The anatomy of failure

The Conservative Party has not been electable in its own right since Margaret Thatcher. It limped through the Blair era offering up deadbeat after deadbeat, none of whom could inspire the nation. Only when New Labour had truly outstayed its welcome did voters take a punt on the Tories and even that wasn't enough to win outright. It took the offer of an EU referendum for the Tory right to give the Tories an outright mandate.

For that time I was politically aligned with the Tory right. I simply didn't bother voting until the promise of a referendum came along. I was far from alone. This is why so many leavers regard the 2016 vote as sacrosanct. It's the only time we've ever been given a say in who runs Britain.

Those who still bothered to vote voted Ukip, not especially out of any devotion to Farage, rather as a means to an end. This is why remainers to date fail to understand leavers. They seek to understand the "populism" of Farage and Johnson but such men don't matter. For eurosceptics it has always been about the cause, not the man.

If remainers really wanted to understand why they lost and keep losing, it is more to do with what they represent. A narcissistic, patriarchal, out of touch and aloof establishment that is simply incapable of listening. That primarily is why remain lost the referendum and they still don't understand it because they lack that essential self-awareness. They pay lip service to the needs and wants of the so-called "left behind" but off camera there's a strong whiff of oikophobia.

Blair and Brown epitomised this and to a large extent, so did David Cameron whose first instinct was to shed the hard right of the party by moving the party to the then centre ground of hugging huskies. That centre ground, though, was a media construct believed only by MPs. The real centre ground was elsewhere and shifting to the right.

There's a reason the Daily Telegraph went from an almost plausible newspaper to a right wing comic. Its main competition came from Breitbart. When Telegraph Blogs shut down the readership decamped to Breitbart and took the advertising revenue with it. You don't survive in that business unless you're telling your readers what they want to hear. It is there that the right wing sentiment festered.

Now the tables have turned. Those who were without a voice for so long now control the destiny of the entire country. Our fate is to be decided by a few thousand Tory members terrified of Farage's shadow. The Tories have a gun to their heads.

For most leavers nothing has changed. The establishment and the media remains as repellent as ever it was, and various attempts at sabotaging Brexit only goes to demonstrate that if we do not leave the EU then a large constituency is, in effect, permanently disenfranchised and have no meaningful say in who runs the country. That is what makes this a fight to the death.

This is also part of a wider culture war where the progressive left have used their position to make even the mildest conservative views synonymous with the far right, thus giving them all they excuse they need to shut down debate, deplatform and demonetise conservative commentators. Brexit is very much part of that culture war against a progressive agenda that holds power over all the important institutions up to and including the BBC.

This culture war, though, is now totally out of control. In just about every online poll I've seen, no deal seems to be the preferred option of Brexiters, and though they don't represent the country, they are the ones influencing the decision makers. For them it is no longer about Brexit or the search for a viable destination. This is only about ensuring the remain establishment loses. It is that sentiment upon which frauds and charlatans have been able to piggyback their radical no deal economic agenda. This unhealthy culture war has made us susceptible.

As it happens, I really can sympathise with that Brexiter nihilism. Though I am absolutely certain that no deal is a disaster for the UK economy, the thought of sticking it to the remainers; the snobbish, nasty, ghoulish authoritarians who despise democracy, is quite a pleasing one. The only problem is that nobody wins from a scorched earth approach.

Parliament should have realised this early on. Remainers should have recognised that in the face of their 2016 defeat, remaining in the EU was not, politically, a viable option. While they said they respected the vote, the closer we get to D-Day, the more they reveal that they never had any intention of respecting the vote. The moves to outlaw no deal are less to do with stopping a no deal Brexit as they are playing for time in the hope of revoking Article 50.

In that time we have seen a legal jihad against Brexit waged through the courts, and parliament has failed to back any destination for Brexit, and though they are now in full panic mode over Boris Johnson becoming PM and leaving without a deal, the power to avert it was theirs all along. All they had to do was ratify the withdrawal agreement.

The reasons for failing to do so vary. Remainers would have it that the deal in no way represents what was sold to the public. That's as maybe but as they would be the first to point out, the Brexiteers never defined a specific destination and what was sold to the public is not necessarily what they bought. Vote Leave may have set out its own stall but people voted to leave for a variety of reasons. Parliament does not get to second guess us.

Moreover, this is parliament going back on its word. They voted to hand the decision to the public. The decision was made and their only task was to implement it. Instead they've spent the whole time trying to stop it, squandering every opportunity to shape the process by way of their own supreme arrogance and total ignorance. Remainers have a hand in bringing us to where we are now.

It should not be forgotten that it is this same arrogance that has brought this saga to such an unhappy end. British voters had freedom of movement imposed on them without consent. It was never fully debated, nor did many even realise what was happening until it was too late. We were also denied a vote on the Lisbon treaty as politicians downplayed its significance and belittled eurosceptics as conspiracy theorists and "fruitcakes" while the BBC piled on the insults through their "comedy" productions.

Ultimately the remainers remind me of the toddler who torment the cat to the point where it scratches the infant who then goes running off to mummy. Years of abusing power and privilege while gradually disenfranchising ordinary people has spectacularly backfired on them. They thought they could do whatever they wanted in perpetuity, piling on the taxes and condescending to us at every turn, handing ever more power to Brussels and in their extreme hubris never imagined their would be consequences.

Well now there are. they've pushed their luck once to often and now it looks like we are leaving without a deal, wrecking the UK's international standing, demolishing its exports and handing all the leverage to the EU. Brexiters didn't do that. Parliament won't ratify a deal, we've exhausted all the extension possibilities and now, unless you know different, no deal remains the only way to leave. Parliament closed down all the options one by one and now we are on the brink.

We can go to town in slamming the Brexiteers for their profound ignorance and Theresa May certainly prepared the ground for failure, but on closer inspection Brexiteers don't have the monopoly on ignorance, not least with remainer MPs still after all this time unable to tell the difference between a customs union and the single market. Moreover, the conflation of the two is in part deliberate since, for the purposes of electoral triangulation, nobody wants to address the elephant in the room that you only get near "frictionless trade" by staying in the single market.

At every turn MPs have failed to get to grips with the issues and be honest with the electorate. Then there's the media problem. The media as a whole, already mistrusted by Brexiters (with good reason), managed to trivialise the effects of no deal and failed to adequately explain the consequences, not least because your average prime time hack is no better informed than our quarterwit MPs.

There have been several points of failure during this process which are all to do with the culture of our Londoncentric politics. Our media is not interested in anything outside the bubble. It is only interested in those with status or prestige; those who hacks think can give them the insider scoop. In reality the information they needed was right in front of them all along, freely available. All they had to do to ask the right questions was to avail themselves of it. We then get into a cycle of self-reinforcing coprophagia where the excretions of Peston, Robinson, Kuenssberg, Marr et al are readily consumed by MPs. The blind and deaf leading the blind and deaf.

With so much broken in our politics, with so much of it conducted through the medium of television, and the propensity of TV producers to prefer readily available telegenic know-nothings over genuine expertise, there was no chance of the public ever being able to make informed opinions before or since the referendum. I can count on one hand the number of times where TV panels have had even a vague clue how the system works. Instead of expertise we are subjected to partisan celebrity columnists and radio presenters.

From the beginning I have been keen to stress that the decision to leave the EU is wholly separate to the question of how we leave. With the UK being psychologically unsuited to EU membership, and the EU being antidemocratic in nature and wholly unaccountable, the decision to leave it, for me, was always a no brainer. What was done to us was done without explicit consent and it was done through subterfuge and connivance. That made this as much a battle for British democracy as it was a fight to leave the EU. An ugly but necessary thing to do.

Never though, did I anticipate the exit process being so badly mishandled. Though I never had much faith in politicians, I believed there was a degree of residual competence. That, however, was a just an illusion. Our politics is in the habit of being told what to legislate for and the parameters therein, and so long as it doesn't have to manage change of any significance it can just about stay on top of things. What our politics is not equipped for is real change largely because nobody currently in politics has ever been tasked with it. It used to be that ideas and paradigms would change between general elections. That has not been the case for nearly thee decades.

Being that politico-media class is now so utterly venal, narcissistic, self-absorbed and short sighted, it would seem there was never any possibility of getting Brexit right. The looming disaster is a culmination of decades of institutional decay which hasn't really been noticeable or even of consequence while Brussels has been in control. Now that we are making our own decisions we find the decision making apparatus has rusted and siezed. That is not the fault of Brexit or Brexiteers. If you're looking for someone to blame, you should blame the politicians who did this to us in the first place.