The successful Brexit vote follows in the British radical democratic tradition of the Levellers of the 17th century, the working-class Chartists of the 19th and the women’s suffrage campaigners of the 20th which were movements for a full adult electoral franchise, for ordinary working people to have the right to determine their nation’s shape and direction and the impact this would have on their working and non-working lives.
These campaigns were all bitterly resisted by Britain’s political, economic and cultural elites which, likewise, have fought against Brexit. The vast majority of anti-Brexit politicians (including the allegedly radical Corbyn Labour Party and the faux-radical Greens), big business, the alphabet soup of global capitalist institutions (the IMF, the WTO, etc.), the Obama White House, most of academia and the usual celebrity suspects joined the anti-Brexit chorus:
Whilst 48% of the public voted Remain 73% of all British MPs, and a massive 95% of Labour MPs, did so.
Whilst 52% of the public voted to leave the EU in 2016, just 3% of guests (132 out of 4,275) on the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, ‘Today’, in the decade prior to the 2016 referendum, did so (thus continuing the Beeb’s state media role of being an agit-prop organ for the liberal elite). This stunning bias was continued during the referendum, and has continued since.
Although the majority of Remain voters have respected the result and believe that Brexit should go ahead, the Remainer elite has sought to subvert the democratic Brexit outcome, through legal challenges, or the House of Lords, or through a second referendum, or through handing control over to parliament to either ‘untrigger’ Article 50 (the technical process for an EU member country to leave the EU) or to have the final say on whether Brexit goes ahead. Brexit was a vote against the establishment, an establishment that has, however, been left to implement it which is a recipe for betrayal or unprincipled compromise.
Ever since the vote, the defeated Remainer elite, when they concede they are stuck with the result) has been trying to dilute Brexit by pushing for a ‘Soft Brexit’ which would retain the UK’s membership of key EU political, legal, economic and judicial institutions such as the Single Market, the Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the European courts. This would be a negation of Brexit:
Remaining inside the Single Market (which enshrines the four ‘freedoms of movement’ – of goods, capital, services, and labour across EU national borders) means sacrificing national democratic control over the terms of such ‘freedoms’ to obedience to rules set by Brussels for such ‘freedoms’.
Remaining in the Customs Union (which eliminates customs duties on trade between EU member countries and imposes a common external tariff on all goods entering the EU) means not taking back national control of trade.
Remaining subject to the European Court of Justice means rejecting national control of law-making – the ECJ is a political body which enforces adherence to the Single Market and the Customs Union, and its rulings compel democratically-elected governments, such as those of Hungary and Poland, to re-write their national laws and bow to EU rules on accepting migrants.
A large majority of the public agrees that a ‘Soft BREXIT’ is Brexit in name only and disrespects the referendum outcome – a survey of 3,300 people by the London School of Economics and Oxford University in 2017 found that, 68% of Britons prefer a ‘Hard Brexit’, a clean, swift, surgical exits from the EU. Whilst 85% of Leave voters favoured ‘hard’ over ‘soft’ BREXIT, even a majority (53%) of Remain voters, too, preferred a ‘hard’/real to a ‘soft’/fake BREXIT.
What there is, however, is precisely a soft, flabby Brexit. PM Theresa May’s proposed deal with the EU would leave Britain subject to swathes of EU Law, potentially indefinitely (and pay an ongoing fortune for the privilege). It would bind Britain in an indefinite neo-colonial relationship with Brussels, with even fewer rights that exist now as a member of the EU.
The only democratic alternative on the table which gives form to the desires of the 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave is a ‘hard Brexit’, a ‘no-deal’, clean-break Brexit i.e. no open-borders, no Single Market, no Customs Union, no subjugation to the EU’s courts, no ‘divorce’ bill. Yet, ‘no deal’ is still bandied about as ‘crashing out’ of the EU, an economic and social nightmare, in order to persuade people that any deal, even may’s crock of a deal, would be better than that. Although the public can see through this ploy (only 19 per cent of the population think May’s Withdrawal Agreement is faithful to the referendum result of 2016), politicians inside parliament, the vast majority of whom are Remainers) are much more panicky. Remainers of all political stripes (from Tory reactionaries to the allegedly radical Momentum movement that backs Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour party) have also vociferously sought to neuter Brexit by narrowing leaving the EU to a false choice between the PM Theresa May’s Remain-by-another-name ‘deal’ with the EU and outright remaining in the EU. May’s proposed deal is a betrayal of Brexit.