What “Leave” means has nothing to do with why people voted Leave
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I knew on Monday that it was all about to get preposterous when the Downing Street lectern appeared outside Number 10 . This sinister piece of furniture has become a sort of harbinger of national crisis. Time and again Theresa May sought shelter behind it as she announced the latest species of acute UK humiliation. I imagine she had it fastened in safely next to her on each of her many late night sojourns from RAF Northolt in order to perfect her horrific variety of supplication. It should, on grounds of reasonable superstition, have been dispensed with as soon as she was finally prised out of office. A leaving gift perhaps?
So we are where we are and the fact that nobody knows where that is doesn’t change that. What we do know is that the assassination of the Brexit idea will be death by suffocation. It will be smothered by process. Remainers have identified their points of maximum distraction and given it a false coating of Commons legitimacy.
This should come as no surprise. Since June 2016 the Remain resistance has implemented a discernible strategy: to resurrect its campaign by initiating a theatre of maximum ambiguity.Thus the genuinely moral idea of national sovereignty has been reduced to the grubby calculus of economics (where facts are always disputable); and the question of what happens next has morphed into the question of why people voted as they did (about which there are no available facts at all). “Nobody voted to be poorer!” they tediously repeated, to which the reply should have been : “How do you know and why does it matter anyway?”. To say that Brexit has to be assessed against the drab criteria of a balance sheet is like saying that Bach’s St Matthew Passion is best understood as a sequence of notations on a piece of parchment.
Some of us heard the music that the Hammonds are trying to mute.
It doesn’t matter why people voted the way they did except in this way: that the way UK polity collectively ticked the “Leave” box. The consequent question should not have been “why did they vote like that?”. It should have been – it should be– : “What is this thing we voted to leave and what does leaving it mean?”. Remainers changed a consequent decision into a subsequent one.
What “leaving the EU” means has nothing to do with why people voted how they did, but everything to do with the nature of what it is we are leaving. When you decide to leave a party you don’t ask yourself whether it was the wine or the conversation; you look for the doors. What leaving the EU amounts to is defined not by the imagined voting intentions of a fictitious, composite “leave”. It is determined by the nature of the thing we are leaving.
The European Union is not, now, even a project, it is a theology. It is a system of aggressive integration with a specific teleology: the ultimate dissolution of the national idea and the acquisition by central structures of the defining institutions of its member states. It is almost Hegelian in its assumption that history works in its favour and that to dispute that must be an offence against “the way things have to be”. But history teaches us that those who call history as their witness end up being history. This is a lesson that the EU nomenklatura, whose chief appointees (and they are never elected) are the (how to put this non-litigiously?) usual evaders of corruption inquiries on their home turf, are uninterested in hearing.
That’s the general shape of the EU “project”. The specifics are more concerning. They include a very reasonable suspicion that Italy will be forced to pay the price for the its attachment to the Orthodoxy by being forced out of the Euro and that the current under-reported “disturbances” in France will devolve into real crisis. There was never a (political) “Remain” option because that implies the possibility of a status quo option. You cannot really remain in something which changes from one moment to the next.
Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested in his speech last evening something which I will put in my own words. To prioritise the specific over the general is to favour the trivial over the important. The Brexit debate cannot be reduced to the contingencies of the parliamentary protocols. There is more going on.
Boris Johnson has been criticised as someone who is not a “details” person. Good. We need someone who can emphasise the bigger picture. I wish him well. I think he may yet succeed.
If he loses the lectern.
