Transition Period

It is absolutely true that the UK is different, spiritually, from the country that it was before the EU referendum – but how, exactly, beyond the strictly practical matters of trade and migration, is harder to gauge. Ethnic minorities have apparently experienced more racism; and yet public attitudes to immigration and race appear to be more liberal than ever before. Leaving the EU can be described as the UK turning away from a wider world, or towards one, depending on your initial prejudices. Both things can be true. There has been a dreadful process of polarisation through the last three years of misjudgements and mistakes, a process promoted and endorsed by the Conservative Party in its own interests since Mrs May’s disgraceful crack about ‘citizens of nowhere’, and it’s uncorked an emboldened substrate of racism and viciousness which was successfully held down since the late 1970s; but paradoxically it’s also been crowned by a Tory cabinet which is more racially diverse than any in British history (of course possessing a non-white skin doesn’t stop you being a reprehensible individual). The upsurge in racial hate (or, rather, in the willingness to express it) is perhaps not the rise of a cultural wave, but the desperate cry of a nationalism gurgling down the plughole of time. Who knows, yet?

The polarisation has, as these things usually do, enabled different points of view to discover themselves. Before the Referendum I never heard anyone, even the most liberal and internationalist of my friends, arguing that the European Union was the crowning expression of everything good and noble in the human spirit; but that’s it then became. That blue-and-yellow flag developed into a symbol of what it meant to be modern, outward-looking, and generous of heart, even though before the Referendum the chasm between the EU’s lofty humanist claims and what it actually did made the 'Ode to Joy' something of a mournful joke: go on, sing it even now to the erstwhile Syriza voters in Greece whose loved-ones were dying as a result of EU-imposed austerity a few short years ago. Beyond a relatively small number of Euro-enthusiasts, the kind of people I occasionally met in the Liberal Democrats many years back, most liberal-minded British voters only realised that the EU was the core of their sense of self once the country had decided to leave it: no wonder they felt so bereft and angry.

I was caught up in that development, just like everyone else. A Eurosceptic since as long as I thought about it, I found myself absolutely unable to vote Leave as the time approached: I feared disruption to international order, and couldn’t abide finding myself on the same side as the xenophobes and nationalists promoting it, whatever I might have thought in the past. I decided with just a few days to go. The separation was salutary, like all facing-up to the truth.

What’s happened since has certainly made some things clearer. Brexit has been like cold water poured on the hot rocks of the UK constitution. The political system we have has positively encouraged the polarisation of the post-Referendum landscape, making discussion and compromise even less likely than it already was. The executive has hid behind the Crown and strictly political decisions have been forced into the courts. The centralisation of power in the UK – only slightly mitigated by the changes brought in by the last Labour governments – fits into the general winner-takes-all mentality that shapes our whole political life: if you get Westminster, you get everything. And in a general election it doesn’t even have to be winner takes all: yet again we have a Government rewarded by the electoral system with an exaggerated Parliamentary majority on the basis of a minority of the vote. It’s not just unfair, it’s not just unrepresentative, it distorts the whole way we think about ourselves. We’re not a mature democracy at all, because we clearly think that ‘democracy’ means not discussion, compromise and respect for minorities, but dictatorship of the majority, even if that majority might be won by a single vote, and often not that. It all needs to go, and I wasn’t as definite about that before.

Alongside the civilisation-smashing potential of climate change, alongside the need to secure our polity against the minority of bigots who might push it in a malign direction, striving to rejoin the EU looks otiose and I have despaired a bit at the tendency of some of my friends to commit themselves to trying. That battle is done, surely. But perhaps the starry banner has something to offer still: perhaps, paradoxically divested of the actual institution it belongs to, it could indeed stand for the kind of Britain we want to be, and which it isn’t yet. Progress needs a symbol, and it doesn’t yet have one.