure of a sovereign democracy from a voluntary alignment of its rules regarding trade in goods and services.
Much the worst thing about the politicians and pundits who led the charge for Brexit is how susceptible they are to rank stupidity. I am not saying there are no reasons at all to wish to the leave the European Union; I am merely saying that the desire to be free is not one of them. The implication, that Britain has been in servitude since 1973, would be offensive to those who have endured genuine suffering if it were not so manifestly absurd. Brexit is a petty local dispute by comparison. It does not warrant this pathetic borrowed grandeur. Yet, as the prominent Brexit cheerleaders unfurl their flags and banners for their ode to joy at our departure, this is the rhetorical idiocy of the time.
The ascent into melodramatic rhetoric is always a tip-off that the speaker has nothing to say. The reason that Brexit has to be described as freedom from oppression is that it is hard to know what else it is, if it is not that. A notable feature of the sorry Brexit saga has been the vastly diminished expectations of even those pressing for departure. Whereas, in a lost and more innocent age in late 2016, Daniel Hannan could write his comic masterpiece, What Next, in which he looked forward to the day that Britain would emerge blinking into the light of a new dawn, to the sound of a nearby gurgling brook. After Mrs May’s downbeat tenure and Mr Johnson’s bluster the tone had changed completely. For a long while now the argument has been no more elevated than we have started so we had better finish. For all Mr Johnson’s fabled optimism it is hard, from what he says, to glean why we are doing this at all.
The reason for the silence where the good, persuasive reasons should be is that Brexit is not a rational project. I do not mean it is therefore irrational. I mean that before it is rational and mathematical it is psychological and emotional. By what measure will Brexit be judged a success or a failure, in the course of time, by its advocates? A higher trend rate of growth? A better performance than the average of the European economies? Regional growth led by inventive regulation that would have been stifled by the EU? It will be none of these things because Brexit was never an economic project for the Goves and Johnsons and Farages. It was, at the risk of emptying the term of meaning, a philosophical project. It was a liberation movement and there lies the secret of its success. Brexit is proof of what Aristotle pointed out in The Art of Rhetoric, that an appeal to the emotions trumps an appeal to the mind.
The description of Brexit as a liberation from the European yoke is also a proof against failure. If Brexit is defined by detaching British law from Europe then success is guaranteed merely by enacting departure. At 11pm this evening success will arrive. Yesterday we were in bondage; today we are free and freedom is its own reward. Brexit, conceived in this way, cannot fail which makes it obvious the argument is rigged. This is obvious self-serving rubbish which Messrs Gove and Johnson are bright enough to understand. The honest thing for them to do would to be set themselves some targets for what Brexit will achieve. How do they think they will be proved right, in the fullness of time? Brexit allows us to diverge from Europe but to what end and to what beneficial consequence we still, remarkably, have no idea.
A calm disposition has been wanting throughout the whole process of Brexit and this applies in equal measure to the Remain side. Sir Ivan Rogers wisely advised that Brexit was a process rather than an event, yet the Remain side has throughout argued as if Brexit were not only an event but an obviously and instantly catastrophic one. Every day that the catastrophe failed to arrive the credibility of the witnesses was eroded a little further. The metaphor of the “cliff-edge” of Brexit was hopelessly ill-conceived. Brexit is not a rapid descent to an almost inevitably fatal collision. It is not, in diplomatic terms, Suez, which was seen as a humiliation by almost everyone at once. And it is not, in material terms, Black Wednesday or the 2008 financial crash. Brexit will be more like Hemingway’s description from The Sun Also Rises of how you go bust: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly”. The Remain arguments all implied that Brexit was singular and exciting. In fact Brexit contains dreary multitudes. It is plural and boring.
And it is set to go on being both. After a day of liberation everything changes. People notice the absence of an unwelcome force. In the course of their everyday lives most people are not going to notice Brexit either way. They will have a blue passport and a coin and Brexit will retreat back to the list of questions to which the British public pay little attention even though, as the trade talks unfold, there is a lot more Brexit to come.
Meanwhile, in public there will be a verdict to be settled on whether the decision was the correct one and this too is destined never to happen. There are no agreed terms on which this verdict can be reached. The reasons of the material Remainers and the emotional Brexiteers are incommensurate. Even if Britain suffers a recession there will be a slowdown in Chinese and Indian economic activity to blame it on, or protectionism from Donald Trump, or some other exogenous factor. This is not an argument that anyone is going to win, except by the sheer force of having more numbers in a referendum and more people in parliament.
Brexit has been a pathetic spectacle which has encouraged and stoked the worst in British politics. It will be a pleasure to see the back of it. That much, at least, is a trivial kind of liberation.