Brexiteers: living with the lies

Simon Kuper is a writer and journalist at the FT. He was a contemporary of Rees-Mogg and Hannan at Oxford in the 1980s, arriving just after Johnson, Cameron, and Gove had graduated. He writes from real knowledge of the men involved in Brexit, as he has done this week: How Brexiters live their truth. In it, he asks a question that I have asked myself on many occasions. How will Brexiteers deal with the rejection of their pet project when finally they are forced to accept it has failed? We are not talking here of a minor misjudgment, are we?  Brexit isn't like picking up the wrong knife at dinner or scraping your car in a car park.

Brexit is a monstrous error, so what do they really think at night when they lay their head on the pillow and turn off the light?

Those few minutes before you drift into sleep are moments of real reflection. You think about deep things. The meaning of life, particularly your own. What have you achieved? 

You would need to be truly stupid to believe that Brexit can survive the next decade. Some are of course. No one can match John Longworth in the stupidity league. Many are still trying to convince us (and themselves perhaps) that it’s all going swimmingly. The sorry truth is that it has been a costly mistake, probably the most expensive peacetime mistake ever made by any nation in modern times. 

What do you think when you realise you had an active role in bringing it about? How do you live with the lies you’ve told? 

Kuper writes to those Conservatives who once believed in Brexit:

"But now you sometimes admit to yourself: we were wrong. Brexit failed. If you’re a Conservative, you’ll probably be tossed out of power next year. If you’re in your fifties, like Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Steve Baker, you’re unlikely ever to return. The generation that will replace you is overwhelmingly Remainer. One day, the first line in your obituary will be Brexit. How will the guilty men and women deal with that?

"Tellingly, Brexiters now hate to talk about Brexit. Whenever we Remoaners mention it, the standard Leaver retort is, “Get over it”, as if it were a defeat in a long-ago football match rather than an all-encompassing policy that will harm Britain for decades." 

He ends with this line which I think hits the nail on the head:

"Older Brexiters have learnt that there’s a worse political fate than losing. It’s winning while being wrong."

And that is what they will have to live with. They persuaded million to vote for something that could never work and the only way you could do it was with lies. Otherwise, it would have been impossible.

From some of his earlier work on the characters involved, you might conclude some of them at least will have no difficulty surviving. Old Etonians who went to Oxford and were in the "faction-ridden" Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) for example, like Johnson, will lose no sleep over Brexit's abject failure.  To them, the nation is expendable, it’s fate a matter of indifference. Only their own status and comfort really matter.

To lesser mortals, people like me, secondary modern kids, the idea that you had a hand in ruining the lives of thousands, perhaps millions along with many good businesses with decent, honest people and all the wealth that has been destroyed, would be unbearable.  I couldn't live knowing what I had done.

And that perhaps is also part of the answer, they have no empathy at all for the struggles and hopes and worries of ordinary men and women. But they must surely know the dream is dead.

You might also like a Kuper piece from mid-2017 (no£) which also seems more appropriate than ever:

"In 1990, Hannan founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain at the Queen’s Lane Coffee House on the city’s high street. This generation of mostly former public schoolboys didn’t want Brussels running Britain. That was their caste’s prerogative."

"The referendum was won like a Union debate: with funny, almost substance-free hot air. Remember Johnson’s policy on cake: he was pro-having it, and pro-eating it. In Britain, humour is used to cut off conversations before they can get emotional, boring or technical."

He has argued that if the negotiations with Brussels after the referendum had been conducted as a public debate, the Brexiteers like Johnson and Hannan would have won easily. Unfortunately, it wasn't. The exercise was boring, detailed, legalistic and technocratic, things they were no good at because none of them had ever bothered with that sort of stuff because they didn't need to.

He also says:

"As long as politicians restricted their silly wordgames to Prime Minister’s Question Time while letting civil servants run the country, they were relatively harmless. But after the referendum, the Brexiters were tasked with managing Brexit. This was like asking the winners of a debating contest to engineer a spaceship. Results have been predictable. The Brexiters cannot wow Brussels with rhetoric, because the EU’s negotiators prefer rules."

And the failure of Elon Musk's Starship rocket yesterday - built by experts - demonstrates that difficult things take real knowledge and understanding, but can still fail. The chances of Brexit, conceived, designed, and built by amateurs, dilettantes and charlatan jerry builders using muddle and hope, ever being a success was never above zero.

REUL Bill, where is it?

And on the subject of failures, I see Sir Bill Cash has written to the Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch querying what has happened to the REUL Bill which was scheduled to be debated in the Lords two days ago but was scratched. He writes:

"It was therefore with concern that we learned the Bill’s Lords Report stage and Third Reading will now not take place this week and next. As far as we are aware, the Bill’s remaining Lords stages are yet to be rearranged. We seek further information on the reasons for this delay and the Government’s timetable for the Bill’s progress, up to Royal Assent.

"We remind you of the December 2023 ‘sunset’ for the automatic revocation of (the majority of) retained EU law. If the most is to be made of Brexit for the people and businesses of the United Kingdom, the passage of the Bill must be prioritised. We see no good reason why the Bill should not be back in the Commons shortly."

Cash doesn't get it even now. He still thinks we can legislate for the "majority" (note) of EU Retained Law to be revoked by the end of 2023. This is insanity.

It is particularly stupid given a report in the FT this very morning about DEFRA (no £ by the way) and its workload:

"Civil servants and lobbyists told the Financial Times that they believed Defra was struggling to handle its large workload, which includes implementing strict new environmental targets and developing a post-Brexit subsidy regime for farmers.

"Defra is also grappling with the requirements of Rishi Sunak’s retained EU law bill, which requires government departments to review nearly 4,000 laws and regulations inherited from the EU before the end of 2023. Defra has by far the largest review exercise of any Whitehall department.

"Whitehall officials said the process was putting serious pressure on the department’s administrative capacity just as it was struggling to roll out other major policies, including new pollution targets and farm reforms.

"A senior Whitehall insider said Defra’s problems stemmed from a lack of political consistency since the Brexit referendum, with the department having seven different secretaries of state since 2016."

We are governed by imbeciles.