Why Brexit is working - and how that has profound implications for democratic politics
Brexit was, above all, a project of political disruption. And it's succeeding.
Most people on the centre and left, and many beyond, believe that Brexit is failing. There’s no doubt that in transactional terms - in terms of its economic and social impact - it has been a disaster. And there is no doubt that public opinion is turning against Brexit, although there is still a strong and vocal hardcore of true believers.
But those claims fail to address the true nature of the Brexit project - that it was always about politics and power: the economic and social advantages its advocates promised were never the point.
The politics of disruption
To understand Brexit - and why it is working - one has to see it as an act of political disruption, and its advocates as self-appointed “disruptors”. Disruption, in the political sense, is about breaking up political consensus and the structures that support it in order to create a chaos from which insurgent politics can seize the agenda and attain power. It uses conspiracy theory, fake news, and other insurgent techniques to pull down the structures that maintain the status quo, presenting them as the expressions of a self-serving elite, which excludes the mass of ordinary people - regular people living in a world of common-sense - from influence or power. It is about maintaining a fiction of democratic empowerment - while, for the most part, ensuring that no such thing happens in fact.
It is particularly damaging in a society that has no written constitution, and where constitutional practice is embodied in an arcane system of convention and precedent. Indeed, the central political message of Brexit was about sovereignty - about “taking back control” - and asserting the purity of a system under which Parliament, untrammelled by EU law, can legislate as it pleases without constitutional constraint. Arguably the only place where many of the individual rights of British citizens were codified was in the Treaties of the European Union. In a society in which living standards and expectations have fallen consistently over a long period, Brexit was fundamentally about mobilising political and economic grievance in pursuit of a political agenda and a project in which rights would be entirely subordinate to whichever party wields a Parliamentary majority, which becomes a substitute for “the will of the people”; in which an independent judiciary upholding the rule of law, the civil service, and even scientific experts can be cast as enemies of the people.
And this is why Brexit is working. Not because it has delivered anything of substance for the United Kingdom - let alone any of the benefits its advocates promised - but because of its wholly destructive effects on British politics and democracy, and how that has in turn led to the seemingly rapid rise of the authoritarian right.
Destruction
Brexit’s effect on the Westminster system has been wholly destructive. From a Conservative government unlawfully proroguing Parliament and proposing legislation on Northern Ireland that wilfully breaches international law, to a Labour government cheerfully throwing out the Ombudsman’s recommendation that the WASPI women should be compensated for the DWP’s gross maladministration because it would be “too expensive”, the norms and conventions that have allowed the Westminster system to function as a representative democracy have been abandoned. And, crucially, it is destroying public confidence in the political processes of the Westminster state.
It has destroyed the Conservative Party - the party that had long been the guardian of the constitution and the union, and the masters of its practise of convention and precedent, but which following Brexit was captured by a populist right that tried and failed to out-Reform Reform; that achieved an election win on the basis of Brexit votes in 2019 but was utterly shattered when a cohort of voters who largely despise what the Conservative Party has always been, but were prepared to lend them their votes to “get Brexit done”.
And it is doing the same to Labour. Labour in government is committed to “making Brexit work” and repeats its red lines of no freedom of movement, no rejoining the Customs Union or Single Market. Electorally fragile, despite the Parliamentary landslide gifted to it by a divided opposition, and hamstrung by a series of political disasters, from the revelations that donors paid for Starmer’s suits and spectacles (guaranteed to play into the populist Right’s “they’re all the same” mantra), to the abolition of winter fuel allowance, Labour’s first six months have seen it reduced to an object of ridicule and contempt, presiding over a renewed austerity that will see - on its own predictions - household incomes fall substantially throughout the current Parliament. Its fate seems likely to be similar to that of the US Democrats, who at least had a decent record of economic delivery on their side, but who failed to connect with the people they needed to win.
Labour still seems incapable of setting a political agenda that will resonate. It’s still traumatised by what it sees of the desertion of its natural Red Wall support to the Tories in 2019, in the name of “getting Brexit done”. There’s no evidence that those voters are coming back, but a party whose working-class origins are still at the heart of its political mythology, and a belief in the “authenticity” of that support, is still seeking to follow the agenda that has led those away from Labour, rather than seeking to lead by creating an optimistic and grounded narrative of its own. Labour has consistently appeased the right, whether over freedom of movement, or its Uxbridge by-election ULEZ wobble, or in its adoption of an explicitly British nationalist iconography and Keir Starmer’s use of conservative tropes about flag, work and family; and if there is one thing the Brexit process taught us it’s that the populist Right will simply bank concessions and demand more.
There is a brutal paradox in a Labour Party with a commanding Parliamentary majority, that sits paralysed like a rabbit in the headlights, apparently happy to let its opponents set the political agenda. That is Brexit’s real victory; the utter political neutering of Westminster’s established political parties, leaving the field clear for the populist right.
The implications for us on the liberal left - the opponents of Brexit - are obvious. We talk endlessly of how Brexit is failing; in transactional terms, we’re right to do so. But we need to rise to the challenge of how Brexit is succeeding - how it’s destroying our political structures and paving the authoritarian Right’s path to power. That doesn’t mean defending the failing Westminster system - the pre-Brexit system was genuinely rotten, the anger against the political class that drove Brexit was in large measure justified. Unless we acknowledge that we’re going nowhere. We need to find an alternative vision and language, something better and more appealing.
The Tao of Brexit
I’ve written elsewhere about the Tao of Brexit - that Brexit is a state of mind rather than something concrete, what Raymond Williams would have called a structure of feeling. Therein lies its power. It privileges feeling over evidence - and the populist right has shown itself to be incredibly adept at manipulating feeling. One of the reasons why Brexit is succeeding is that it has taken discourse into places where almost no mainstream Westminster politician wants to go - into nostalgia, and the way in which two decades of austerity have damaged not only material wellbeing, but the morale and confidence of people who have seen their living standards so savagely attacked, and who trust neither an economic system they believe to be rigged against them nor the political class who run it. Brexiter politicians - whether Conservatives or Reform - seek to garner support by denouncing the economic elites of which they are overwhelmingly members. The fact that they can still get away with doing so, that they appear to be gaining support, and that the liberal left has not so far found the language or narrative to stop them, demonstrates that Brexit is working.
Moreover, the populist Right thrives on the idea that it is somehow “owning the Libs” - we’ve seen the same from the MAGA insurgency in the US too. As with any other insurgency of the populist Right, there has always been a nihilistic element in the Brexit mix. The best way to show that we’re not going to take being “owned” is to be confident and optimistic in expressing our beliefs; to refuse to be intimidated by that overworked and increasingly meaningless word “woke”; to promote forward-looking, progressive and evidence-based narratives; to call out conspiracy theories and fake news, and to condemn those politicians and parties who surrender to the Right’s framing and allow them to set the agenda. It is difficult to be intellectually and politically confident in the face of populism, but we have to do it.
It also means getting off the fence. It means understanding that politicians who argue that we can - or should - “make Brexit work” have either misunderstood what Brexit is, or are not prepared to confront Brexit’s political implications. Nobody really should be surprised that confronting a political shock on the scale of Brexit requires an abandonment of old political loyalties and the building of new political alliances and structures. The People’s Vote campaign made basic mistakes, many of them rooted in a misunderstanding of both Brexit’s structure of feeling and the resentment of those outside the political class who saw Brexit as a moment of agency - it looked far too much like the affluent middle class trying to reverse the one moment when an alienated and disregarded public had their say - but it did show how political alliances can be made in the face of confusion and hostility at Westminster.
But most of all we should be very wary of a narrative that says that Brexit has failed. In so many ways it has, but that is beside the point. We need to start by understanding how it is succeeding, and understanding the profound impact of that success on our democratic practice. To do otherwise is to give the populist authoritarians a clear run.