Three Days Later: The Looming Conservative Reaction

I want to cast some speculations about Brexit into the air. Having listened to and read as much as I could for the past three days I have become convinced that the Johnson/Gove wing of the Brexit alliance not only did not expect to win, they did not wish to win. Again, this is speculation, but I think their view was that a high turnout for Brexit would create a situation where their real goal, access to the Single Market without any of the social and other protections offered by the Union, would be attainable.

Listening to Francis Maude this morning it seemed that was the game he was playing. He seemed to think that exit doesn't have to mean exit. Is George Osborne moving between Paris and Berlin trying to get a diplomatic deal done that pulls that off at the eleventh hour? If so he could ask the Parliament to put the referendum aside (on the grounds of real and material change in conditions), and the political class could tough out the reaction. In that scenario the 3 million or so who have petitioned for a re-run of the referendum end up being the useful idiots for a rightward swing for Britain as the only Union that would be available would be the version adapted to the needs of the business wing of the Conservative Party. From their point of view that would be a triumph, and I think it is possible because Gove and Johnson want it too. Liam Fox this morning argued that the process would have to wait until the Conservative had chosen a new leader, making the 150k membership of the Tory party the constitutional hinge of Europe. I think that kind of chutzpah is unlikely to succeed, but Cameron resigning has bought time for Westminster to work out what to do. If he was still there it would be hard to slow up the exit process, and for the other strategy to work that process has to be avoided.

Again this is speculation, but how to assess its likelihood? Britain as European Singapore is not the project of UKIP or of the millions who vote for Brexit, so could the system downface the population and get away with it? Would the Labour right go along with the Lib Dems and the relevant Tories to get some deal of this sort through the Commons? Those questions assume the robustness of the institutions and their capacity to manage the political moment, but is that still true? There is a vacuum, not of power, but of leadership in British politics, but that can be filled in. Is there a legitimacy crisis? Is there a figure with the kind of Pittean cunning necessary to pull this off available? Nicola Sturgeon plays for the opposition, so that is not a possibility.

Finally have the consequences of Brexit simply overwhelmed this kind of thinking? Right now it is impossible to assess the consequences across Europe, but I can't see anyone there colluding with a project of this sort. At what point is it better for Europe to have England walk? Doing a deal with Scotland would soften the blow, and how long could England last alone, especially if financial services are not given easy access to European markets. And now that English Nationalism is a force in British politics it is hard to see it being bottled up.

The Early Days of a Worse Future... and some possible exits

Obviously the Brexit vote is a disaster in any way you cut it, and there is no clever "cunning of history" way to recuperate that vote. The future that the UK is in the act of choosing is unpredictable, but none of the possible futures this move open up are creative. The alliance that made this vote possible is just terrifying.

When we do stop rending our garments, then what? There is a temptation to leap to a second Scottish independence referendum as an exit, but I think that may not be the best option. There is a UDI option of course, but that is really risky, but if Scotland doesn't do that we will be in trench warfare with Westminster just to get another referendum approved, and who knows what the outcome of an ugly row with revived English nationalism would be?

The more creative move is for Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast to take the high road. Those administrations represent people who today are European citizens and have expressed the wish to remain so (obviously the same is true of London). As governments and devolved administrations with recognized international standing they have an interest, and in my view a right, to voice in any negotiations for an English exit. England may leave the EU, Ireland isn't even thinking of doing so, Northern Ireland and Scotland have a right to represent their citizens.

Moreover this would be as British a move as cricket. There is a near millennium long British jurisprudence and political theory on complex and hybrid political entities, confederations, empires and partitions. There are already entities like the Isle of Man that are attached to the Crown of England, not part of the United Kingdom and so not part of the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland could remain attached to the crown, leave the UK, but remain part of the EU. Scotland and the two Irelands could form a new confederation on the Swiss model. There are all sorts of politically practical, constitutionally responsible models that allow the English vote to be respected, without the rest of us having to be dragged into the disastrous romance of identity that they have embraced. We could even work out a settlement in Britain akin to the Irish settlement, where anyone born anywhere on the British Isles could claim either the English or European passport (in its Scots and Irish forms), and then the Londoners could stay European too. There are resources in our shared histories that can help us avoid the worst.

For any of this to work the Republic has to be flexible and accommodating. I think that the Irish population, North and South, are constitutionally sophisticated and the Scots are obviously politically mobilized and creative. We are all European citizens this morning and have a right to retain that citizenship. It is up to our politicians to defend our acquired citizens' rights.

The UK left and the EU Referendum

There is no coherent left argument for exit, it just looks like there might be. There has been a notable lack of real enthusiasm among the UK left for the EU, and that has opened up all opportunities for the exit campaign. My suspicion is that the treatment handed out to Greece during the financial crisis is a real problem for a lot of people. The hope that the social democratic model could be saved by Europe hasn't work out. Moreover I cannot think of anyone who thinks the current shape of the confederation (and that is what it is, not a union) is optimal.

But we are not being asked what kind of European Union we want to be part of, though if it is to survive that is clearly going to have to happen and won't be at all easy. The question being asked of the electorate in the UK is in or out, and the answer has to be in.

The European Union was created because the European states system, based on the balance of power, did not work. More specifically, the three major imperial states (four if you include Russia, but that gets complicated), could not reconcile their sovereignty doctrines, and claims to act independently, with limited forms of democratization, without in turn destroying international peace. The point of the EU is to depower toxic large-state nationalism and to articulate some kind of cosmopolitanism that doesn't replace more local loyalties, but tempers them.

We should not underestimate how close to the surface the old loyalties lie. In my own view, the recent historical work on the commemoration of the First World War has gone dangerously close to celebrating the passions and commitments that drove Europeans to slaughter one another. I'm constantly perturbed by how unaware some of my colleagues seem to be of the nostalgia for uncomplicated identity that infuses their writing.

Obviously the exit of the UK will not cause a European war, but UK exit from the EU would injure, possibly fatally, the project of creating a reasonable, livable Europe. Even if we could go back to a past of independent sovereign nations and uncomplicated identities, who would want to? And the question that is really pressing is not would we want to like in that kind of Europe, but would we want to live in that kind of UK? The real nightmare is a revived agressive British nationalism that would threaten the complex, plural political experiment that, almost unnoticed, has been going on across the whole British Isles for the last thirty years.