However sunny your disposition, it wears you down, 10 straight years of being asked to accept facts about Brexit that aren’t true: 52% as an “overwhelming majority”; a flaky, half-baked referendum as the endpoint of purest democracy; the severance of a complicated trading and geopolitical relationship that took decades to build as the dawn of a new prosperity. All such nonsense, all delivered with such conviction, by such a wide variety of sources, many of them self-describing as impartial, that in the end you just surrender to it. None of it magically becomes true, don’t be silly.
It’s more that you come to accept that everyone else talks nonsense now. Nobody get too excited – just because Andy Burnham has reopened a debate that upside-down world said couldn’t be reopened, it doesn’t mean the UK is on the brink of coming to its senses. I have no idea what’s going to happen; all I can say for certain is that times have changed more than I realised.
The pro-Brexit crew have updated their arguments. They no longer say leaving the EU will bring untold riches, and they never even namecheck all the control we were meant to have taken back. They rarely mention any immigration benefits because that unwieldy issue now has a life of its own – or, to put that more simply, it turns out that in or out of the European Union, we can still fight about our borders like rats in a sack.
Instead, they have a new narrative, and these are its contours. Remain sympathisers are apparently very divided. Some of us want freedom of movement, especially for young people, while others of us just want our trading relationships rebuilt with our nearest gigantic market.
Different remainers again wish for greater collaboration on security and defence with nations who share our values. Those who can be trusted, for example, to oppose Vladimir Putin and his war of aggression, rather than opposing him on a Tuesday and calling him a great guy by Thursday. Some of us just miss the days when we made coherent, continent-wide decisions about the climate emergency.
Given that degrees of global heating observe no nationality and pick no favourites, given that people who believe in scientific evidence tend to get on quite well together, however stark that evidence is, it would be quite relaxing to club together, no? All these different interest groups, I’ve heard it said by those who defend the status quo, can cooperate from a distance, but sooner or later, the remain coalition will fall apart. Here, I rediscover the certainty I thought I’d lost for ever in the post-2016 melee: there is absolutely no way will we fall apart.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
