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Excellent piece from Adam Boulton in the Sunday Times.
The UK in a Changing Europe think tank “promotes rigorous, high quality research” supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. Participants at its recent conference on “Brexit and public opinion” came from all sides. One lady accused me, as a representative of the mainstream media, of having “your head up your bum” for not reporting on what she said was a Europe-wide popular uprising against trade deals. She didn’t storm the room wearing a balaclava to make her point, unlike protesters against Jacob Rees-Mogg at a student event in Bristol, but passions are running high.
Nineteen months on, British society is still just as deeply polarised as it was on referendum day: June 23, 2016. According to Professor Sara Hobolt and colleagues at the London School of Economics, 35% of the public identify themselves as leavers, 40% as remainers. These identifications are much stronger than identification with political parties.
If the issue of Brexit is still livid at the time of the next general election it has the potential, but only the potential, to be the decisive factor in determining the winner. If politicians really want to win power they must handle this highly explosive issue with the utmost care, even though their efforts may be in vain because opinions about Brexit are impervious to reasoned argument. Leavers are disinclined to acknowledge that any harm could come from Brexit and remainers won’t consider that there might be benefits. In contrast to traditional politics, there is no respect for a person’s right to hold a different opinion. Each Brexit camp is prejudiced against the other, readily branding its adherents as “hypocritical”, “selfish” and “closed-minded”.With so much emotion in play, both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have been wise to keep their positions on Europe ambiguous for as long as possible. Corbyn’s Euroscepticism tempers his party’s inclination for a Norway-style close alignment with the bloc. The prime minister has so far built on “Brexit means Brexit” with detail-free policy speeches. Neither leader has explained how they would square the circle with participation in “a”, certainly not “the”, single market or customs union.
Brexit partisan zealotry is still sweeping through both parties. Activists in each are demanding that their leaders take a firmer and clearer stance. The Labour pressure is all in one direction — for a clearer commitment to continued close ties to the European Union. The Conservative Party is bitterly divided. Frustrated that May and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, tack from side to side, Tory leavers and remainers are uniting behind the slogan “lead or leave”. Both sides are impatiently demanding that the prime minister must assert herself — but in opposite directions. Rees-Mogg is the favourite of the bookies and the ConservativeHome straw poll to be the next Tory leader and thereby prime minister. He wants a clean break with the EU as soon as possible and dismisses the transition period that the government is seeking as “a Norman conquest”, which would make Britain a “vassal state”. Unlike his ally, the Brexit minister Steve Baker, he has not apologised for promulgating the false slur that Treasury officials “deliberately developed a model to show that all options other than staying in the customs union were bad”.
On the other side the former minister Anna Soubry, Tory MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire, urged the prime minister “to get a grip” to avoid “a Brexit nightmare” brought about by around 40 “hard Brexiteer” MPs who, she said, would not hesitate to destroy the party to obtain their ends. Soubry favours another referendum to endorse a soft Brexit centred on membership of the European Free Trade Association.
