Why did the Remainers fail to keep Britain in the EU?

For around five years now, British politics has found a new axis for political rivalry, far removed from the traditional Left-Right split. In the arena of Brexit, Remainers and Leavers have battled it out, vociferously and acrimoniously. The character and nature of the Leavers has been analysed, almost ad infinitum. By contrast, very little has been said about the Remainers. For all their eloquence, they are an enigmatic group.

This is an opportune moment to consider the Remainers, before Britain leaves the Transition Period at the end of the year, and before we know what (if any) agreement has been reached with the EU. It is a chance to begin evaluation, unbedevilled by hindsight. At present, we do not know if the worst fears and predictions of the Remainers will be realised, or if we will just see long queues of lorries in Kent for a few weeks, as the hauliers sort themselves out.

Britain has been a democracy with universal adult suffrage for some ninety years. Out of all the national elections fought over this period, only two have been followed immediately by determined campaigns by the losers to overturn the result. One was the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, but then the motives and aims of the Scottish Nationalist losers were crystal clear. The other election was the 2016 Brexit referendum. The Leavers, of course, sought to implement the referendum result. The Remainers might have swallowed their pride and assisted with the implementation, or taken themselves off in a sulk. They did neither. What motivated them, what did they aim to achieve, and why did they fail?

To begin with, how do we explain the motivation of the Remainers? There appear to be two competing explanations: one political, the other psychological. At the outset, the Remainers who refused to accept the referendum result had an interior conflict. They were committed to the democratic process. They were also committed to overturning the result of the referendum — as anti-democratic a stance as possible. They resolved this contradiction by telling themselves stories about the referendum: it was only advisory; the Leave campaign, unlike the Remain campaign, told lies; it was only a protest vote; shadowy interests in the United States and Russia tried to influence the voters; the voters were too old, stupid, ill-educated, xenophobic, racist, gullible, provincial, narrow-minded and (believe it or not) fat to understand where their best interests lay. 

In this way, Remainers convinced themselves that they were acting in the national interest, to save the Leave voters from the consequences of their own folly. It was not necessary that these stories should be true, but it was necessary that the Remainers believed them. The rival psychological explanation, Brexit Anxiety Disorder, sees it differently. (This is not the same as Brexit Derangement Syndrome, which was used as a catch-all to describe the general insanity of the Brexit “debate”). Here, loss of control and a feeling of insecurity bred anxiety on a vast scale. This in turn produced anger, despair and a desire to portray the Leavers as fanatics and political extremists.

What were they trying to achieve? Did they want a Brexit which left Britain as an economic satellite of the European Union? Did they want a second referendum? Or did they just want Parliament to abandon Brexit as a bad job? They never made up their minds. Why was this? It did not, apparently, occur to them to evaluate the course of action with the highest likelihood of success, and then campaign for it in a disciplined and coherent way. For example, what was the point of demanding a second referendum, if they spent their time insulting and belittling the Leave voters? Waverers in the Leave camp required gentle coaxing, not being patronised or insulted, to persuade them to completely change their minds. Nor did the Remainers deploy new, persuasive arguments to counteract the erosion of credibility from their prophecies of economic doom, which failed to materialise. Consequently, in the four-and-a-half years from the referendum to the end of 2020, public opinion did not shift appreciably.

Did the Remainers collude or coordinate their activities with the bureaucracy of the European Union? They had every incentive to do so. Did they, for example, obtain a cast-iron assurance that an Act of Parliament to revoke Article 50 and thus cancel Brexit, would see Britain return to the fold with all its opt-outs and exemptions intact, or was the goal of remaining in the EU just wishful thinking? Certainly, there were allegations of collusion in the overheated political atmosphere of autumn 2019.

What is striking was the lack of rigorous self-examination by the Remainers and any critique of the European Union. Did any Remainer commentator, at any time, criticise the EU for making mistakes in its negotiations with the UK? It seems not. And yet the EU did make huge mistakes. 

The most significant, I suggest, was the decision in December 2017 to appoint Ireland as the “point man” for the negotiations with Britain. Indeed, Donald Tusk went out of his way to give the Irish a blank cheque. For the first time in history, this gave the Irish an opportunity to tweak British noses with impunity. Varadkar and Coveney set to with a will. This had the predictable result of destroying, in two short years, two decades’ worth of painfully accumulated goodwill in Anglo-Irish relations. It also imposed on the British a withdrawal agreement to which no self-respecting nation in its right mind would agree. This in turn had the predictable result of destroying Theresa May, and replacing her with someone who would not be nearly as accommodating. It beggars belief that this was what the EU intended. To the best of my knowledge, no Remainer — in the vast army of Tweeters, bloggers and print media commentators — has uttered a breath of criticism of this appalling catalogue of unforced errors.

One of the oddest and most inexplicable aspects of the anti-Brexit campaign was the Remainer preoccupation with the British Empire. To be sure, there was some loose Leaver talk about empire, but the Remainers seemed to be obsessed with it. Dorling and Tomlinson’s Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire, Kenny and Pearce’s Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics, Murphy’s The Empire’s New Clothes: the Myth of the Commonwealth, and Ward and Rasch’s Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain were just the tip of a huge iceberg of spilt ink. There was nothing remotely comparable to this on the Leaver side, yet strong Remainer voices insisted that the Leavers were motivated by false memories of empire. Were the Remainers simply projecting onto their opponents their own fears and anxieties, or is there a different, more persuasive explanation of this strange imperial fixation?

What goes a long way to explaining the failure of the Remainer campaign was their Olympian disdain for their opponents. They refused to take the Leavers seriously. Thus, when Boris Johnson put into operation his démarche in August-December 2019, it should have been obvious that he was intent on signalling to the British people who was responsible for the political stalemate, before calling an election. Yet the Remainers never saw it. All of them, such as Change UK and the Conservative Party’s “Gaukeward Squad”, cooperated beautifully with Johnson’s plan. They even made snide jokes about Johnson’s competence as they ambled happily into his trap. What explains this elementary error? 

It is important to get the balance of explanations right. The Remainers were never a bunch of hopeless dreamers who didn’t stand a chance. They came tantalisingly close to success in the autumn of 2019. All they had to do was band themselves together into a government of national unity, and they would have been home and dry.

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