Beware the cult of Brexit

[Denzil_DC]

Nick Cohen

In their frequent moments of self-congratulation, conservatives describe themselves as level-headed and practical people. If there were a scintilla of truth in the stories they tell themselves the government would not think of activating Article 50 this week. Unfortunately, for our country, actual conservatives and mythical conservatives have next to nothing in common. Unconstrained by a political opposition and egged on by a Tory press that makes Breitbart seem like a reputable news service, modern Tories resemble no one so much as the right-wing parody of left wingers: utopian, contemptuous of detail and convinced the world owes them a living.

No practical government would invoke Article 50 this week, this month or any time before the end of the year. The next six months in the EU will be filled by the Dutch, French and German elections. The French elections will undoubtedly produce a new government with a different view of Brexit. The German election just might produce one too.

... there is every likelihood that nothing worth noticing will happen in the first six months of the two years, because everyone will be waiting for European electorates to vote. The last months will be taken up with trying to get a deal (assuming there is a deal) ratified by the European parliament (every parliament on the continent will have a say on Brexit, you should note, except the British parliament).

... Political common sense would tell May and the Cabinet to delay implementing Article 50, and to prepare the country for trouble ahead. That they do not suggests that they are in a cultish trance. As does their failure to celebrate. You must have noticed that instead, of rejoicing that they have at last found their heart’s desire, Brexiteers harangue the rest of us with angry diatribes against our refusal to share their faith. They are the spit of true believers who cannot accept that heretics refuse to see the way and the truth and the life.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/beware-cult-brexit/

[Denzil_DC]

1. More in a similar vein:

May’s diplomatic blunders will cost Britain dear in Brexit talks
Rafael Behr

There aren’t many rules to drug dealing, but one of them is not to get high on your own supply. The product is for punters, and getting wasted is bad for business. The equivalent rule in politics is not to be taken in by your own spin. Prime ministers employ people to push positive stories about them on Westminster street corners. But they shouldn’t consume that line themselves.

Theresa May is sitting on a consignment of Brexit. The street value is unknown. The quality is hard to ascertain because it has been cut with bad promises, myths and unrealistic expectations. The spun version depicts a nation on the threshold of ecstatic liberation. Foreigners will no longer make the laws, nor swarm the shores.

When urging MPs not to tamper with the bill permitting activation of article 50, May said it was “time to get on with … building an independent, self-governing, global Britain”. Anyone who queries the prime minister’s approach wants a subjugated, dependent, non-global Britain. May’s Brexit is the only Brexit, and it’s the good stuff – clean, pure, no nasty side-effects.

...

May could have allayed anxiety with personal diplomacy, but that has never been her style. She is reserved with cabinet ministers she has known for years. With European leaders she has been formal to the point of rudeness, sticking to prepared speaking notes and gnomic banalities. Even in bilateral chats, where friendly counterparts have offered support in exchange for insight into May’s thinking, the prime minister has used her “Brexit means Brexit” line, unaware of how insulting it is to fob off the head of an EU power with a vacuous media soundbite.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/14/theresa-may-brexit-talks-prime-minister-diplomacy-eu

Longer read made shorter: May is as useless as Prime Minister as she was as Home Secretary. Who could have known?

[T_i_B]

2. Another good article on the self-delusion theme

If only politics in 2017 wasn't fuelled by delusions...

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/03/tinkerbell-theory-politics-failures-my-lack-belief

The moment you doubt whether you can fly,” J M Barrie once wrote, "You cease for ever to be able to do it.” Elsewhere in the same book he was blunter, still: “Whenever a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.”

I would never have expected that Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century, if I’m honest. But predictions are not my strongpoint, and over the last few years, what one might term the Tinkerbell Theory of Politics has played an increasingly prominent role in national debate. The doubters’ lack of faith, we are told, is one of the biggest barriers to flight for everything from Jeremy Corbyn’s poll ratings to Brexit. Because we don’t believe, they can’t achieve.

It’s easy to see why the Tinkerbell strategy would be such an attractive line of argument for those who deploy it - one that places responsibility for their own f*ck-ups squarely on their critics, thus rendering them impervious to attack. Corbyn’s failure becomes the fault of the Blairites. A bad Brexit becomes the fault of "Remoaners", and not those who were dim enough to believe it would easy to begin with. Best of all, the more right your critics turn out to be, the more you have to blame them for.

But being impervious to criticism is not the same as being right, and to think this strategy is a recipe for good government is to mistake a closed loop of true believers for objective reality. And whatever the right-wing press do to convince themselves that Boris Johnson is right, and John Major is wrong, it is unlikely to affect the negotiating position of the 27 other states in the slightest. At the end of the day, our faith matters a lot less than the facts on the ground. There is no such things as fairies.