The British Labour party’s decision to back a second referendum has raised the hope of ardent remainers. The latter claim a “people’s vote is now inevitable” and “remain can win”.
Their optimism may simply be a matter of political manoeuvring. They may be talking up the prospect of overturning Brexit to build support for this option. However, their view of Leave’s victory in 2016 suggests they genuinely think they will prevail. Many of them believe this victory stemmed from information deficiencies. They see leave voters as being misinformed, uninformed, or both, implying that had they been exposed to more accurate information, they never would have chosen to exit the EU.
Some aspects of the Leave campaign were undoubtedly misleading. The UK doesn’t pay £350 million a week to Brussels, for instance, and Vote Leave wasn’t in a position to suggest that the money Britain saved by exiting the EU would be spent on the NHS. To say this campaign dealt in “lies and false promises” is therefore true.
For supporters of a second referendum, Leave’s deceit has been fully revealed by the British government’s withdrawal agreement. This deal proves that the promises of Brexit are “fantasies”, they argue, as it gives the UK only partial access to the single market and risks keeping the country in a permanent customs union. As they see it, the information deficiencies of 2016 have been corrected and, consequently, a second referendum and remain are now backed by “a majority”.
It is ardent remainers who are delusional, however. As it stands, a Labour motion calling for a second referendum is unlikely to make it through parliament. And even if there was a rerun of the 2016 vote, there’s nothing to suggest that the British public has shifted decisively to remain. According to The Economist, if a second referendum was held, it would split 49% remain and 51% leave, a result almost identical to the first one.
Of course, some leavers have become disillusioned. But their disillusionment stems more from the Brexit process than from Brexit itself. They tend to see the government’s deal and the current deadlock as products of the political class’ incompetence and unwillingness to exit the EU. This has meant that many leave voters have become less sanguine about where the UK is heading. But few seem to think that their original choice was misguided.
The reason for this is that their choice reflected a deep aversion to the EU, or rather the liberal principles underpinning it. For many Britons, free markets, open borders and technocratic governance have been forces of economic and cultural decline and democratic impotence. They’ve been understood as corroding the prized artefacts of place, nation and parliamentary democracy. In backing Brexit, many leavers were signalling their rejection of the status quo and their desire for a new settlement based on economic protection, conservative cultural values, and what the political scientist David Runciman calls “the primacy of national politics”. Brexit, in short, is an ideological issue; it is about promoting an alternative conception of the good life.
By fixating on information shortfalls, ardent remainers show they still don’t get this. As such, they risk appearing aloof and scornful to the concerns of many Britons This isn’t helped by the fact that the leading proponents of a second referendum tend to come from an elite metropolitan background. On top of being erroneous and offensive, their portrayal of leavers as dupes makes ardent remainers fight their battle on the wrong terrain. Their struggle isn’t to demystify but to persuade people of liberalism’s merits. That is, they can no longer assume their ideology is superior. The world has turned and moved past that point.