Remember Project Fear? The mainstay of the Brexiteer’s rhetorical handbook: casting those who attempted to explain the economic and social consequences of leaving the European Union as mere scaremongers who traded in pessimism.
Funnily enough, we haven’t heard much of it in recent months. Perhaps it has gone out of fashion, or perhaps as reality dawns – and formerly abstract concerns about the economy and employment fast become tangible – it has been shorn of all legitimacy.
With recent economic modelling that shows the long-term economic impact of a no-deal Brexit to be greater than that of Covid-19; and an OECD report that posits the UK's recovery from the pandemic will be among the slowest in the world; amid ongoing reputational damage for Britain's respect for international law, the promised sunlit uplands of Brexit are looking at best overcast. And it has become increasingly difficult to dismiss the dreary forecasts of pesky remainers as mere pessimistic scepticism.
With that in mind, the loudest Brexiteers and their allies in the press are working on a new method to justify their political project. Having lost the ability to claim Brexit was always destined to be a success; the challenge is now to prove that they are not responsible for its failures.
Though the Brexit blame-game has been ongoing for quite some time, as we approach 2021 it is increasing in scale and vitriol. The objects of the Brexiteer’s derision has oscillated over the years between the European Union, France, Remainers, Labour, some Tories, civil servants, Ireland, any nationalists apart from English ones, Nicola Sturgeon, Joe Biden and business owners. But one principle has held steadfast: whoever’s fault it is, it could never be theirs.
The impulse to avoid responsibility is one that requires all the intellectual sophistication of a toddler. But it may still be effective. So long as blame is apportioned across that vast expanse of people and nations (most of whom do not share the same political interests), the Brexiteers can claim the malign consequences of Brexit would never have been felt had everyone just played ball.
The ultimate blame – were you to ask the Express, or perhaps Jacob Rees-Mogg – lies with the European Union. Their intransigence has been as shocking as their desire to punish the United Kingdom for deigning to leave the trading bloc. And Michel Barnier and his cronies never had any interest in facilitating a workable Brexit.
Compelling an argument though it might be, the Brexiteers quickly run into a problem. In 2016 their best case for leaving the EU lay in how easy it would be to strike a trade deal; in how Britain really held all the cards; in how the EU needed Britain more than the other way round. Unfortunately both narratives – that Britain held all the cards in negotiating its exit, and that the EU has leveraged its power to ensure the worst outcome for Britain – cannot be true at the same time. Either Britain held all the cards or it didn’t. Peddling the idea that the EU is responsible for the difficulties of Brexit reveals their original premise as very shaky indeed.
But nevertheless; the pursuit to absolve themselves of responsibility can continue. Barnier may have been the Brexit bogeyman; but Leo Varadkar was the grim reaper. As reality slowly dawned on Brexiteers, in the wake of their referendum victory, that the border would become not just an issue to be resolved, but rather the greatest material and totemic challenge in leaving the European Union, the intellectual gymnastics began.
‘Real threat to peace’
The narrative – one that we are surely all too familiar with now – cast Varadkar as being in the clutches of the EU; allowing himself to be weaponised by Brussels in their bid to punish Britain; that his commitments to the Border were designed solely to frustrate the passage of Brexit; that he – in the word’s of Theresa May’s former adviser Nick Timothy – was the “real threat to peace” in Northern Ireland.
But these attempts to blame Dublin quickly lose their steam when we remember that it was Varadkar and Johnson themselves who unlocked a deal with new provisions for the Border in October last year, paving the way for Johnson’s seismic electoral victory just over a month later, and granting him the leverage to follow through on his Get Brexit Done mantra. A bid to attribute the British government’s difficulties now to Dublin’s intransigence on the Border seems to conveniently ignore this crucial fact.
It is not just the EU and Dublin at the receiving end of this treatment, of course. Headlines are already laying the groundwork to claim a Biden premiership will undermine a prosperous Brexit. And we ought to expect French president Emmanuel Macron to get a difficult ride too. But amid this exercise there is one unfortunate truth: whoever the Brexiteers seek to blame for the impending (and severe) consequences is secondary. The consequences will still be felt, whether people believe it was Barnier’s or Varadkar’s or somehow the American electorate’s fault.