However sunny your disposition, it wears you down, 10 straight years of being asked to accept facts about Brexit that aren’t true: 52% as an “overwhelming majority”; a flaky, half-baked referendum as the endpoint of purest democracy; the severance of a complicated trading and geopolitical relationship that took decades to build as the dawn of a new prosperity. All such nonsense, all delivered with such conviction, by such a wide variety of sources, many of them self-describing as impartial, that in the end you just surrender to it. None of it magically becomes true, don’t be silly. It’s more that you come to accept that everyone else talks nonsense now.
Nobody get too excited – just because Andy Burnham has reopened a debate that upside-down world said couldn’t be reopened, it doesn’t mean the UK is on the brink of coming to its senses. I have no idea what’s going to happen; all I can say for certain is that times have changed more than I realised. The pro-Brexit crew have updated their arguments. They no longer say leaving the EU will bring untold riches, and they never even namecheck all the control we were meant to have taken back. They rarely mention any immigration benefits because that unwieldy issue now has a life of its own – or, to put that more simply, it turns out that in or out of the European Union, we can still fight about our borders like rats in a sack.
Instead, they have a new narrative, and these are its contours. Remain sympathisers are apparently very divided. Some of us want freedom of movement, especially for young people, while others of us just want our trading relationships rebuilt with our nearest gigantic market. Different remainers again wish for greater collaboration on security and defence with nations who share our values. Those who can be trusted, for example, to oppose Vladimir Putin and his war of aggression, rather than opposing him on a Tuesday and calling him a great guy by Thursday. Some of us just miss the days when we made coherent, continent-wide decisions about the climate emergency. Given that degrees of global heating observe no nationality and pick no favourites, given that people who believe in scientific evidence tend to get on quite well together, however stark that evidence is, it would be quite relaxing to club together, no?
All these different interest groups, I’ve heard it said by those who defend the status quo, can cooperate from a distance, but sooner or later, the remain coalition will fall apart. Here, I rediscover the certainty I thought I’d lost for ever in the post-2016 melee: there is absolutely no way will we fall apart. We are a match made in heaven. I have a fair idea which of those issues I care about the most, between climate, young people, defence and trade, but seriously, this is like choosing my favourite song on Surfer Rosa (the Pixies album), or adjudicating my favourite guest at the wedding of, say, my sister. In the joy of the moment, my preferences could take a backseat. I’d really just want everyone to have a good time.
There’s one other new rhetorical strain: Brexit supporters point to Europe and say, that place is on fire. It’s not a blip caused by arson-happy French protesters, nor the housing-impoverished Spanish, it’s not a peculiarity of new German political movements, nor rage at the policing tactics of the Portuguese. Everyone, everywhere, is absolutely furious. Would this not be a good time to keep our distance? This might be the weakest argument of all, since all it underscores is that the cost of living crisis affects us all; the wars in Ukraine and Iran have hit everyone; the long tail of the financial crash and subsequent austerity has left no one unscathed; the disfigurement of the housing market was only temporarily a London thing, a Madrid thing – sooner or later, it would be an everywhere thing, and later’s where we are. There is no isolationist course that protects you from civic unrest, unless you can miraculously protect yourself from the conditions driving it. And those conditions were not made in Strasbourg.
Again, if a decade of magical thinking has taught me anything, it’s that predictions are futile, and however absurd an argument looks, you can’t bank on toppling it. But these fresh lines are so weak it’s almost endearing.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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