The philosophical argument for Brexit has not changed in all the years we have been in the EU. Many of the concerns articulated in the 1975 campaign have turned out to be entirely valid. For me the point that the EU is an anti-democratic sovereignty harvester is unarguable. The democratic principle underscoring the leave movement is timeless. In a world of globalisation where the EU is continually redefining the scope and breadth of trade, affording itself power over ever more competences without even a debate, it becomes especially relevant. All our laws are becoming bartering chips.
Remainers tend to view the EU as a benign entity upholding the values of Western progressive liberalism. It's all nonsense of course. The nations of Europe are still as fractious and combative as ever they were. The EU is just a continental scale virtue signal on the part of its political elites. The reason the EU is suffering from "populist" revolts on all sides is because the values it projects are not the values of the people.
Meanwhile, at the business end, the EU is a gigantic nexus of corporate lobbying so as to rig the rules in their favour. Our democracy is stolen from us one sliver at a time. This is the opaque side of the EU which is seldom ever discussed or debated not least because this inner workings are simply not reported much less understood. Any news I get is from specialist watchdogs. Rarely does it break into the mainstream. Only when there are major scandals do we get to hear about it - and that's really only the tip of the iceberg.
Irrespective of the intellectual foundation for Brexit, though, and how ever sound the principle, we still have to operate in the real world where regulatory horse trading is a fact of life and regulatory harmonisation is the WD40 of modern commerce. Consequently, though the question of why we should leave is easily argued, the question of how we leave is not.
Devising any exit strategy must take into account certain basic facts of life - namely that the EU is our nearest and largest single trading partner, it is a regulatory superpower and that isn't going to change any time soon. We therefore find that absolute adherence to principle is a seriously expensive business. It's one thing to say that economic concerns are secondary to the democratic principle - a point of view I happen to hold, but that is not to say that economic concerns are irrelevant.
Here we have to go right back to basics and ask what Brexit is about. It is the consensus view of leavers that the EU is a political project primarily concerned with political integration which uses trade and harmonisation as a means to that end. Continued membership involves the further transfer of political authority. This is more acute for Euro members who must now submit their budgets for approval by the unelected Commission. At the last definitive polling, Brits have said they want no part of this.
Here it is necessary to separate out the political from the economic. The UK needs an enhanced relationship with its largest and nearest partner. In this we need to respect that the EU will safeguard its own sovereignty and will not relax its third country controls compromising the integrity of its regulatory ecosystem for the sole benefit of the UK. Moreover it cannot show the UK greater preference under the WTO system. If, therefore, as the weaker side of the equation, the UK wants greater freedoms to sell goods in the EU market then we must submit to its terms.
To be strictly intellectually consistent with Brexit, to remove EU political authority from the UK, a bare bones FTA is really the only choice. That, though, is not sufficient for the UK to maintain the levels of trade it has grown to depend on. The only elegant solution here is Efta EEA since there is then a firewall between the UK and the ECJ. Here the UK could take up a leadership role within Efta and further develop the EEA to become a powerful non-EU bloc.
Any such vision is absent from this entire process. What we are seeing is a hamfisted piece of electoral triangulation, with a spent administration attempting to reconcile the needs of business while trying to appease the leave voting public. This results in a wholly inadequate agreement which pleases nobody and doesn't even protect our trade. Moreover, it is wildly inconsistent with Brexit if the aim was to remove the political authority of the EU. This is essentially the dead hand of managerialism - the form of government which has dominated for most of my adult life.
Somewhere along the line politics died a death. Vision and principle no longer get a look in. Our politics has been sanitised and reduced to the level of resource allocation. Gone is any sense of purpose. Our politics and our institutions no longer have a moral mission. Moreover, the UK is in the midst of an identity crisis struggling to define its place in the world.
The perhaps explains the rampant nostalgia in our politics. On the left we have Corbyn and McDonnell, both of whom fantasise about general strikes and workers pouring out of the factories to mount mass demonstrations - failing to note that the factories, mines and shipyards are no longer there.
This, though, is not limited to the left. The right also pines for days of yore with an almost religious devotion to the ghost of Thatcher. In many respects it is as though our entire politics when into stasis a the end of the Eighties and now we have voted to leave politics has stepped out of the cryochamber with a deep amnesia.
Though the nation may be divided, almost all of us now recognise that we need new ideas and a new politics - and the vessels we usually look to for political ideas are totally spent. This is as much to do with the culture of modern politics which is mainly conducted in London, mainly by politics professionals who have never spent a day in the real world and have never been north of Oxford.
This is especially problematic for the UK. We really did pick an inopportune time to go into a deep political slumber. Rather a lot has happened in the last twenty years which rewrites to book on most of what we know about trade, economics and the world in general. We have been to the brink of financial collapse, we have seen the mass adoption of internet, media has changed, work has changed and we have seen a massive expansion of global governance. Our politics isn't remotely equipped for these challenges.
Traditionally think tanks have taken up the role of policy and parties have their own favoured sources but our think tanks have now become little more than glorified lobbyists and propaganda bureaus. They are not intellectually equipped to produce policy, not least because the UK government has surrendered so many competences to Brussels that we have simply lost any domestic capability in these areas. Anybody with any capability goes to Brussels. London think tanks are for political wannabes and party hacks.
This is where the UK has been badly caught out. The right have been chomping at the bit to leave the EU for decades but really have no idea as to how that gets done or what to do when we've done it. They have attempted to fill in the blanks with free trade mantras but nothing that withstands any serious scrutiny. For all that the right have lambasted Corbyn for his political obsolescence, the right have nothing much original to say for themselves either.
Then there's the parliamentary system itself which is fundamentally broken. It lacks the information gathering processes and its committee system does not feed into policymaking at all. They serve as platforms for grandstanding politicians and vanity parades for persons of institutional prestige within the bubble. Essentially the politics we know is rotten. Brexit is the storm that blows down the tree that has rotted from the inside.
In many respect Britain is teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state. Certainly we are wealthy one with the intellectual resource to rebuild but things have been on autopilot for so long that we no longer have a functioning idea of how any of it works and even those who are supposed to know struggle with the basics. All the difficult stuff is determined elsewhere and arrives on our statute book via Statutory Instrument without so much as a press release.
This to me is one of the more perverse effects of EU membership. For a long time the status quo has masked a decline in political capability leading to a bread and circuses form of politics unable to exert any moral authority on account of its narcissism. It is generally repellent which is why the establishment lost what was essentially an opinion poll on their performance in 2016.
In all respects our politics has lost its vitality and in so doing has lost its ambition. We hear the Brexiters trotting out their global Britain mantras but it is little more than hollow rhetoric from a band of deadbeats who still think the UK wields enormous trade clout in a world where even the tide is going out on the EU as a trade superpower. They have no idea what they are doing but posses a dangerous talent for deluding themselves.
At this point you may be wondering when the adults step in to take over - but that's the problem. Anyone with any serious talent goes nowhere near politics - especially when it prizes conformity over knowledge. British politics is the one place where expertise is utterly valueless - especially so if it is saying something that politicians do not want to hear. The other end of that spectrum is Brussels where the technocrats have the rule of the roost - which tends to produce equally catastrophic policies. We do not seem to have a happy medium.
I can't say which way Brexit will go from here. The deal on offer may scrape through parliament, or we could very well find ourselves ejected without any formal agreement. What we do know, though, is that the political crisis is far deeper than any of us realised and there is no hope of a return to prosperity until we have addressed it. In respect of that, no deal at all might very well be preferable.
Remainers complained that Brexit will see parliament tied up with Brexit related politics for the next ten years or more. That much is a certainty. I this time we will be re-learning the art of self-governance, rebuilding our domestic competences and rethinking long settled policies. That is no bad thing and it's at least half the point of Brexit. At this point, though, it's looking like a kill or cure proposition.
The very least we can say about Brexit thus far is that is has woken the public up to how broken our politics is. It's turning into a pretty miserable affair. Just the other day I spoke with a lukewarm supporter of Brexit who said they now wish it had never happened. I have some sympathy with that view in that there is some comfort to be taken in the illusion that things are less broken than they are, but with politics this broken it is our duty and our responsibility to fix it.
Brexit is one of those issues where if you don't see the problem, the chances are, you are the problem, or a component of it. What remainers want is less to do wit their love of the EU as it is their fondness for the status quo. There may be one or two things they want improving or changing but on the whole they are happy with the state as the controller of all things and want to see more central economic planning. What they really want is to continue propping up a failing system and they don't see that it is failing.
Wherever you look you see signs of the dysfunction. People aren't saving, they don't have pensions and everyone is looking to the state to underwrite their choices. Meanwhile the state sustains a massive zombie economy. And for all that, our schools are rubbish, our health system is not coping, policing has all but collapsed and the the gulf between London and the regions, financially, politically and culturally widens by the day.
There are even symptoms on the micro level. My local council has seen fit to replace perfectly adequate wheelie bins with ones half the size. The result of this is bin bags piling up by the side of every bin. For all that we have outsourced more council functions, we are paying more than ever for fewer services while it fails to manage even the basics. No doubt the EU landfill ban and recycling quotas have a lot to do with this.
Very often I'm asked how Brexit will make us better off. I have never made the case that it will. I have never seen it as an economic proposition. More than anything I see Brexit as an opportunity to arrest the decline and free us to take whatever measures are necessary. Britain needs a complete rethink of how we run our affairs and the freedom to innovate in policy. We should not need to grovel to Brussels to change the way we manage public assets.
Much of our dysfunction is blamed on austerity rather than the EU which to me is a cop out. If firehosing the public sector with cash worked then the so-called populist movement in the UK would not have gained traction during the Blair era. The systemic dysfunction in our governance is not a matter of funding. It is everything to do with the culture of our politics and the total absence of meaningful democracy on any level.
More to the point, if our politics is dysfunctional that could be said to be a symptom of a dysfunctional society - one which has grown used to politics as a from of entertainment, picking their team as one might pick a football club to support. The tribal mentality on display is much the same. We have a pastiche of democracy with minimal public participation and we have forgotten what it means to engage with politics.
As disruptive and expensive as Brexit is, I think the verdict speaks to a more primal instinct among voters that we need more substantial change than simply a change of government. A general election does not afford us scope to change the underlying paradigm. Brexit does. It is certainly no guarantee of future prosperity but if done right will put the power back in the hands of the people so that they may be authors of their own destiny. If then this administration fails to deliver Brexit, then we will be back here again eventually for one simple reason: Things cannot continue as they are.
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