Pro-European opinion and activism spans a range of views on our ambitions, goals and prospects. This is normal and understandable, as is our shared readiness for a degree of compromise over our common positions. ‘Step by Step to Rejoin’ worked well as a policy for pro-Europeans when it was adopted following the 2019 election defeat and Brexit, allowing in difficult times some flexibility of interpretation and some ambiguity over timescales, policies, priorities and expectations.
A recent discussion has proposed adding some detail to this notion, while retaining the elements of flexibility and ambiguity. This is, once again, sensible, given the need to be prepared to adapt to further unpredictable events and developments. However, flexibility needs to avoid looking like evasion, and nuance needs to avoid seeming like timidity and frailty of purpose.
Falling between two stools?
If we want to consider the risks inherent in our approach, then I would suggest that this strategy might be at risk of falling between two stools.
On the one hand, we talk about some early steps in the form of various negotiated modifications to the terms of Brexit, and/or additional UK-EU arrangements, that are thought to be available within the limits of Starmer’s red lines (the refusal to re-enter the Single Market, the Customs Union, or the EU, or to accept Freedom of Movement), and which we think can deliver some short-term benefits or mitigations which help shift the climate of UK attitudes to the EU.
The risk here is that many or most of these desirable mitigations are liable to be difficult, time-consuming or even impossible to negotiate, while we already know the meagre benefits that can realistically be expected from them will not, in overall terms, noticeably boost our economy or noticeably improve the wellbeing of most citizens, and may therefore have limited positive impact on public attitudes to the EU.
On the other hand, the policy may risk looking as though pro-Europeans have little appetite to start at any time soon to actively and seriously make the public case for Rejoin (and thereby also seriously call for a rethinking of the Starmer red lines). And if we are seen as being vague or uncertain in conviction about our end goal, we may be less likely to persuade the wider public to take our campaign seriously and attract their committed mass support. In one current formulation, our task is “creating the conditions ultimately to win a campaign to realign and rejoin.” We need to be clear that the way to create these conditions is to campaign for rejoin, starting now, and continuing for as long as it takes. The sooner we start, the sooner we will reach the goal.
If (as is probable) it becomes clear that the menu of early Brexit mitigation items is not able to deliver economic benefits felt by the general public, if we have not already been aggressively making the case for a rethink of Starmer’s red lines and mounting an active programme of national persuasion and information in favour of Rejoin, then pro-Europeans may find themselves poorly positioned and ill-prepared to intervene effectively in the national conversation.
Three related elements in a recent discussion caused me some concern.
A “huge risk”?
One concern was a suggestion that any UK government applying to rejoin the EU would be engaging in a dangerous gamble (“a British Government must take the huge risk of seeking accession”). Certainly, if we are to rejoin the EU then a government must apply to join, and our task must be to ensure that a UK government will in changed circumstances judge it less hazardous to seek re-entry to the EU than to remain outside: it is not appropriate for a campaign such as ours to define its goal in terms liable to intimidate those who it precisely needs and seeks to encourage.
Happily, in subsequent discussion this point has been accepted and addressed.
“Straight to Rejoin”?
A second concern is the unfortunately frequent characterisation of one significant strand of pro-European opinion as holding that we should just rejoin the EU now [“as one person said, we should forget the steps and jump straight to ‘rejoin’”]. But this comment blurs together two quite different positions – one perfectly realistic, the other not. It is perfectly true, and widely understood, that the UK cannot immediately resume its membership of the EU on identical terms and by a simple unilateral sovereign decision. The process to rejoin is the same as the process to join: the door to accession is open, but there are conditions requiring to be both agreed in specific detail, and then implemented.
However it also needs to be clear that there are no obligatory intermediate stepping stones. We do not, for example, have to join the Single Market or the Customs Union before we can apply to become EU members. Neither, for example do we need in advance of an accession process to negotiate, as a third country outside the union, desirable but potentially problematic and time-consuming items such as the mutual recognition of professional qualifications or travel rights for musicians. Improvments that are (maybe) possible without rejoining are not all things that must be done before rejoining. Items that we choose to think of as helpful intermediate steps to rejoin should be actions that enable, facilitate and speed the route to the end objective, not factors which are liable to generate obstacles or excuse delay. We should not over-rely on our larger case being made for us by uncertain quick wins and harvests of (supposedly) low-hanging fruit, whose aggregate benefit we know, even given the best of outcomes, will fall far short of “making Brexit work”, and, as numerous excellent commentators have put it, amount in the big economic picture to no more than “tinkering in the margins”.
There are a good many well-informed people among us who advocate that the UK should apply to rejoin the EU as soon as circumstances (including public and political attitudes in the UK and EU) make this feasible, and that meanwhile political and civil society actors should take all necessary actions to ensure certain preconditions are in place, without necessarily pausing en route to pursue other intermediate actions such as a re-entry to the Single Market and/or the Customs Union. It is true that we cannot rejoin the EU instantly, but this is also true of rejoining the Single Market or Customs Union. Willing the end – re-entry to the EU – does not, indeed, dispense us from working to deliver the means, and taking the time that may be required, while avoiding unnecessary delay along the way. Rejoin, in short, in this view is something that in the national interest should be delivered as soon as possible, by all necessary means, doing whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, but not waiting any longer than is strictly necessary before we get started. This seems a reasonable approach – maybe not the only one possible, but at least a serious contender, and certainly not one that deserves to be stigmatised, caricatured or dismissed out of hand.
Most, if not all, steps needed to prepare, enable and ensure a successful application to rejoin the EU need to be got under way either now or as soon as possible. One key requirement for this – which may be glaringly obvious, but needs to be clearly acknowledged and addressed – is that we should not delay in starting to actively communicate to the general public the positive case for Rejoin.
It has been suggested that we focus our strategy on putting in place the conditions for securing and then winning a ‘short referendum campaign’ to rejoin the EU. This makes sense, as long as we are clear that one vital precondition of such a victory will be a major and sustained campaign to inform and persuade public and political opinion.
This is one of the key lessons of 2016: we need to start sooner rather than later. It is fine to work at becoming match-fit, but at some point, soon, we need to get on the pitch.
The hardness of changing minds
The third concern is more at the level of technique and method, but significant for the strategic big picture. An expert adviser assisting this discussion recently reported an opinion that persuasion is difficult because people find it physically painful to change their minds.
It would be interesting to see more evidence for this claim. There is a well-known psychological effect called cognitive dissonance whereby people tend to refuse to accept facts which conflict with their prior beliefs. In post-truth populist and polarised politics, people can and do take pleasure in accepting statements which they know to be false, and even because they are false: lying, including by those who govern us is condoned, even embraced and admired as a legitimate weapon of culture war. In polarisation, a set of counterfactual beliefs becomes integral for some actors to their sense of identity, self-esteem and self-worth, often linked to the enjoyment of negative other-directed affects of aggression, cruelty, resentment and contempt. Some people may become addicted to these affective gratifications, rather as some people become addicted to opioid analgesics, and experience discomfort if they are withdrawn. Some people are more resistant than others to changing their attitudes, beliefs and opinions. But it is also common, and even commonplace in politics, that people change their minds because they perceive in daily life that facts and experiences have changed, and that promises and expectations have been unfulfilled. Changing one’s mind, freely and as an autonomous act, is not intrinsically painful. It is a fundamental component of human agency and freedom. Some recent academic writing[1] has suggested that polarised opinions commonly tend to become persistently entrenched and resistant to change. This might be a risky generalisation. Some issues of bitter and polarised mass dissension can last for decades, generations or even centuries (circus factions at Byzantium, papal and imperial loyalties in mediaeval Italy); others can be dissipated in little over a decade (Prohibition in the USA) or less (Munich and Suez in UK politics). Different historical precedents can be cited to support different (and changing) speculations about the lifespan of current polarisations. In the recent past, academics wrote political sociologies and demographies of a polarised fraction of England called ‘Brexitland’[2]; today some of the same people inform us that Brexit is now a forgotten and vanished past: we are told that the public ‘has moved on’ from Brexit and that we should do likewise. Making Brexit disappear from public perception and discourse as a live issue is, as hardly needs to be pointed out, one way of ensuring that it is left unchallenged.
Polarisations do not often appear, and may not disappear, by themselves: polarisations, including what are called “culture wars”, sometimes involving acts or threats of lethal violence, can be intentionally fomented or amplified by performative and manipulative tricks, by algorithms, and by techniques of provocation, fabrication, simulation or amplification. This is an important matter which demands serious attention. Attempts have been made to measure or predict the stability of hardcore voter opinions, and such estimates or speculations in turn form part of the currency of electoral politics. But all this arguably diverts us from our main task. Polarisation and the design of (some) social media platforms drive us to frame our politics as a polemical duel with entrenched adversaries. We are constantly lured into the false belief that our main task is the daily joust with trolls, the unending struggle to persuade the least persuadable, something which may well often be impossible and which diverts effort from our true priority, which is eminently possible and sufficient for victory, namely the need to persuade the persuadable and mobilise the persuaded. Realistically, some people will never support Rejoin, but Rejoin does not require unanimous endorsement. Brexiters constantly seek to pretend they have a perpetual majority, or that even as a minority they have a permanent veto on reversing Brexit, one which is enforceable if necessary by violence. They do not. We should not base our policy on the assumption that our success depends on persuading the unpersuadable. There are plenty of people who are persuadable; polling (to which arguably too little heed has been given in recent discussion) indeed consistently suggests that a plurality of voters are already persuaded.
There are some more optimistic views on persuasion and persuadability, supported by experience and evidence, in David McRaney’s How Minds Change. The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion [Oneworld 2022].
There is a striking cluster of tropes or metaphors widely used by politicians and pundits when talking about Brexit and our body politic: the languages of trauma, toxicity, wound and pain. We are repeatedly advised or instructed not to revisit the site of our Brexit trauma, not to reopen our Brexit wounds. By implication, this can be made to suggest that we should not change our minds or try to change the minds of others on certain issues, nor attempt to correct past errors whose effects continue to harm us. We should consider whether arguments that are essentially based on fear really serve the interests of democratic decision-making or rational government in the public interest. We should also reflect seriously on the wisdom of yielding to the thinly veiled politics of violent threat which remains the core currency of the Brexiter Right.
The present is a palimpsest of the old and the new. Humans are only intermittently able to face facts and deal with them responsibly and inventively. We can see signs of progress in the policy conversations reported here, and a recent comment calling for “a greater emphasis on the positive case for Britain being in Europe.” I welcome this call and hope it is heeded. Nevertheless the leadership of our major pro-European campaigning organisation also continues to signal that it is awaiting the permission of the public before it can properly begin to make the case for Rejoin. This is a more troubling sign of the times. A democracy in which permission is felt to be required before public deliberation can take place on a key issue of policy is no longer fully a democracy. As Timothy Snyder says in his new book On Freedom, we should not ‘obey in advance’ by deferring voluntarily to the will of would-be autocrats. Neither should we voluntarily silence ourselves by waiting for others’ permission to speak.
[1] Hobolt SB, Leeper TJ, Tilley J. Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum. British Journal of Political Science. 2021;51(4):1476-1493. doi:10.1017/S0007123420000125
[2] Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford,
Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics.Cambridge University Press (2020)
