A good piece, trailed in Briefings from Britain today, by R Tombs in Spiked,trying to puzzle out exactly what the case is for Rejoin.
As he notes, the economic arguments during the Referendum were motivated by Operation Fear, and the arguments now seems to depend on dubious comparisons with 'doppelganger' economies (much criticised, including in this blog -- which countries do you compare with the UK? How do you control the other variables like the Crash of 2008, oil price rises, wars, embargoes, Covid and policies like aiming for net zero?).
As a commentary in Briefings... puts it
the Remain view (also a feature of the BBC documentary) ...[is that].. the years between 2016 and 2026 are abridged: ... there is a straight line from the referendum to soaring debt, poor productivity and border chaos. Remain, in this view, is vindicated. The lockdowns and failures of individual politicians are secondary consequences: Brexit is the first cause of our present woes.
So what does that leave? Tombs seems to argue towards an autonomy for the political interests of what he comes close to identifying as a ruling class or elite. These are expressed in 'political' and personal terms -- they want to be included in major political and economic decisions and the UK is no longer a big enough actor on the ''world stage'. First they pinned their hopes in the Commonwealth as a kind of free trade dominion,then the stages of the EU -- the initial Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market etc. They never committed to the ideology of European unification,unlike the political elite in European countries,most of whom had unfortunate pasts to live down and persistent rivalries to manage.
So there still is no strong case for Rejoin, or not one that can have public appeal. It has ideological appeal, but even there it is ill-formed, never quite explicit (it would be laughable if it were made explicit). The most popular aspects of it, like nationalism and patriotism, are self-defeating and anyway better expressed by various emergent right-wing alternatives,not monopolised by the major traditional political parties since the first decade of this century.
To put it bluntly -- what is the appeal of promoting the ideological interests, the wishes to belong, to have seats at various tables, to find a new role fro themselves, of privileged knobs?
The Briefings team have also produced a book. I have it. I'll deliver some summaries. Meanwhile, buy it on Amazon here
Brexit: The Facts Strike Back
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