There is a flaw in the strategy that makes Brexit the central issue, while running on a platform that appeals to public weariness with the topic. That problem feeds back into the incumbency issue. There is something dissonant in a campaign that says vote for me so we can end this nightmare that I told you would be brilliant; vote for the Tories to move on from the only thing Tories seem to care about...A six-week campaign is long enough for those contradictions to show. [And in the near future, when negotiating trade deals] Under Johnson’s plan, a miserably familiar landscape sweeps into view: Brexiteers pretending something impossible is easy, ruling out compromise and denouncing as traitors any who counsel delay. Meet the new rows over Europe, same as the old ones.
Masterful. All we need to do is read the GRun, reel in horror at these contradictions, realise that such a contradictory policy wold end in absurdity -- and vote Liberal? Well no:
The Liberal Democrats have correctly identified article 50 revocation as the efficient way to settle the technical question of Britain’s future relationship with the EU, but it is not something any government likely to be formed after this election could reasonably do
So is that a contradiction as well ? Once you don the right spectacles they are everywhere:
British politics has created a situation so monstrous and writhing with venom that the public cannot bear to look at it...And of all the climates in which to cultivate measured debate on the subject, a frenzied, polarised election campaign is the least hospitable.
Nice genteel and rational election campaigns with measured debate like we have had before? The British press has had nothing to do with this venomous atmosphere of course. Polly Toynbee really loves old people who voted to Leave. Meanwhile, we are having an election, no matter how Behr counsels against. He seems to be just putting his fingers in his ears and whistling.
Meanwhile, back to those contradictions. Behr ends in despair and the consolations of 'told you so' rather than in any brilliant properly dialectic transcendental synthesis and overcoming, so there seems little point As in many cases, possibly all, the sophistication of the dialectic can be resolved by restoring a linear time dimension anyway. So:
Johnson and the others (including me) did believe Brexit would be brilliant - and fairly easy at the first stage. The the EC and the Remainers found all sorts of way to delay, obstruct, and scare people, no doubt hoping for a rethink at a new referendum, as before. Maybe to their surprise it didn't shift public opinion this time. In particular, because of the contingencies and ambiguities of Parliamentary democracy, and the earlier gross incompetence of T May's regime, the Government was able to be thwarted by a loose coalition of MPs pursuing single interest politics, denying their own earlier support for Brexit, and acting as EC useful idiots.There could be no decisive alternative partly because they were split on every other issue. The absurd fixed term Parliament Act deepened the crisis in ways no-one realised at the time.
That was the nightmare that needs ending. It need not have emerged with Brexit but the fact that it was shows how complex and unpredictable politics is, and many Leavers, including me, underestimated the extent and nature of the opposition.
Now we can solve the Parliamentary dimensions of the crisis at least, please God. We might have to wait for the other issues to be resolved. I still don't fully understand the passions that drive Remain, but it is clear that resentment at a successful Brexit will be a persisting force. Perhaps it will last until the millennials switch fully into saving the planet, and old Guardinistas die off a la Toynbee.
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