{"id":1178,"date":"2016-07-01T16:19:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T16:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=1178"},"modified":"2016-07-03T10:42:48","modified_gmt":"2016-07-03T10:42:48","slug":"what-should-campaigners-do-about-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=1178","title":{"rendered":"What Should Campaigners Do About Brexit ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Rose\u00a0 chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk<\/a> \u00a01 July 2016<\/p>\n

Out of disruption comes change, out of chaos comes opportunity.\u00a0 In the UK, thanks to the narrow 52:48 pro-Brexit vote at the EU referendum of 23 June, we have both.\u00a0 Everything has changed and NGOs need to react to that.<\/h2>\n

The instinct of British voluntary sector or civil society groups is to \u2018stay out\u2019 of politics, and their reflex is to hunker down, wait for things to blow over and make friends with whoever ends up running the country when normal service is resumed.\u00a0 Usually this would be a good strategy but not now.<\/h2>\n

This time they should help those young, positive, forward thinking and optimistic young people who voted to Remain, to take the opportunity to change Britain for the better.\u00a0 If they do not, the NGOs themselves risk becoming increasingly irrelevant.<\/h2>\n

\"demo\"<\/p>\n

picture: Olly Wainwright<\/em><\/p>\n

A Tragi-Comedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Brexit referendum results from a tragic comedy of errors, brought about by long,\u00a0 slow separation of politics from the people, and short-term political miscalculations.<\/p>\n

The unexpected Brexit result shocked the waiting audience because it went against all expectations, including those of most who voted to Leave<\/a> and the leaders of the Leave campaign itself.<\/p>\n

As soon as the curtain lifted on what should have been the Final Act on 24 June, the chief actors tumbled fighting onto the stage.\u00a0 The Prime Minister committed political suicide, principal characters got assassinated, the two main Political Parties at once descended into chaos, and what should have been minor characters now strut and swagger in the limelight.<\/p>\n

The critics are dumbfounded. \u00a0\u00a0Living in Britain right now means living with a new political earthquake every day.\u00a0 So much so that pundits and commentators are almost lost for words.\u00a0 I fear we may soon face a national shortage of political metaphors.<\/p>\n

And now the audience has discovered that the premise of the whole story may be false: the choice they were asked to make may be impossible to implement.\u00a0 It\u2019s not over.\u00a0 \u00a0Some want their money back but those who promoted the play claim that the box office is closed.\u00a0 Angry and dismayed, the audience has spilled out into the streets, fearful for homes, their children, their jobs, future and country.\u00a0 Nobody knows how it will end.\u00a0 A new chapter is needed and if civil society organisations take no part in that, they may find the new story has no happy ending.<\/p>\n

The Story So Far<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the plot of the tragicomedy as described in a much shared Facebook post by Benjamin Timothy Blaine a few days ago<\/p>\n

So, let me get this straight… the leader of the opposition campaigned to stay but secretly wanted to leave, so his party held a non-binding vote to shame him into resigning so someone else could lead the campaign to ignore the result of the non-binding referendum which many people now think was just angry people trying to shame politicians into seeing they’d all done nothing to help them. <\/em><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the man who campaigned to leave because he hoped losing would help him win the leadership of his party, accidentally won and ruined any chance of leading because the man who thought he couldn’t lose, did – but resigned before actually doing the thing the vote had been about. The man who’d always thought he’d lead next, campaigned so badly that everyone thought he was lying when he said the economy would crash – and he was, but it did, but he’s not resigned, but, like the man who lost and the man who won, also now can’t become leader. Which means the woman who quietly campaigned to stay but always said she wanted to leave is likely to become leader instead. <\/em><\/p>\n

Which means she holds the same view as the leader of the opposition but for opposite reasons, but her party’s view of this view is the opposite of the opposition’s. And the opposition aren’t yet opposing anything because the leader isn’t listening to his party, who aren’t listening to the country, who aren’t listening to experts or possibly paying that much attention at all. However, none of their opponents actually want to be the one to do the thing that the vote was about, so there’s not yet anything actually on the table to oppose anyway. And if no one ever does do the thing that most people asked them to do, it will be undemocratic and if any one ever does do it, it will be awful. <\/em><\/p>\n

Clear?<\/em><\/p>\n

Read Vox<\/em> magazine\u2019s useful explanation of what this actually means here<\/a> .<\/p>\n

The Brexit vote came about because of short term political miscalculation.\u00a0 The reason a referendum was called at all, and the reactions to it, is a far longer backstory<\/a> of gradual decay and hollowing out of British politics in the widest sense.<\/p>\n

The Backstory<\/strong><\/p>\n

For generations, Britain\u2019s formal political connections between people, Parliament, Government and governance (running the country and getting stuff done), have thinned and frayed.\u00a0 The old machinery of local, regional and national political representation and delivery is still there but short-term political advantage has been to do less, while maintaining a pretence that you are in fact in control of outcomes, using electoral promises and attempting subsequent command of the media space.\u00a0 The military, the National Health Service and so far the police, mostly remain directly accountable along the old lines but much else that matters, such as basic services, transport, infrastructure and education has, so far as possible, been delegated to the market.\u00a0 Consequently there has been less and less agency through voting.<\/p>\n

Participation in formal politics has dwindled but the edifice has survived so long as enough people felt life was getting better,\u00a0 could get better or they were secure in feeling it would get no worse.\u00a0 \u00a0This reflected the progressive shift from a Settler-dominated society, in which political allegiances were \u2018tribal\u2019 and the public broadly respectful of conventional authority, to one in which Settlers were a minority (now 24%<\/a>), and most national political competition was for the \u2018aspirational\u2019 Prospector vote.\u00a0 Since the 2008 financial crisis but going back much further to the crushing of the Trade Unions by Margaret Thatcher and the technological and lifestyle changes of the 1960s, many Settlers have felt themselves increasingly \u2018adrift\u2019, ignored by most politicians, left-behind by a changing world and without political leaders who spoke for them.\u00a0 Enter UKIP, with a radical simple sounding solution, of leaving the EU.<\/p>\n

The same values-shift and polarisation process has taken place in other European countries (eg Germany, France and Italy<\/a>) but Britain was particularly ill-prepared to maintain a sense of cohesion and community.\u00a0 In common with the US it has a socially dysfunctional first-past-the-post political system which encourages adversarial polarisation on every issue, and a political class dominated by Labour and Conservative politicians schooled in a perpetual struggle to take power from one another while marginalising the huge parts of society who were politically too widely distributed to elect many MPs (eg the Liberal Democrats, Greens, UKIP) because we have no national Proportional Representation.\u00a0 Except of course in European Elections which few in England take part in.<\/p>\n

So for generations, many people who wanted reform and change (mainly Pioneers, now 38%) put their efforts into setting up or supporting NGOs or Non-Governmental Organisations: a huge part of civil society.\u00a0 By \u2018getting stuff done\u2019 through campaigns to influence policy they became a form of \u2018people\u2019s politics<\/a>\u2019, filling a gap where the public interest was not met through the market or formal politics. \u00a0They have even worked to influence business and with business to by-pass politics altogether and create outcomes in forms of unpolitics<\/a> or consumer politics.<\/p>\n

But that is a very hit and miss and incomplete process.\u00a0 The charity and voluntary sector has grown big enough to be hard to completely ignore but remained weak enough to not change major outcomes where the main political parties are opposed, on sustainability for instance. \u00a0\u00a0Charities lack the resources to replace the state, and campaigns, whether by Greenpeace, health charities promoting particular medical needs or 38 Degrees, often only pick off the cases where public attention can be focused for long enough to make politicians look \u2018out of step\u2019 with opinion.<\/p>\n

Britain also lacks the consensus-seeking mechanisms which involve politicians, business, labour and civil society which are still quite common in Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.\u00a0 \u00a0The social connections between different classes, values groups, regions and interest groups are threadbare.<\/p>\n

Normal political elections in Britain do not offer a way to change these arrangements but the Brexit referendum pulled a thread which activated and divided society.<\/p>\n

Britain in Shock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now Britain is in shock.\u00a0 It faces many developments that people who voted Leave or Remain might consider disastrous, and which few of them seriously considered before the referendum.<\/p>\n

So profound is the turmoil that developments which would normally rank as national political crises in themselves, go almost un-discussed.\u00a0 For instance the Scottish National Party wants a new referendum on independence and \u2018Republican\u2019 politicians in Northern Ireland talk of merging with the Irish Republic, which if Britain leaves the EU will be across a \u2018hard\u2019 land border, undoing the work of successive Irish and UK governments which have toiled for decades to make it irrelevant as possible.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile media attention focusses on the entertaining mass dog-fights that have broken out in both the two main political parties.\u00a0 Labour and Conservatives are both pulling themselves apart through internal leadership struggles. \u00a0Boris Johnson, face of the \u2018Leave\u2019 campaign victorious in the referendum, emerged as front runner to replace Prime Minister David Cameron, only to be politically assassinated by Michael Gove, his running mate, days later.\u00a0\u00a0 The same day, Teresa May took over as Conservative party front runner to be Prime Minister. She announced<\/a> she would abandon one of the main planks of economic austerity insisted upon by George Osborne: to achieving a budget surplus by the end of the Parliament.\u00a0 Normally this would make headlines but it was relegated to an aside.<\/p>\n

In Labour, there is a life and death struggle between the MPs, who are broadly aligned to the Labour voters, and the slew of new Members who support the \u2018hard left\u2019 leader Jeremy Corbyn,\u00a0 an ethical warrior with little popular touch who has proved himself limited in Westminster.\u00a0 Corbyn was effectively elected by accident when the party changed its rules and was colonised by left wing activists, who do not care if they are of touch with potential voters because they are on a \u2018long march\u2019 to socialism.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile predominantly young and \u2018non-political\u2019 people who voted \u2018Remain\u2019 in the referendum have taken to the streets to protest in favour of the EU<\/a>.\u00a0 This has simply never happened before in the UK.\u00a0\u00a0 They look to me like the mostly young, educated Prospectors and Pioneers which Ashcroft polling<\/a> and CDSM surveys suggest<\/a> will have voted to Remain.<\/p>\n

Government itself is in limbo: major and supposedly critical infrastructure decisions such as on a new or extended London Airport<\/a> are simply being kicked into the distant long grass.\u00a0 Sterling has dropped in value.\u00a0 Big Business is furious and demanding continued access to the Single European Market, which the Leave campaign said could be accomplished along with immigration controls but EU politicians now say is impossible.\u00a0 Britain will lose the \u2018Financial Passport<\/a>\u2019 if Brexit is implemented and as a result banks plan to transfer jobs to Europe and the European banking Authority will leave London<\/a>.\u00a0 A range of<\/a> \u00a0business<\/a> investments and property deals are being frozen.\u00a0 Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England forsees<\/a> a cut in interest rates below the record low of 0.5%.<\/p>\n

Most of the people voting to \u2018Leave\u2019 thought the outcome would be<\/a> to remain (ie it was a safe \u2018protest vote\u2019) and it\u2019s widely thought that the leaders of the Leave campaign expected to lose but it would boost their chances of taking over from their party colleague David Cameron, as Prime Minister.\u00a0 In other words it was a cock-up.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just the start of it.<\/p>\n

Why It\u2019s Not Over<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing campaigners need to realise if they don\u2019t already is that it\u2019s not over, for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Legal Obstacles to Brexit<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There was a Brexit vote but it\u2019s quite possible the UK will not invoke Article 50 (nothing to do with Area 51<\/a> but the so far untested mechanism for a country to exit the EU). \u00a0The referendum is not legally binding but merely a sort of official opinion poll.\u00a0 David Cameron said he was bound by it as Prime Minister but that was a political statement not a legal obligation, and he then passed the decision to his successor. \u00a0\u00a0A Cambridge Professor of International Law<\/a> and the UK Constitutional Law Association both argue<\/a> \u00a0that whether to invoke Article 50 and on what terms must involve a debate in Parliament.\u00a0 Before Brexit can be triggered, it is argued that Parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act<\/a><\/p>\n

    These legal points could create grounds for a challenge in the Courts (a Judicial Review) if any attempt is made to invoke Article 50 without action by Parliament.\u00a0 Front runner Teresa May currently says this will not be until December 2016 and that negotiations with the EU could take \u2018several years\u2019.<\/p>\n

    \"unlawful\"<\/p>\n

    The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Political Resistance to Brexit<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      David Lammy MP has called<\/a> for Parliament to vote down Brexit.\u00a0 In the UK which has a representative democracy, Parliament is sovereign, not referenda.\u00a0 Pro-European Conservative Peer Lord Heseltine has pointed out that<\/a> \u201cThere is a majority of something like 350 in the House of Commons broadly in favour of the European relationship\u201d.<\/p>\n

      Labour MP Geraint Davies has filed an Early Day Motion<\/a> in the House of Commons making a similar call.\u00a0 His bid says \u201cUK citizens must agree on the terms of leaving the EU and, if not satisfied, be given the opportunity to opt for the UK to remain an EU member\u201d.<\/p>\n

      The Liberal Democrats have declared they will run at the next General Election on a ticket of re-entering the EU, if Brexit takes place.\u00a0 The Greens have proposed an alliance with the SNP and others. \u00a0\u00a0So far these are merely straws in the wind and Labour, the theoretical but non-functioning Official Opposition, has played no part but in the next months, anything could happen.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Public Opinion<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Although the new Conservative government will no doubt make strenuous efforts to \u2018manage\u2019 public opinion and make it seem like Brexit is inevitable, if there is sufficient opposition and in particular if some of those who voted Leave are shown to now wish they had not voted Leave, this position may become untenable.<\/p>\n

        It is already claimed on the basis of a Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday<\/a> that over a million people \u2018regret\u2019 having voted Leave. \u00a0\u00a0It would only take 2 or 3% of those who voted Leave to decide it should have been Remain for the non-binding Brexit referendum result to lose its political credibility.<\/p>\n

        A steady stream of such reports started immediately after the result, such as<\/a> one who tweeted\u00a0 \u201cpersonally voted leave believing these lies and I regret it more than anything, I feel genuinely robbed of my vote\u201d.<\/p>\n

        Before the referendum leading Brexiteer Nigel Farage said that a 48%:52% result against leaving would not be the end of the matter, it would be \u201cunfinished business\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 Likewise on 27 June Boris Johnson<\/a> said that the 52% :48% result in favour of Leave was \u201cnot entirely overwhelming\u201d, which is one reason why Leavers doubted that he would ever see it through.<\/p>\n

        Whereas both the Leave and Remain camps seem to have had no real plans for what would happen in the event of a Leave result (not least as they were internally divided),\u00a0 the Swiss Bank Credit Suisse produced this analysis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

        \"Swiss<\/p>\n

        Note the box \u2018swing in public opinion due to uncertainty, recession and austerity\u2019.\u00a0 Factors which could lead to such as swing in opinion in the short term (this year before any chance to invoke Article 50) include:<\/p>\n