The will of the people

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The argument that ‘the people have spoken’ and that the government has a responsibility to deliver on what the people have asked for is, in principle, a sound one.  But if what the people have asked for is a fantasy, at what point does the government have a bigger responsibility to tell them that, actually, what they’re asking for is undeliverable?  If they know that something simply can’t be done, for how long should they continue pretending that it can?

If the people voted for free unicorns, for example, because some irresponsible politicians told them that they could have them, would the government really feel obliged to say “Let me clear about this.  The people have spoken, and we are getting on with the business of delivering what they voted for.  But it isn’t just an issue for me – the rest of the world also has a responsibility to come up with innovative ways of delivering unicorns”.  When I started to write that sentence, I thought it was just plain silly; sadly, having re-read the sentence, I can almost hear Theresa May saying it, in her usual robotic tone.

Brexit – as in the hard-line, no compromise, complete break version favoured by the ideologues – is perfectly doable, albeit requiring a degree of preparation which is currently completely absent.  There are consequences which flow from it.  None of us can be entirely certain what those will be, but there is a strong consensus suggesting that they won’t be good in the short term.  BINO (Brexit in name only), a la Norway, is also perfectly doable, and if the Government were in a position where its own supporters would allow it to do a deal along those lines, I suspect that all the negotiations could have been largely done and dusted by now.  What is not doable is the provision of free unicorns – a deal under which the UK gets all the benefits of frictionless trade with the rest of the EU without following the same rules as everyone else.

It might be official government policy; it might even be what people thought that they were voting for, but ‘the will of the people’ can’t make it happen, any more than it can conjure up unicorns.  The ideologues know this, but don’t care; continuing to demand the impossible only makes it more likely that they’ll get what they want.  The rest of the government knows it as well, but its continuation depends on pretending that it doesn’t.  And rather than coming to grips with reality, the one thing on which they can easily unite is a demand that the rest of us join them in their unreality, and then blame those who refuse for undermining what they bizarrely call their ‘negotiating position’. 

The most obvious route back to the real world would be for the main opposition party to start explaining why the options are rather more limited than people have been led to believe, but half of them, including their leader, seem to be trapped in another version of unreality, in which a UK freed from the regulatory controls of ‘Brussels’ will somehow turn into a socialist paradise rather than the low wage, low regulation, offshore tax haven which is the ultimate objective of the Brexiteers.

It’s a strange world that we inhabit.