Absolutely spot on!
Brexit ‘liberation day’ is self-serving fantasy
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Leavers know they can’t be proved wrong if the measure of success is freedom from the yoke rather than economic gain
Philip Collins
Thursday January 30 2020, 5.00pm, The Times
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In Cambodia it is January 7. In Kuwait, February 26. In the United States it is March 3, it is May 8 in the Czech Republic and July 4 in Rwanda. In Turkey it is celebrated on August 30 and the following day by the Lithuanians. In Bangladesh it is December 16. National liberation day in these nations commemorates, respectively, the defeat of the murderous Khmer Rouge, the expulsion of Iraq, the emancipation of slaves in Charlottesville, Virginia, liberation from Nazi Germany, the deposing of a genocidal tyrant, the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the withdrawal of the Russian army after half a century of occupation and the creation of a brand new nation out of Pakistan. None of these days of national liberation describe the voluntary departure of a sovereign democracy from a voluntary alignment of its rules regarding trade in goods and services.
Much the worst thing about the politicians and pundits who led the charge for Brexit is how susceptible they are to rank stupidity. I am not saying there are no reasons at all to wish to the leave the European Union; I am merely saying that the desire to be free is not one of them. The implication, that Britain has been in servitude since 1973, would be offensive to those who have endured genuine suffering if it were not so manifestly absurd. Brexit is a petty local dispute by comparison. It does not warrant this pathetic borrowed grandeur. Yet, as the prominent Brexit cheerleaders unfurl their flags and banners for their ode to joy at our departure, this is the rhetorical idiocy of the time.
The ascent into melodramatic rhetoric is always a tip-off that the speaker has nothing to say. The reason that Brexit has to be described as freedom from oppression is that it is hard to know what else it is, if it is not that. A notable feature of the sorry Brexit saga has been the vastly diminished expectations of even those pressing for departure. Whereas, in a lost and more innocent age in late 2016, Daniel Hannan could write his comic masterpiece, What Next, in which he looked forward to the day that Britain would emerge blinking into the light of a new dawn, to the sound of a nearby gurgling brook. After Mrs May’s downbeat tenure and Mr Johnson’s bluster the tone had changed completely. For a long while now the argument has been no more elevated than we have started so we had better finish. For all Mr Johnson’s fabled optimism it is hard, from what he says, to glean why we are doing this at all.
The reason for the silence where the good, persuasive reasons should be is that Brexit is not a rational project. I do not mean it is therefore irrational. I mean that before it is rational and mathematical it is psychological and emotional. By what measure will Brexit be judged a success or a failure, in the course of time, by its advocates? A higher trend rate of growth? A better performance than the average of the European economies? Regional growth led by inventive regulation that would have been stifled by the EU? It will be none of these things because Brexit was never an economic project for the Goves and Johnsons and Farages. It was, at the risk of emptying the term of meaning, a philosophical project. It was a liberation movement and there lies the secret of its success. Brexit is proof of what Aristotle pointed out in The Art of Rhetoric, that an appeal to the emotions trumps an appeal to the mind.
The description of Brexit as a liberation from the European yoke is also a proof against failure. If Brexit is defined by detaching British law from Europe then success is guaranteed merely by enacting departure. At 11pm this evening success will arrive. Yesterday we were in bondage; today we are free and freedom is its own reward. Brexit, conceived in this way, cannot fail which makes it obvious the argument is rigged. This is obvious self-serving rubbish which Messrs Gove and Johnson are bright enough to understand. The honest thing for them to do would to be set themselves some targets for what Brexit will achieve. How do they think they will be proved right, in the fullness of time? Brexit allows us to diverge from Europe but to what end and to what beneficial consequence we still, remarkably, have no idea.
