By Brexiteer standards I am not a Brexiteer. Many won't even have it that I even voted leave. I have spent the whole time pointing out the deficiencies in the campaign, the unrealistic ideas, the limitations of sovereignty and the complexity of trade outside the single market. This is probably the loneliest place in the whole debate since I get piss and bile from both sides if anyone even bothers to acknowledge I exist.
It's not the easiest job either. I recognised early on that a no deal Brexit would be a disaster but still very much want us to leave the EU. This against a backdrop of a core of vocal Brexiters who insisted that and Brexit that wasn't a no deal Brexit was no deal at all. I therefore have some sympathy for those MPs who did vote for May's deal on all occasions only to be ousted because they moved to prevent a no deal exit. We're not out of the woods yet but they may have saved us from an unmitigated disaster.
Course, if I'd inhabited one of the trenches on either the leave or remain side I'd have had an easier time of it. Had I dutifully retweeted ERG and Guido trash I would have conformed sufficiently to be accepted by Brexiters, but instead The Leave Alliance barely made a dent. Had I then decided to switch camps (something I will never do) the remainers would have brought me into the fold and given me all the media attention I could handle.
The one thing the media can't cope with is any position that falls between two extremes. This is the fundamental problem with politics being conducted through the medium of TV. It doesn't do detail or nuance. And now that we are finally leaving the EU I am essentially, indirectly, an accessory to whatever disaster the Tories unleash because I supported leave. I'm certainly not going to make any friends on either side. I can point out how crap it is, which will piss off the leavers while taking abuse from remainers. I can't win.
Of course, I could take the easy path. I could be so very easily rehabilitated by confining my posts to gloating about Brexit and sticking it to remainers. I would certainly get more hits. That's how it works. You give your audience what they want to read. They want to read how the other side are the bad guys and deserve what they're getting. They don't want to read about trade and customs. For as long as I'm not doing that, though, I will never be a true Brexiteer. So be it.
But, of course, the argument remains the same. The EU is still what it is. A supreme government over which ordinary people have no meaningful influence nor means with which to hold it to account. It increasingly confiscates powers and decisions are made behind closed doors or away from the media eye, and once something becomes law there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it, and our own government won't put up much of a fight. It's still a dysfunctional antidemocratic mess that can never realise its ambitions thus destined to stay a dysfunctional mess.
I'm not persuadable on this. In theory it could become democratic but in so doing it would need to be a formal state with an executive we can sack, but I don't want to ever see a United States of Europe, much less see the United Kingdom absorbed into it. Since we are never going to be on board with the direction of travel and since it won't allow meaningful reform we have no choice but to leave.
Now that we are leaving, though, we're in the shit. This is because Brexit is more complicated and difficult than any leaver dare admit, that won't yield many of the benefits that were promised. Sunlit uplands there are not. If there are, then Jacob Rees-Mogg may have been telling the truth for once when he said we won't see the benefits for fifty years.
There is also another reason we're in the shit. Those who wanted this have become so absorbed in fighting the cause that now they have it they don't know how to do anything else. The era of leavers and remainers may have ended in law, but in reality the two sides will be slinging mud at each other for a long while to come with Breixteers going into denial about any bad news and amplifying any morsel of good news as proof that Brexiteers were right about everything all along.
Then there's that other problem with Brexit. The people in charge of delivering it have no idea what they are doing or why. The big complaint about Theresa May was that she never really believed in Brexit. Perhaps that is true but she was a loyal servant of the country and set about it to the best of her limited abilities in near impossible circumstances. But I'm not talking about Theresa May. I speak of Boris Johnson. He never believed in Brexit and still doesn't.
This is a man who will pick his team according to what advances his own ambitions and appropriate just about any argument to that end whether its credible or not. He's not even the driving force of Brexit. He just wants to be in power for its own sake and will do whatever it takes to stay in power and that includes placating the hard right of the parliamentary party and the membership. The red lines are entirely set by the ERG and their cronies not least because Johnson has not put the slightest thought into what we actually want to achieve. He simply doesn't care.
That then makes Brexit infinitely interchangeable. For now the ERG may be calling the shots behind the scenes, but pretty soon business will start to voice its own concerns. For now the attitude may be "fuck business" but when they start to vote with their feet, and as public opinion starts to drift, Johnson will readily throw the ERG under the bus. We simply don't know what sort of dog's dinner of a Brexit we are getting in the long run because Johnson can turn on a dime.
Say what you like about Theresa May but her "citizens of nowhere" speech (though obviously written by someone else) was in tune with Theresa May's brand of C of E Toryism and if that chimed with her she probably had more of a grasp of what was happening socially than the media who lambasted her for it. Meanwhile Johnson presents as a Brexiter doing the bidding of the hard right Brexiteers but in all other aspects is continuity liberal consensus. There's no substance to him at all.
In many respects Johnson is a Tory father Christmas handing out Tory goodies to Tory people. The upper middle class Tory clan love him. He's given them Dominic Cummings to swing his axe around in the civil service - to pander to a decades old Tory mantra that we need sweeping reforms to the civil service. He's promising the world on a stick to all comers - that we'll take back control of our fishing and we won't be accepting any rules from Brussels. He's promising more plod, more cash to the NHS and a big spending spree in the north. He's ending austerity too! Allegedly.
And Tories are completely satisfied with this. We complain that politicians lie but we actually prefer it if our own tribal leaders lie to us. We won't let reality intrude. Everything will be alright on the night. But then that's just politics now. In normal circumstances politicians can lie without consequences because we don't normally do politics and policy of substance. Westminster rule is tinkering managerialism. Brexit, however, is a different ballgame entirely. It has very real and quantifiable consequences but nobody on the leave side seems to want to acknowledge it.
My worry is that the Guidophiles and the Telegraph will continue to paper over the cracks until it;s too late. Remainers often joke that for all Brexiteers are willing to engage in reality, we could just as easily remain in the EU, tell them we have left and they wouldn't even notice. There's some truth in that - especially if they're expecting Brexit to have no noticeable consequences at all.
But of course even the Telegraph et al cannot conceal reality forever. There has to be consequences. Even with a withdrawal agreement and an FTA, leaving a decades old sophisticated regulatory system in little under a year, can't not have serious implications for commerce and continuity of normal business. The Northern Ireland customs protocol alone tells you that much.
The battle over the last four years has not been one of whether we should leave the EU. That was already written. Psychologically we have never been in it. Ordinary people do not engage with the EU, they don't know about it, they don't read about it, and the only time they are invited to vote on anything in respect of it, they stick two fingers up to it. Such was always unsustainable and only now are we getting round to doing something about it. What we have witnessed, therefore, is a wide ranging battle over values where the EU is a remote embodiment of "progressive" values that the right is revolting against.
That battle has paid no regard to the real world of what the EU is in practical terms and how we interact with it when this culture war is over. Nobody normal is interested in the nuts and bolts of trade, it bores the media, and our politicians couldn't be less interested either. Their fullest engagement with it is the talking points fed to them by their electoral handlers.
In a lot of ways we deserve whatever hardships are throw at us. We will be caught off guard by events of the future because we showed no interest in shaping them. That can be said of leavers and remainers alike, with both sides so dedicated to annihilating the other, they never realised they were annihilating themselves.
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