Essay: Why are Remainers still so cheesed off?
Remainers, however much they got right about Brexit, lost the argument. Now, five years on from the referendum, what matters most is what they got wrong — and why.
Most Remainers do not see it this way. Even so, they will have begrudgingly noticed that six months after Brexit, the supermarket shelves are full, the lights are on and trucks flow freely down the M20. The UK retains the top destination in Europe for investment, the City of London continues to dominate European financial services, sterling is on the up and the FTSE is nudging all-time highs. They will certainly know that the UK stole a march on our neighbours in rolling out Covid vaccinations, panicking Brussels; and that this has something to do with paddling our own canoe.
To summarise the argument of this essay, the Remain cause made much of its high-mindedness over the last five years of the Brexit saga. It is now obvious that the Remainer sense of superiority distracted from their low dishonest campaign, which has left the country divided and its supporters bereft.
What Remainers got right
Remainers called the negotiations accurately. They were not as simple as the Leave camp claimed; the EU’s negotiating team stuck to a legalistic process; it was unrealistic to expect EU member states to defect from their collective position; and there is a trade-off between regulatory sovereignty and market access. They were also on the money about the complications of Ireland, trade deals with the US and other major partners, plus the empty promises made to the fishing industry.
They also got elements of the outcome right: businesses are suffering from the loss of freedom of movement; there are likely to be problems in the supply of unskilled labour; trade with the EU has suffered at least frictional disruption; expats are facing everyday difficulties; Brexit delivered a shock to international institutions; and leaving will not end our dealings with the bloc.
Some of these arguments were better than others, but even the best failed to change minds. They were undermined by Remainers’ inability to mount compelling arguments for their cause; weakened by their association with the overwrought “Project Fear”; overshadowed by the self-defeating attack on the referendum’s legitimacy; or wasted as supporting the “soft Brexit”, which challenged the sovereignty prized by Leave voters.
Remainers’ central problem
These days, former leaders of the Remain camp reminisce that they dared not make a political case for the EU, as any attempt to do so repelled focus-groups. They could never overcome the obstacle that any political proposition for the EU rests on a picture of the world which most Brits just don’t buy into.1
Europhiles like to talk up the part played by the EU in promoting Europe’s postwar peace. There is something to this, notably the reconciliation between France and Germany, but Britons incline to place more emphasis on the part of NATO in holding the line against the Soviet Union, with some also remembering that France detached itself from the alliance for forty years.
The prospect of an “ever closer union” puts voters off throughout the continent. This applies all the more to that majority of the UK electorate which is relieved to have avoided the Euro and Schengen, worries about the standards of EU accounting and democracy and would run a mile from the prospect of a standing EU army. Remainers also press the view that the EU is such a central part of the postwar “rules-based order” that Britain’s departure weakens the entire set-up. This doesn’t wash with most British voters, who see the risk as far-fetched. So much for the politics, but even economics was less help to Remainers than they might have hoped, with trade sovereignty (discussed further below) presenting the evidence that while we were in the EU, its trading regime penalised the UK.
For lack of positive arguments, the Remain campaign changed the subject. Its principal moves were to promote “Project Fear”, warnings about universal disruption, conspicuous for their hyperbole; and to challenge the legitimacy of the referendum. They ignored, obfuscated or traduced sovereignty, Leavers’ central concern. Remainers also raised various further points, some largely ill-conceived, eg, reputation, relations with the US, trade agreements and other minor matters; and some with a measure of substance, eg, fishing and Ireland. None, however, justified the catastrophic construction placed upon them by Europhiles.
“Project Fear” — disruption, long-term economic adversity
During the referendum campaign, it was often asserted by commentators that while the Leave cause had the best of the political argument, Remainers had the best of the economics. This was half true. We have already seen that the dirty little secret of the Remain campaign was that its leaders knew almost immediately that they could not mount a persuasive positive political argument. Worse still, trade sovereignty below presents the evidence that the economic argument on which Remainers relied was so easy to answer that they had no choice but to double down with the exaggerations of “Project Fear”. Initially, Remainers promoted it to get out the vote for the 2016 referendum. Thereafter, it survived to push along a second referendum; failing that, to press for a “soft Brexit”, with a view to minimising alterations to the status quo; and to provide the powder and shot for parliamentary ambushes. Leavers argued that the gain was worth the pain — Johnson’s “Nike tick”. Nonetheless, the psychology textbooks tell us that the fear of loss outweighs the prospect of gains, so Project Fear’s warnings should have found an audience. Instead, they were discredited by their hyperbolic precision, eg, Osborne’s forecast of a cost of £4,300 for each household; and Remainers’ coincident attacks on legitimacy and sovereignty. All of these seemed to confirm the truth of the Leave camp’s earlier mockery of “experts”.
Nonetheless, these fears represented the overwhelming official and professional consensus. Just one or two maverick economists — for example, Tim Congdon and Patrick Minford — pointed out that they failed to recognise second-order effects, with clunky economic models taken too seriously. It is true that the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, stated that he expected Brexit to have the same effect on growth as joining the EU in the first place, that is none at all; but he was up against strenuous warnings to the contrary from his successor, Mark Carney.
Covid has complicated the immediate outcome and its measurement but so far, Project Fear turns out to be without foundation. Osborne’s threatened “punishment budget” was self-defeating. Indeed, it never made sense: how could it be delivered, given that he was bound to resign on losing? Queues at Dover and empty larders have never happened; there has been no loss of jobs. European traders reported disruption early in the year, but recent figures are returning to pre-Brexit levels. The UK continues to hold the largest stock of inward investment in Europe and the City jobs on as ever.2 Meanwhile, long-term concerns have been softened by the post-Brexit vaccine success.
Delegitimising the referendum
Although Remainers made much of their claim on the moral high ground, they betrayed this and damaged themselves by withholding losers’ consent for over four years. This was opportunism: they were seeking to lay the ground for popular and political support for the “people’s vote” campaign for a second referendum; or, failing that, to press for a “soft Brexit”, as befitting a poll with a small majority, or failing to specify an outcome. The reduction in May’s majority after the 2017 election reinvigorated Remain MPs, who represented the result as throwing the referendum into question. This was also unprincipled, as candidates from both major parties had campaigned on manifestoes promising to honour the referendum result.
Even so, Europhiles continued to protest about constitutionality, destination, demographics, manipulation, racism, lies, and executive overreach. None of this changed minds and voters became irritated at hearing that they’d given the wrong answer. The Leave camp saw they were on to a winner and joined in with gusto, arguing as to “advisory” — legally correct but politically tone-deaf in the face of the huge turnout, Cameron’s promise to honour the result and his resignation; “super-majority” — also tone-deaf plus constitutionally irrelevant; “destination” — disingenuous as only a “hard Brexit” made for regulatory, border and trade sovereignty; “older, less-educated voters”, etc — anti-democratic, distasteful and incoherent; “racist,” etc — challenged by poll and crime data; “manipulated” — no convincing evidence, with the Guardian taking its conspiracy-theorist, Carole Cadwalladr, off the story after she lost a libel case to Arron Banks, the founder of Leave EU; “lies” — voters know that campaigning politicians are not on oath; and “overreach” — at odds with the UK’s political culture.
Bad feeling was amplified by parliamentary chaos, including dissident ministers and officials given to leaks, together with guerrilla lawsuits, some persuading the judges but none stopping the train. The increase in temperature led the public to lose patience and to question Remainers’ other messages. The “people’s vote” campaign imploded.
Regulatory sovereignty
Sovereignty was central to Leave voters and the final negotiation, but Remainers never got it. Some could see it only through the lens of immigration, leading to accusations of prejudice. Others relished the thought of binding the UK with the Lilliputian threads of European Court rulings, with a view to undermining Brexit altogether. Remain campaigners minimised the issue, stigmatised it as racist and obfuscated it with “shared sovereignty”, which no-one understood, let alone took seriously.
Leavers were initially divided over their own construction of sovereignty and deliberately failed to specify an outcome during the referendum campaign. The preparations for, and early stages of, negotiations established that only a “hard Brexit” delivered freedom from intervention by the European Court and freedom to strike trade deals. As this emerged, Leavers ignored Remainers’ insults and stuck to their guns. Towards the end of negotiations, “sovereignty” was reframed as “regulatory divergence”, at which point the complications of Ireland entered the limelight. Within a few months, the post-Brexit headlines were “vaccine, nimble, speedboat”, confirming sovereignty’s substance and auguring well for the future.
Border sovereignty — freedom of movement, immigration
Remain campaigners sought to discredit border sovereignty as racist, or as making EU immigrants ill at ease in their new home, or as placing British expats at risk, or as destroying the ideal enabling Britons to “live, love and work in Europe”. They talked up negotiating difficulties, though this was tricky in the face of the strenuous efforts on all sides to minimise human friction.
They also argued that restricting the flow of EU immigrants would lead to labour shortages. There is something in this, though the taint of prejudice prevented discussion of the implications of Commonwealth or other third-world immigrants replacing low-skilled arrivals from the EU. Leavers spoke of the opportunity to substitute better-capitalised or more highly-skilled locals, though it was never clear how this would apply directly to (eg) care homes or hospitality. Long-term expatriates face teething troubles, which the authorities are trying to sort out. “Live, love and work in Europe” turns out too ethereal to interest the general public. Our immigration policy is a work in progress.
At first the Covid epidemic seemed to soften the topic, with one million EU migrants said to have returned home. Attitudes may harden, however, with the number of EU citizens presenting themselves for settlement as much as 66% above estimates, with six million European applications for settlement at the end of June 2021, compared to 3.6m estimated residents in 2016. This suggests that the number at the time of the referendum was close to twice official figures, calls into question the bases upon which the original debate was conducted and gives many millions of reasons to reject the smear that Brexit has made EU immigrants to the UK ill at ease.
Trade sovereignty
Early on, both sides struggled with the ins and outs of the endgame. Remainers warmed to what came to be known as soft Brexit as closest to the status quo — always articulated as minimising disruption; but at the outset Leavers declined to offer a clear destination, offering models including Norway, Switzerland and even Turkey. It took some time for the underlying issue to be definitively flushed out as membership of the Customs Union and of the Single Market. All then ignored the elephant in the room, the UK’s pre-Brexit trading within the EU. By their silence, Remainers conceded the lack of a positive argument. The Customs Union was transparently more useful for European than British exporters of goods. In part, this is because the post-WW2 decline in duties has put emphasis on non-tariff measures, where the EU is a notable offender. Similar considerations apply to the Single Market, in principle more important for the UK as the world’s number two exporter of services, but with years of data showing that it hasn’t done much good for anyone, including this country.3
Unable to make headway on the specifics of trade sovereignty, Remainers instead dwelt upon the sheer proximity and size of the European market, as the “gravity model” of trade beloved by economics geeks, but irrelevant given the EU‘s dysfunctional regime; or on dangers to the City, the taxman’s darling but otherwise too unpopular to attract sympathy; or on the economic implications of the loss of freedom of movement, accurate enough but doomed to fall on deaf ears given Leavers’ appetite for sovereignty. Leavers were happy to aim off such technicalities, as they had so much the best of it on legitimacy and sovereignty. The latter also emerged as the basis for resolving hard vs soft: if the UK was determined to negotiate independently on goods, it had to leave the Customs Union; if similarly inclined on services, it had to leave the Single Market
The Remain camp also ventilated other issues during the campaign and afterwards.
Influence in world, reputation
The Remain camp sought to undermine Brexit by talking up the institutions of the EU and other European bodies (eg, the Human Rights Court), on a view that that British defection would undermine the post-WW2 settlement in Europe, if not the entire “rules-based order”. This was overwrought but understandable, given the coincident chaos of the Trump administration. Remainers also talked up the British courts, which from time to time seemed an avenue to frustrate Brexit altogether. Throughout, they demonised Johnson as irresponsible, with EU figures adding fuel to the flames.4 In the late stages of the negotiations, Remainers made much of the UK on the back foot over prorogation and official hints of walking away from the Northern Ireland Protocol. Concerns about international standing were goosed up by a drip-feed of interviews with retired ambassadors and unattributable leaks from a Foreign Office devoid of direction under May.
Such complaints were ill-founded. May dismissed Trump’s proposal of a claim against the EU and no-one took up Dominic Cummings’ plan to disconcert Brussels by declining to serve Article 50 notice. Instead, the UK has been scrupulous about treaty procedures and timetables. This goes so far as to include the Northern Ireland Protocol, despite what Macron describes as its incohérences, which have led both sides into unmannerly post-agreement jostling. At time of writing, Johnson is holding his own, while remaining a controversial figure. The Foreign Office is pulling out the stops to make the new dispensation work, working up the recent Cornwall G7 and forthcoming COP26; and testing appetites for a D10 group of democracies and a welcome from the CPTPP (Pacific trade pact). If anything, reputational damage is going the other way, what with the EU’s discomfiture over its vaccine roll-out, failures of pragmatism in Ireland, fishing kerfuffles, and the collapse of its deal with Switzerland.
Ireland
Barnier’s memoirs make no secret of his determination to protect the EU’s borders: none of the three alternative frontiers for Ireland works well. The topic came to the fore relatively late in negotiations. Hat-tip to John Major, in other respects so relentless a Remainer as to make it hard to pick out this prescience from his other jeremiads.
Remain campaigners were ostensibly trying to defend the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. Some, however, were happy to use the issue to undermine Brexit altogether — the backstop threatened to keep the UK under EU regulation indefinitely — though so far, I’ve seen no evidence that they were in cahoots with Brussels. Even so, they made no bones of talking up the issue, dwelling on Nationalist sensitivities. They also sought to bring in the US, as a natural sympathiser to the Republic and Nationalist sentiment, as well as a sponsor of the Good Friday Agreement.
The reaction was fury from the Democratic Unionist Party, at the time supporting May’s government; and from the European Research Group, the Brexit ginger-group of Tory MPs. The parliamentary arithmetic plus the Attorney General’s formal opinion kyboshed the backstop and obliged May to resign. In the best case, as things now stand, all parties are stuck with the final arrangement, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which miscalculated the province’s politics by overlooking the Unionists. In the worst case, we’ve all been thrown into uncertainty because the EU entertained the backstop as a gambit to undermine Brexit and the Commons sniffed it out. Either way, the fragile balance in Ulster has been unsettled by disobliging EU officials. A border in the Irish Sea may be better than the intolerable backstop, but it’s hard to see the current set-up lasting for long.
Relations with the US
During the campaign, the UK Government used Obama’s popularity and authority to push for a “Remain” vote. Afterwards, Remain campaigners invoked Trump’s disrepute to tarnish Farage as his buddy and Johnson as (in Trump’s unhelpful words) “Britain Trump”, so as to discredit Brexit as similarly populist. At worst, Europhiles sought to use US influence to inflame the complications of Ireland, lobbying Nancy Pelosi and others, with a view to derailing Brexit altogether.
Obama’s “back of the queue” remarks — intended as a favour to Cameron — turned out self-defeating with UK voters. Trump’s chaos and disrepute prevented any advance on trade during his term. After initial jitters, Biden has reset relations, confirming the UK as a much-trumpeted (but naturally, junior) partner, with trade not yet on the agenda. Ireland is a continuing bugbear: if America's purpose in revealing its démarche on the subject was to mollify domestic sentiment, or placate the EU ahead of the Cornwall G7, or even to clear the air, the leak also recalls Obama’s clumsiness and runs the risk of similar blow-back.
It is true that the US fostered the EU and would have preferred Britain to stay. Nonetheless, the US takes its allies as it finds them: since WW2, it’s weathered greater storms, for example France, Greece, Israel, Korea, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; and eighty years of strategic intimacy count for much.
Fishing
Europhiles used fishing as a parable of the futility of an independent trade stance, in that the ambitions of the UK’s fishing fleet were unrealistic. They talked up the insignificance of the sector, its disproportionate emotional weight on both sides of the Channel and the impossibility of obtaining sovereignty over our waters while our fleet needed access to European markets for its own catch. The public was uninterested, while Leave campaigners kept as quiet as possible, knowing that Remainers had the best of the argument; and that the UK’s fishing fleet is perennially bloody-minded, fragmented and undercapitalised. So far, we have seen bad-tempered stand-offs with French fisherman and disruptive treatment of British imports by EU officials. These teething troubles have been amplified by French electoral politics. The only way out is for HMG to underwrite investment in (and negotiate access for) intercontinental delivery chains, sufficient to leave our fleet relatively invulnerable to the EU market, when both sides revisit the deal in the mid-2020s.
Trade agreements
Remainers argued that the UK could never replicate the EU’s network of trade pacts. They talked up the number of such deals and the difficulty of achieving them. The reaction was indifference by the public and the odd unread monograph from the Leave camp. It was hard not to smile when, during Brexit negotiations, the EU completed agreements with Canada and Japan, formerly stuck for years. A few days after Brexit, the UK rolled over sixty-odd agreements with the marginal economies with which Brussels had struck pre-Brexit deals. Serious-ish deals are now done or close with Australia, India & Japan. Concerns were based on a flawed understanding — sometimes wilful — of the EU’s disappointing performance.
Other issues
Remain campaigners also flagged up data protection, where the UK now has the option to free itself of gold-plated GDPR regulations; defence and foreign policy, from which the MOD was delighted to drop out and where France Germany and Italy are now soliciting bilateral links; the Erasmus scheme for overseas study, although second-eleven European universities never attracted our best and brightest, with twice as many EU students coming here; medical co-operation, where defection has made for Britain’s headline Brexit success; and police and judicial cooperation, which so far is operating satisfactorily at working level. Once again, Remain concerns rested upon a flawed reading of the record.
Tone of voice
In addition to imperfect arguments, the Remain camp suffered from an off-putting manner. Political campaigners have learned to rely upon emotion to win over and retain support. It is no disgrace that leaders of the Remain campaign found it expedient to do so, but their three big emotional themes were inauspicious. First, they made much of their own expertise and authority, together with the support of international economic bodies and local industrial interests. This turned out to be self-defeating, as voters bridled at being asked to take instructions from spokesmen whom the Leave campaign was able to reframe as elitist, remote or self-interested. Second, Remainers dwelt upon the disproportion between Britain and the EU, arguing that the big battalions were bound to have the best of it. If anything this undermined Project Fear, as most voters declined to flinch from, let alone support, the neighbourhood bully. Finally, Remainers claimed to occupy the moral high ground. As already touched on in Delegitimising the referendum and Reputation — influence in the world, they promptly undermined themselves by acting as though this gave them permission to attack Leave voters as ill-informed, racist or otherwise to be disregarded; and to attack the UK government as disreputable, when its tactics brushed up against legal or other norms. Any merits in this last were undermined, as linked to episodic attacks on the UK’s negotiators for proposing “unicorns”, a term popularised by Brussels as rubbishing Britain’s position. Although I have noted the lack of evidence of deliberate co-ordination, nonetheless Europhiles hurt themselves by appearing to delight in undermining the home team. All in all, Remainers’ tone of voice failed to change voters’ minds but here too, we face its aftermath.
Conclusion
Post-Brexit Britain has passed its first test, but there are plenty more to come. Meanwhile, Brexit has been mainland Britain’s most protracted disharmony since the sixteen years of turmoil between the rejection of Castle’s In place of Strife and the defeat of Scargill’s miners. It was prolonged by lack of certainty and May’s unsuccessful leadership; and intensified by the chagrin of defenestrated incumbents and the lefty self-righteousness consistently attested by poll data.5 Good people lost their sense of proportion, but let’s not exaggerate: Home Counties dinner-parties may have been tricky, but at least there was no violence. Compare the coincident gilets jaunes over the Channel, or the violence throughout the West in the 1970s. If we look for a lesson, it would be that Remainers don’t realise that their devastation and anxiety arise because the leaders of their campaign shaved the dice for lack of persuasive arguments. Unfortunately, some still do so.6
This goes some way to explain why Brussels officials and Leave campaigners railed so fiercely against Johnson’s mischievous journalism, which they argue poisoned the British public against the EU with fibs. This is a bit stiff from cultures delighting in Rabelais, de Bergerac, Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo (France); Böll, Brecht, Grass and Simplicimus (Germany); not to say Swift, Hogarth, Dickens, Private Eye, Viz and Rod Liddle (here).
It is some sort of corrective that a poll taken in late April 2021 showed that most French voters have a favourable opinion of Johnson, going so far as to prefer him to Macron. Source: Institut français d'opinion publique. https://www.ifop.com/publication/le-regard-des-francais-sur-boris-johnson. Extracted 4 June 2021
This is despite the failure to implement the commitment that both parties should “by March 2021, agree a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the framework for [financial services] cooperation. The Parties will discuss, inter alia, how to move forward on both sides with equivalence determinations…” (Annex 3 to the Co-operation and Trade Agreement between the EU and the UK). Instead, we have seen bad-tempered exchanges on fishing, Ireland and vaccinations. The City is now preparing to go its own way, independent of EU regulation.
While the UK was a member of the EU, its regime of non-tariff measures (NTMs) put our exporters of goods at a consistent disadvantage. For many years, the OECD has measured these as trade restrictiveness indices (TRIs), with the UK showing by far the lowest NTMs. The EU nudges the Americans but is mercantilist by the standards of Australia, Canada and ourselves.
The OECD also measures TRIs within the EEA (the EU plus Iceland and Norway). The 2019 figures show that the EU has higher internal NTMs than the UK in 20 out of the 22 sectors measured. The worst offender is Austria with barriers 2.5x UK levels; Italy is 2.3x, Germany 2x and France 1.6x. Ireland is closest to the UK at 1.08x, no surprise as Dublin generally follows London. Such differentials have always been present, telling us that the reality of the Customs Union put the UK at a systemic disadvantage: everyone else could sell goods to us more easily than we to them.
The Single Market did equally little for UK service exporters. In August 2020, the EU published its own analysis of internal TRIs for business services (accounting, architecture, computer, engineering and legal). This shows that internal and external barriers for competition are identical in 104 of 115 measures, meaning that by this standard too the Single Market was close to useless for the UK. Sources: OECD. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=STRI; and https://qdd.oecd.org/subject.aspx?Subject=STRI_INTRAEEA; and European Union: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121443. Extracted 21 January 2021. Author’s analysis.
Parenthetically, no-one knows how much co-ordination there was between Brussels and Remain campaigners in this country. In the heat of the moment, some Leavers claimed there was a seamless web between the two. If there was, no-one is talking and so far, there’s no smoking gun. Maybe this is another conspiracy theory.
The poll question is that used for over sixty years to flush out racial prejudice: “How would you feel if your child married a…?” For US data see YouGov America; https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/09/17/republicans-democrats-marriage-poll; 17 September 2020. For UK data, including Brexit affiliation, see YouGov: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/relationships/articles-reports/2019/08/27/labour-voters-more-wary-about-politics-childs-spou; 27 August 2019.
A wonderful example appears in the Guardian, datelined 27 June 2021, where Will Hutton, lifetime critic of free markets and former Principal of Herford College, Oxford, mixes anecdote, bile and cherry-picked statistics under the headline The case for Brexit was built on lies. Five years later, deceit is routine in our politics. Motes and beams come to mind. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/27/case-for-brexit-built-on-lies-five-years-later-deceit-is-routine-in-our-politics. Extracted 28 June 2021.