Luke McGee, a journalist working until recently with CNN, has been a reasonable and balanced commentator on Brexit affairs over the last few years. What he says is to be taken seriously and as reflective of the kinds of conversations that would be taking place among decision-makers and policy-influencers. It is for this reason that it is worth addressing his latest piece with a full counter-argument and not just a couple tweets. For while his position is reasoned, I do think it is completely wrong and that for it to be become commonly accepted wisdom would, in his words, “set the Europhile cause back five years or more”.
The full piece is here but the brief summary is as follows. Rejoiners and other pro-Europeans should hold off from pushing for any significant improvement in our relationship with the EU. Starmer’s current stated position – no free movement, no Single Market, no Customs Union – should be respected and any campaign should stay within those lines. Trying to go further risks a political backlash and reigniting the Brexit-based polarisation that characterised 2016-19. In particular, campaigning for the Single Market is marked out as no kind of easy solution, given the difficult reality of becoming a rule-taker. He is certainly not the only person to have made this argument, just a recent, prominent one.
From the outset, it’s not clear who this message is really addressed to – ordinary people, campaign groups or political parties? Although the piece often talks about pro-Europeans in general, the push for the Single Market over full EU membership is not a bottom-up grassroots demand. The pro-EU protest taking place on the 28th of this month is the ‘National Rejoin March’, not the National March for Single Market Membership. If the focus on the Single Market comes from anywhere, it comes from people in Westminster and Fleet Street. It is itself the product of the kind of logic – climbing down from preferred options in order to reflect political realities – that the article declares is necessary for pro-Europeans to adopt.
If the message is addressed to ordinary people then it can be put aside relatively quickly. It is not, after all, the job of the public to manage trade-offs on behalf of political leaders. Though it became increasingly common during the Brexit years, the idea that voters must be more reasonable in what they ask of leaders is not normally how democracy functions. Similarly, campaign groups are meant to be representative of grassroots demands. They are vehicles for turning public opinion into policy. It is still the job of political leaders to then assess the range of different groups and demands before finding the right trade-offs according to their political views and their electoral coalition.
If the message is really destined for political leaders (principally the Liberal Democrats and the Greens), it seems they are already taking on board the principle of political compromise, but perhaps have not climbed down far enough. However, if pro-European parties are expected to compromise on the compromises, and potentially compromise on those too, then we quickly fall all the way down the ladder and end up more or less at the status quo. This would mean that pro-Europeans are left with political representation that is based solely on demands that are small in scale, easily met and thus very low pressure. In that context, from the perspective of the British government, it would always appear that the greater political demand comes from the Brexit hardliners, in Parliament and in the media. The government would then water down the position still further as part of a ‘compromise’ solution between the two. Under this approach, it is hard to see how the end result is not always pro-Europeans getting almost nothing.
It seems to me that there are two main counters to that conclusion. One is that the ‘steady steps’ method of delivering small improvements to the UK’s relationship with the EU would naturally increase people’s positivity towards European integration and so help build a high level of public support for taking the next step. This seems like a large and unproven assumption. In practice, more exposure to European integration does not automatically improve public opinion towards it, even when they receive material benefits as a result. We should be especially wary of this in an environment where pro-Europeans are reluctant to be vocal but Brexiteers are always trying to set the terms of the debate. More generally, small steps do not necessarily make you more likely to endorse a big leap to another, significantly different level. European integration is not a steady slope all the way up to EU membership; there are some small shifts and some large jumps. Moving into the Single Market – accepting free movement, accepting EU law – is a large jump. If you are in the circa 40% of voters telling pollsters today you would vote to stay out of the EU, there is nothing intrinsic to having a youth mobility agreement or an SPS deal that would make you more willing to make that jump.
The other likely counter is that structural pressures, arising from the state of the economy mainly, would act as the driving force for Britain to adopt closer relations with the EU. Yet if one of our overriding concerns if political acceptability, then simply sitting back and drifting towards this end point seems like a particular bad way of going about it. The idea that going back to European integration is something that must be actively sold to the public is something we all agree on. But that is ground that must be prepared long in advance. If you want to get back into the EU or even the Single Market in the 2030s, then the time to start talking about it, to debate the trade-offs and convince the public that policies like free movement are actually a good thing, is now – not in the 12 months leading up to it. The idea you can pull off a quick turnaround in public opinion after years (arguably decades) of talking down European integration is how the Cameronites ended up calling and losing a referendum on the EU in the first place.
In provoking these conversations, it will indeed lead to a certain degree of politicisation and maybe even polarisation. That is a feature, not a flaw, of policy change in a democracy. Effective change happens through mass, regular engagement of the public with policy. I fear that the particularly toxic nature of the 2016-19 debates on Brexit has led people to conclude that public debate is a bad thing, a necessary evil that should be minimised and truncated wherever possible. It seems to me that the correct lesson from Brexit is that the opposite is true: you will spend many years holding wall-to-wall debates on a major decision regardless, so best to do it long before you take the decision rather than after.
Beyond this, I am not convinced that betting on economic pressure is a path that pro-Europeans should adopt. Part of the reason Britain ended up in the mess that it has on European integration is because political leaders spent so long treating it as nothing more than an economic necessity. To do so again and to try to re-engage with the EU on a purely negative basis (‘we need this because the economy is weak’) would be an original sin that would infect EU relations for many years after. If Britain is to dive back into the European pool, it is infinitely preferable that everyone feels we have willingly jumped as a result of a belief in the cause of European unity rather than been pushed by destitution and distress.
I am not even convinced that such a strategy would work anyway. The economic pressures that drive Britain towards European integration are not new, nor are they particularly more acute today than during most of the EU’s history. Yet we have seen repeated evidence, over the decades of membership and into the Brexit era, that political pressures can and do win out over structural ones. What was the 2016 Brexit vote if not a definitive triumph of political campaigning and political values over what economic logic told us we should do?
Against all of this, I believe there is a more effective approach for pro-European parties and one that will be necessary in order to actually bring the UK back into the EU.
First, do not fear politicisation. While it has become something of a dirty word, politicisation, when done right, can be synonymous with popular engagement in the democratic process. That this would mean opponents would also get a chance to air their views is not something to be concerned about because it is ultimately unavoidable. For complex and important issues (like, for example, rejoining the EU), the priority should be that debates are allowed to unfold over time, with the space to explore each aspect and for the public to learn, question and adjust. European integration, right across Europe, has been marked by too little politicisation, opening the way to populists. Britain’s new approach should steer clear of technocratic dominance from the outset.
Second, demand what you want. From the perspective of the public, this is fairly obvious. Politicians are generally unlikely to supply policies for which there is no public demand. If you want Rejoin or Single Market you need to insist on Rejoin or Single Market. If not, politicians will listen to the people who are (loudly, incessantly) demanding more Brexit. But smaller political parties should also take this approach on board. Realistically, neither the Greens or the Lib Dems are going to be forming a government any time soon. What they can do is apply pressure on Labour and the Tories to offer more by shifting the Overton window in public debate. Even a relatively unsuccessful party, simply by existing and having a clutch of elected officials, can help generate momentum in this way if the two main parties start fearing they will lose votes. Public demands and political party pressure combined is exactly the one-two punch that Brexiteers used to knock out centre-right pro-Europeans and keep the Tories bound to Brexit in the years since. Learning from that and executing its reverse is far from an unreasonable approach.
Third, don’t launch yourself down the compromise slide. Compromise in politics is often a noble virtue. Pre-emptive compromise, before the debate as even really got going, probably shows you’re a pushover. This is especially true if your opponents show no inclination of returning the favour and fully intend to sit on their current positions (a probably fair assessment of most Brexiteers today). If you open with a compromise then you will likely be asked to keep compromising further and, if you continue to do the noble thing, you risk getting very little at all. Hold back compromise as an asset, a future reserve to be deployed if there is no better alternative after the fight is done.
Fourth, be willing to try and move public opinion. It has become an unfortunate feature of modern politics that politicians and parties often do not want to advocate for something if the public is not pretty much already in agreement with them. The process of convincing and persuading is seen as far too risky and uncertain. Yet this removes agency from politics and forces us to imagine that public opinion is a dead weight that must be moved around, as opposed to something that we actively shape. If you are months away from an election, there can be an argument for cleaving close to where the public is. But if you have a number of years ahead of you (and we do), there is certainly time to successfully move public opinion to where you want it to be. To resign yourself to the idea that you cannot shift public opinion is a defeatism that will only cede the field to your opponents.
I believe that these ideas, when brought together, would give us a more positive and likely more successful route for Britain’s pro-Europeans. It would still need real-world actions to match the theory and for these actions to be well-executed (talking about the idea of changing people’s minds is a lot easier than actually doing it). Nonetheless, the alternative approach, absent an organic groundswell of pro-European sentiment, has little chance of actually delivering the future Britain today’s pro-Europeans wish for.
Excellent discussion. Yes, compromising in advance is a major problem.