Still waiting for the jam tomorrow - the sunlit uplands are getting further away (if they ever existed)
One of the things that irritated me about Brexit was that it was never a particularly sophisticated discussion.
My engagements with people would frequently end in disagreement and most often descend into insults [from the other person] purely because the other person would get frustrated by my never-ending, non-judgemental curiosity in trying to understand their motivations for wanting to ‘Leave’ the EU.
(And likewise with ‘Remain’ - though not as often)
There was one question I’d ask ‘Leave’ voters in particular that would irritate them more than any other, however: ‘do you know what a non-majoritarian institution is?’
It’s not a malevolent question to start off with, though it is when you work out the deception. There is context.
I would be faced with an individual - for example - screaming about ‘taking back control’ from “unelected bureaucrats,” and their growing frustration with me - I assumed - stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t convinced by their arguments. On many occasions, I was called stupid by these people.
So - any time I would engage with somebody who would be screaming about ‘unelected bureaucrats’ (who also assumed that I was an idiot) I would ask them a ‘trick’ question about whether or not they knew what non-majoritarian institutions were.
Their answer was either deflection [because they didn’t know] or just plain, “no.”
Why is this such a snooty and pernicious question - that would likely anger somebody who thinks they’re smarter than you?
Because non-majoritarian institutions and “unelected bureaucrats” are the same thing - but these people, apparently smarter than “stupid” me, did not know this.
The point in asking the question was not to be ‘smarter’ than them, however. It wasn’t a game of oneupmanship in who could be more pretentious than the other.
The point was to make them doubt - or at least question - whether or not they truly understood what they were talking about, and if not, whether they would be interested enough to have a sophisticated discussion about it.
Often, they would not - the question was counterproductive and they were not interested in sophistry.
‘How’ we were expected to ‘take back control’ is another matter dealt with the same lack of sophistry - often, it was met with the circular logic of: 'because we're British - that’s how.'
Of course, waving a flag was never going to provide a solution to such idiosyncratic problems as - for example - ‘chemicals to treat our water are stuck in Calais and we can't get them here because… well, Brexit.'
This reality in 2022 was dismissed in 2018 as Project Fear.
Most often, emotional conversations involved half-baked solutions to problems. In turn, they were met with complex dismissals that often felt were never truly understood.
-Let’s do this!
‘We can’t do this’
-Why not?*
‘Because…’
-Yeah well, traitor.
*-The fact that you were rarely asked ‘why not?’ was half the problem.
The same dismissal was applied to many arguments over Brexit, too - including the economy; including the labour market - the same approach to each subject handled with similar levels of sophistry.
‘Take back control’ was equivalent to any number of meaningless slogans often found in the social media comments section.
The problem however, is that when the United Kingdom actually did that - formally on 31 December 2020 - by way of its own sense of exceptionalism, veiled in a kind of misplaced nationalism - it seems Britain needed to ‘take back control’ before we learned the hard way that we are - well, quite bad at the control thing, actually.
As evidenced by, of all things, the Conservative government post-January 2020 when we began the transitional period of our formal departure from the EU.
As a result of ‘taking back control’ and having the benefit [a relative term] of being able to manage our own country, we’ve been left in such dire straits that one painstakingly asks the question, ‘...but have our lives been made better off since 2016?’
Economically at least, the answer is quite simple. We saw it with last week’s Autumn budget. It’s very clear.