PM Theresa May's speech in Florence, Italy, setting out plans for a transitional period from the formal date of Brexit in March 2019.Jeff J Mitchell/Press Association. All rights reserved.Brexit is written in binary code. It is all zeros and ones – out of the European Union or in. In his long Telegraph essay last weekend, the British foreign secretary and totem of the Leave campaign Boris Johnson
reiterated the iron imperatives of last year’s referendum: “The choice
was binary. The result was decisive. There is simply no way – or no good
way – of being 52 per cent out and 48 per cent in.”
This has an impeccable logic, in the way mad things often do. In her speech in Florence on Friday, Johnson’s supposed boss Theresa May was trying, in her own weak way, to tweak that logic, to find some wriggle room in the relentless bind of the binary.
The concrete content of the speech may be less
important than its signal of distress – though whether May is waving or
drowning remains an open question. She is edging towards some way to be –
however temporarily – at least a little bit in while moving out. She is edging towards some way to be –
however temporarily – at least a little bit in while moving out.
This is what mathematicians call fuzzy logic, the
logic of vagueness where there are infinite possible gradations between
zero and one. Her problem is that compared with the clean and clear
choice that Johnson offers – in or out – the search for a transitional
compromise deal is indeed fuzzy.
As she retreats from the confident, if rather
ludicrous, tautology of “Brexit means Brexit”, she must wander into a
no-man’s-land of ambiguities and uncertainties. May’s compromise offer
is slight and tentative but the abandonment of the lofty rhetorical
heights of last January is unmistakable.
Almost a year ago, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk,
prefigured Johnson when he suggested that “the only real alternative to
a hard Brexit is no Brexit”. From both sides of the English Channel,
the binary view makes sense.
It is easier for the EU if the UK simply departs – a part in/part out
arrangement, even for a few years, undermines the clarity of the rules
of EU membership.
And, conceptually if not in practice, it is also
easier for the Brexiteers. Since, as Johnson claimed, Britain outside
the EU will be nothing less than “the greatest country on Earth”, why
should it wait around in the anteroom of historic destiny?
In an essay that was much more interesting than its
headline-grabbing mendacities and implied leadership ambitions
suggested, Johnson was really delivering a classic break-up speech. And
although he didn’t actually use the old “It’s not you, it’s me” line, he
came pretty close.
Cleverly, instead of attacking the EU, he depicted
Britain’s membership of the union as just one of those relationships in
which the lovers are bad for each other. They don’t mean to be but they
are.
And he suggested that the Brits, unhappy and
misplaced, had become impossible to live with: “It is wrong for us to be
there – always trying to make things different, always getting in the
way, always moaning.”
Johnson’s tale of the Brits as partners in a doomed
marriage has a compelling moral: make a clean break. The couple who were
never meant for one another will find a way to be perfectly civil, even
friendly, in the future, but only if, to coin a phrase, they
consciously uncouple first.
No sentimental one-night stands, no teary evenings
looking at the wedding photos, no possibility that they might, after
all, give it another go sometime.
Theresa May, on the other hand, now finds herself
edging towards the suggestion that the couple should share a house for a
few years and not finalise the divorce until Britain is ready to occupy
the apartment it has not yet begun to build.
Logical Brexiteers
The point is not that May is wrong – she isn’t. It’s
that the binary logic is all on Johnson’s side. The strangeness of where
the Brexit paroxysm has led us is that the hard Brexiteers once
characterised by a close ally of David Cameron as “swivel-eyed loons” are logical but not rational.
The sensible compromisers are rational but not
logical. The crux of the matter is this: compromise means mirroring the
EU as closely as possible so you can still enjoy some of its benefits.
Rule Brittania will segue into I Wanna Be Like You.
And if you’re going to be as like the EU as possible,
why not stay in the EU? In Johnson’s metaphor, if you’re going to live
in the same house, sleep together and with no one else, pay into a joint
bank account and do your share of the domestic chores, why get divorced
at all?
The answer, of course, is that you’re trying to make
the best of a very bad job. And that best is inevitably second best –
Johnson was not entirely wrong to characterise the compromise position
of staying in the single market and/or the customs union as one in which
Britain is “turned into a vassal state – taking direction from the EU,
but with no power to influence the EU’s decisions”.
If, as May signalled on Friday, the UK is moving away
from the clean break she called for last January, the nation is indeed
going to be, for some as yet undefined period, not the glorious British
sun but a satellite locked into the EU’s gravitational pull and palely
reflecting its light. It is an oddly humiliating overture to what May
still insists will be a heroic grand opera.
The underlying problem is with binary thinking
itself. Where May and Johnson do not differ is in their insistence that
people can belong to one thing or the other, but not to both. They can
be British or European; they can be with us or against us. May, in the
hubris before her general election nemesis, characterised pro-Europeans
as “citizens of nowhere”. Underlying the
whole mad project is the idea of belonging and sovereignty as zero sum
games – it is either/or, not both/and.
Johnson, in his essay, declared himself “troubled
with the thought that people [in Britain] are beginning to have
genuinely split allegiances” – with Brexit as the cure that will restore
the binary choice between Britishness and Europeanness. Underlying the
whole mad project is the idea of belonging and sovereignty as zero sum
games – it is either/or, not both/and.
The British problem is that all the rationality is on
the side of both/and, but all the emotional clarity is with either/or.
If it is to avoid disaster, Britain needs to accept messy ambiguities.
But it is still led by a party that allowed itself to be captured by the
stirring simplicities of a stark choice between national failure and
impending glory.
The question after May’s speech is the same as it was
before it: who has the authority to invest a painful climbdown with the
emotional potency of a patriotic imperative?
Thanks go to the author and The Irish Times for permission to republish this piece originally published here, on September, 23, 2017.