This book is, precisely, an attempt to make sense of what has happened and, given that it is such contested terrain, it is necessary that I say something about my own position, and in the process something about the basis on which this book is written.
by Chris Grey
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them. ~ Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic
On 23 June 2016 a referendum was held in which the majority of the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.
Just that short, apparently factual, statement contains within it implications which are still heavily contested.
It was a majority of the ‘people’, but only of the 72 per cent who voted amongst those eligible to do so. Those ineligible included sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, EU nationals living in the UK* and UK nationals who had lived abroad for over fifteen years. The people of England and Wales voted by a majority to leave, but those of Scotland or Northern Ireland did not. Legally, the vote was an ‘advisory referendum’, which did not automatically entail leaving the EU but simply gave advice to Parliament which it could, in principle, refuse to take. That it was advisory was the reason given in Parliament as to why only a simple majority of anything over 50 per cent, rather than a super majority of some higher percentage, was required for a vote to leave. So how could a very small simple majority – 52 per cent to 48 per cent – now mandate leaving? Above all: what did it mean to ‘leave the EU’? Clearly it meant not being a member of the EU, but which of the many different ways of ‘not being a member’ was to be followed?
Yet this account of the issues raised by the referendum result would be regarded by many Brexiters and leave voters† as absurd, if not downright dishonest. More specifically, it would be seen as a ‘remainer’ account, and perhaps as an illustration of remainers’ refusal to accept the referendum result. They would see it as an irrelevant truism that only those eligible to vote and choosing to do so were the ones who got to decide. The distribution of votes between the constituent parts of the UK is also irrelevant since it was a national vote. The advisory nature of the referendum is irrelevant because the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, had written to every household saying that its outcome would be implemented by the government. A narrow majority is a majority, and that is all that matters. As for what leaving the EU means, things get much murkier, as is discussed at length in this book, but many Brexiters would say that it meant leaving all the institutions of the EU without exception.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COMPETING ACCOUNTS OF BREXIT
Without evaluating these competing accounts of the referendum result, what is important is simply that they exist. That matters in two ways. Firstly, it matters because it illustrates that anything that anyone writes about Brexit will almost certainly be hotly disputed by someone, and is likely to be seen as reflecting the biases of the person writing it. I will say more about my position shortly, but for now will just note that such disputes are part of the wider sense in which Brexit has created a kind of culture war.
This is partly to do with the demographics of the referendum vote itself. Polls conducted afterwards showed that leave voters were likely to be older, less educated and less economically active than remain voters (these things were partially linked, because older people are less likely to have been able to go to university and more likely to be retired), more likely to be in lower socio-economic groups than remain voters, and more likely to hold socially illiberal views.
This suggests that the way people voted in the referendum coded a set of social and cultural divisions that went deeper than the ostensible question of EU membership and, therefore, that the Brexit process was going to be about more than Brexit itself. One consequence was that, almost from the beginning, there emerged fundamental differences in how the two groups saw Brexit, to the extent of there being almost ‘remainer truth’ and ‘leaver truth’.
From this flows the second significance of the competing accounts. It is that whatever position anyone takes on Brexit, they cannot deny that these accounts do, as a matter of fact, exist. Whatever motivations or inadequacies each side attributes to the other in a sense don’t matter. The very fact of their existence structures what has happened since the referendum and to some extent explains it: had there been more consensus then Brexit would not be the deeply contested issue that it is. Even now, there is very little sign that members of either side have been persuaded by each other. If anything, each is more deeply entrenched than before. That can’t be wished away, but has to be accepted and understood in order to make sense of what has happened since the referendum.
MY POSITION
This book is, precisely, an attempt to make sense of what has happened and, given that it is such contested terrain, it is necessary that I say something about my own position, and in the process something about the basis on which this book is written.
I regard Brexit as a very serious national mistake, which has already done and will continue to do untold economic, geopolitical and cultural damage to the United Kingdom. However, from the day of the referendum result, I did not expect the decision to be reversed. In that sense I ‘accepted’ the result, not because of any particular ‘respect’ for it but because it seemed to me politically impossible to change it. Except for a brief period during 2019, that view did not change. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, I believed that a ‘soft Brexit’, in the sense discussed below, would be viable in fully meeting the requirements of the vote whilst minimising the damage. That did not happen, but I continue to believe that in 2016 there could have been a national consensus for such an approach which would largely have avoided the bitter and toxic divisions we have experienced.
It’s also worth saying that prior to the run-up to the referendum I was neither especially interested in the EU nor a passionate advocate of Britain’s membership of it. Like a lot of people, including many who became deeply partisan on both sides, it simply didn’t feature in my mind as much of an issue. To that limited extent, I approached things with an open mind – and certainly had no life-long involvement in debates about the EU. In view of some of the accusations that fly about in discussions of Brexit, it’s also necessary to say that I have never received any money, for example research grants or other funding, from the EU.
My interest only really started in the year or so before the referendum, when it was in prospect but no date had been set, as I began to notice a huge amount of confusion and downright falsehood about what EU membership meant, and especially how it functioned as a trade and regulatory institution. This touched on my own academic expertise because I work in the field of organisation studies – a rather strange, hybrid discipline at the interface of psychology, sociology, economics, business and politics which is concerned with how organisations of all sorts operate. As such, I had worked in business schools for over twenty-five years. My own research had never been concerned with the EU, especially, but as part of the general background knowledge of my subject I had a working knowledge of how it operated. Moreover, ever since writing a PhD on the regulation of financial services my academic research and teaching has been on the intersection between politics and business.
In the run-up to the referendum, I wrote some short articles trying to clarify the trade and regulatory issues, which led to invitations to give various public talks. In the course of these, I deepened my own knowledge but also observed that many people valued these explanations and felt they were more useful than the material they were getting during what, by then, was the official campaign. It was not simply that I was providing them with ‘the facts’ but also with an analysis which grew out of my work as an academic even though it had not in the past been applied to Britain’s membership of the EU.
That analytical mindset is the basis of this book. For whilst it may be that there is in some sense ‘remainer truth’ and ‘leaver truth’, I continue to believe that it is possible to use the tools of rational argument and evidence in order to make sense of events, including Brexit. Of course there are endless questions of judgement, values and interpretation, as in all political questions (were that not so, they would not be political questions). But that does not mean that there is no basis on which to evaluate evidence and nothing to differentiate good arguments from bad ones. Moreover, whilst some things about Brexit are legitimately and probably endlessly debatable, there are some things which are straightforwardly true or false.
What matters is to avoid starting from the position that Brexit is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ despite facts, evidence or argument to the contrary and to avoid twisting those facts to support that position. Having not started with a particular position but having acquired one as a result of evidence and argument I have tried, within human limits, to continue in that analytical vein. I am not ‘neutral’, therefore, and do not pretend to be, but I am not tribalist either.
Concretely, shortly after the referendum result, I decided to start a weekly blog to catalogue and analyse Brexit events as they transpired. Inevitably, at first very few people read it but even within the extremely crowded market for Brexit analysis it gradually acquired a wide and enthusiastic readership. In time, it came to be highly praised by leading journalists and commentators, and read by politicians and others on both sides of the Brexit debate, and in many countries. It was also frequently quoted in the media and led to me making several media appearances to comment on events.
This book grows out of that blog, but it is certainly not a print edition of it, not least as that would run to ten or more volumes. Rather, it draws out what emerged over time as the recurring analytical themes in the blog and attempts to use these to explain how Brexit has unfolded since the referendum.
THE UNFOLDING OF BREXIT
To speak of the unfolding of Brexit is, in itself, to make an important point. Brexit is not, and was never going to be, a single event. It was and is an ongoing process. That explains why – to the consternation of some, especially those Brexiters for whom securing it had been their life’s ambition – the vote to leave the EU was not the end of anything but, rather, the beginning of something very different and much more complex. For that matter, the day that Britain left the EU, 31 January 2020, was only a staging post, albeit a very important one, in the Brexit process. It was followed by a transition period during which a future terms agreement, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), was negotiated. This book ends at that point but, as will become clear, that in itself was only the beginning of a new phase of Brexit.
As the process has unfolded, it has become possible to see recurring themes within it, some more important than others. One of them is simply that lack of agreement about basic facts – or, perhaps, it might be truer to say that all of them are variations on that theme.
Lack of definition of the outcome of Brexit
A particular, and crucial, case of lack of agreed facts was the absence of an agreed definition before the Brexit vote as to what that vote would mean. In outline, from the outset at least three fundamentally different versions of Brexit were in play, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter One. One version, known as ‘soft Brexit’ or the ‘Norway option’, meant remaining as a member of the single market and possibly even (unlike Norway) in some form of customs union. Another, which was usually called ‘hard Brexit’ or the ‘Canada option’, meant leaving the single market but seeking a free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU. A third, ‘no-deal Brexit’ or ‘the WTO option’, meant leaving without a trade deal and trading on World Trade Organization terms.
These very different versions of Brexit were the subject of the first thing I published on Brexit, on a website devoted to making academic research publicly accessible, in October 2015.2 This was after it was known that there would be a referendum, but before the campaign had started. In the piece, I outlined these main models of Brexit and argued that the debate at that time suffered from conflating or confusing them. If this persisted, and the vote were to leave when the referendum was held, then I warned it would be too late and the country would have voted for something without knowing what it was.
This turned out to be prescient. Not only were all the models touted at different times by different advocates of Brexit during the referendum, but their differences were concealed, especially by persistent references to ‘single market access’ which could have meant any of them. The Vote Leave campaign did not specify which version of Brexit it advocated, and explicitly said that it would be for the government, not it, to do so if the vote were to leave. It was only after the referendum that Brexiters claimed the vote had been for any particular form of Brexit. But that was not true, as was shown by the fact that for many months after the referendum all the versions were being debated as possible outcomes. Clearly that debate would not have happened had Brexit been pre-defined.
Ever-hardening definitions
The existence of this debate is a prelude to the next recurring theme. At every stage of the process, some Brexiters, whom I refer to as ‘Brexit Ultras’, argued that ‘true Brexit’ was a harder form of Brexit than whatever was currently envisaged. So whereas in the years before the referendum Nigel Farage and UKIP (as well as some of those on what was then called the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party) were extolling the soft Brexit Norway model, by the time of the referendum only hard or FTA Brexit would do. Some who campaigned during the referendum for soft Brexit afterwards championed an FTA hard Brexit. Still others who had argued for soft or hard Brexit came to say that ‘no deal’ was the only true Brexit. Within this, there have been many twists and turns but the direction of travel was always the same – as soon as anything was conceded to the Brexit Ultras, they always demanded something more extreme.
As a consequence, the terminology shifted confusingly as Brexit unfolded. Soft Brexit came to be called, by Brexit Ultras, ‘Brexit in name only’ (BRINO), or simply not Brexit at all. The hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union came sometimes to be described as soft Brexit, with hard Brexit sometimes referring to the more extreme position of WTO Brexit, or no-deal Brexit.
Lack of definition of the process of Brexit
However, no-deal Brexit itself came to have two meanings which, initially, were not clear, because as well as the outcome of Brexit being undefined, so too was its process. In fact, all of the different models for Brexit were actually models of what the outcome might be, and not of the process by which it might be reached.
The legal process for leaving the EU was defined in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. This specified that an agreement for withdrawal would be negotiated ‘taking account of the framework for [the departing member’s] future relationship with the Union’. That future relationship would be agreed subsequent to the Withdrawal Agreement, and by a different process.
What it meant was that Brexit would consist of two separate agreements. One would be a Withdrawal Agreement, setting out the terms of exit. The other would be a future terms agreement, setting out the conditions of trade and other forms of cooperation, which eventually was called the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Sitting between these two deals would, or might, be a Political Declaration accompanying the Withdrawal Agreement in which both parties agreed a non-binding general framework for the future terms agreement.
Over and over again as Brexit unfolded it became clear that many Brexiters either did not accept this process or did not understand it, and that lack of understanding was shared by many in the media and elsewhere. During the referendum, the Vote Leave campaign actually promised that the future terms would be agreed before the Article 50 process to leave even began. This was simply impossible given the terms of Article 50. After the referendum, many Brexiters claimed that both the exit agreement and the future terms agreement could be done as part of a single process.
This was also untrue but it permeated almost the entirety of the Brexit process in one way or another. It led to a row over the structure of the Article 50 talks (see Chapter Three) which never really went away. It led to the idea that what was agreed in the exit terms – especially as regards a financial settlement for the past – was, or should be, conditional on the future terms agreement. It led at least some Brexiter MPs to think that the final terms agreement would override the exit terms agreement. And it led to some very complex misunderstandings about what was being voted for in the fraught parliamentary debates that occurred. To give one example, during debates about the original Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by Theresa May (see Chapter Four), many MPs objected to it saying that, instead, they wanted a ‘Canada-style’ deal. But such a deal, if reached, would be the future terms agreement and so could not be a substitute for the exit terms agreement.
All of this will be explained in more detail in the coming chapters, but for now it is important to say that one consequence was that the term ‘no-deal Brexit’ changed in meaning as the Brexit process unfolded. Until the end of 2019 it meant no Withdrawal Agreement (i.e. no agreement on exit terms). From early 2020 it meant no Trade and Cooperation Agreement (i.e. no agreement on future terms).
Nativism and globalism
In addition to recurrent confusions about the outcome and process of Brexit, there were others about its meaning. On the one hand, it was sold to many, if not most, leave voters on an anti-immigration and economically protectionist or ‘nativist’ prospectus. On the other, especially since the referendum, it has been proclaimed as a licence for a free-trading ‘Global Britain’ open to the ‘brightest and the best’. Whilst being contradictory, combining these two strands arguably helped to build the coalition to win the referendum because it enabled the combination of two quite different critiques of the EU. The EU was depicted as a neo-liberal agent of globalisation which cared nothing for the nation state but was solely concerned with satisfying the interests of the business elite, including for the supposedly cheap labour that freedom of movement of people supplied. However, the EU was also derided as a ‘protectionist racket’, inhibiting free trade and preventing Britain from being globally competitive.
This has inflected the Brexit process in several ways. As regards immigration, it partly explains the shift away from soft Brexit, since this would have entailed freedom of movement of people within the single market, including the UK, and hence would not fulfil the ‘nativist’ strand. At the same time, it has led to a far greater emphasis on the globalist agenda of independent trade deals (which entail not being in a customs union with the EU) than was the case during the referendum. But the two remain in tension. It is highly likely that post-Brexit Britain will have higher levels of immigration than before, though probably not from the EU, in order to meet skills needs, and also because immigration liberalisation is likely to be a precondition of some trade deals. Meanwhile, erecting new barriers to free trade with the UK’s biggest trading partner is hardly a sign of pursuing a global free trade agenda.
Economics and sovereignty
Nested inside all that is yet another theme, which is the tension between Brexit as an economic project and as one purely concerned with political sovereignty and national independence. Again, there are many complexities and sub-plots. In brief, whilst one of the main referendum slogans – ‘taking back control’ – articulated Brexit in terms of sovereignty, the other main slogan – ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ – was plainly an economic argument for Brexit. Indeed, the Vote Leave campaign made numerous claims of economic benefits in terms of higher wages and better access to housing and public services, often linked to reducing immigration. It was only later, when even the most disingenuous could no longer say that the economic effects were going to be anything other than negative, that it began to be widely claimed that it was ‘never about the money’.
That this claim is false is shown by the fact that any suggestions of economic damage (or any other kind of damage, for that matter) were dismissed as ‘Project Fear’. The reason for that was because Brexiters knew that if voters were persuaded that leaving would cause economic damage they would not vote for it, or not in sufficient numbers to win, in the name of sovereignty. The central achievement of their campaign was to persuade voters that ‘taking back control’ was cost-free, but this also turned out to be its central flaw. For it was the fundamental reason why, as the subtitle of this book suggests, Brexit in reality could never deliver the Brexit promised. One of the commonly used terms during the Brexit process was ‘cakeism’, deriving from Boris Johnson having said that he favoured Britain ‘having its cake and eating it’. This meant, generally, having the benefits of EU membership without belonging to it but, more specifically, having the independence of sovereignty without economic cost and, indeed, with economic benefits. In fact, there was a tension, and a trade-off, between the two.
Betrayal and victimhood
All of these issues are discussed in detail later, but with them comes another recurring theme, which is quite psychologically complex. Whilst Brexit stayed undefined, it could mean whatever people wanted it to mean. But as soon as any actual form of Brexit was articulated or defined, some group of Brexiters would consider it to be ‘a betrayal of true Brexit’.
As mentioned earlier, this generally meant pushing for a harder and harder version, but its real significance went much deeper: it became ever clearer that betrayal was not just something that many Brexiters feared, but something that some of them actually wanted or even needed. There was a particular strand within support for Brexit which positioned ‘ordinary people’ as the downtrodden victims of the elite, meaning not so much the rich and privileged but the politically correct ‘metropolitan liberals’ who wouldn’t let ordinary people ‘say what they thought’, about immigration especially. For those of this mindset, winning the referendum was, paradoxically, a disaster because by making their protest agenda central to government policy they were denied that victimhood. Thus ‘betrayal’ was actually quite attractive because it enabled them to stay in a mode of perpetual victimhood, perpetually railing against the elite who were thwarting them.
This contained within it the seeds of an inevitable tragedy, which was that once Brexit was done, and however it was done, not only would it be against the wishes of, by definition, remainers, but also there would be at least a hard core of Brexiters for whom it would be seen as a betrayal.
Punishment and sabotage
From this derives the final and most culturally destructive theme, which is the search for blame. If ‘true Brexit’ could never be delivered in the eyes of those who most wanted it, and yet never disowned as a mistake, and if victimhood was to be maintained through a narrative of betrayal, then someone had to be to blame. Thus, almost from the beginning, various groups and people were identified. Some were external – the EU ‘punishment brigade’, Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk, Michel Barnier, the Irish, especially Leo Varadkar, and the global elite. Others were internal – saboteurs and enemies of the people, such as Gina Miller, judges, civil servants, the Establishment, the liberal elite, and in due course Theresa ‘the Remainer’. In the end, even Boris Johnson was attacked by the most extreme Brexiters for what he delivered.
It is this theme, more than any other, that has made the politics of the Brexit process so toxic. It meant that Brexit could not be undertaken within the ‘normal’ parameters of policy delivery – even contentious policy delivery. The immensely complex business of enacting Brexit was constantly being scrutinised and judged through the prism of the culture war. In fact, even to describe it as ‘complex’ is, in the eyes of some Brexiters, a part of this culture war because, they still insist, it should have been quick and easy and was only made complex by EU punishment and remainer sabotage. But on any rational appraisal the process was bound to be complex, and Brexiters above all should have realised this, since their repeated complaint was that the UK had been sucked into a European ‘super-state’. At all events, Brexit could not be made simple just by saying that it should be.
MAKING SENSE OF BREXIT
In the years since the 2016 referendum there has been a swirl of events, often confusing, sometimes dramatic. Millions became watchers of the parliamentary TV channel as knife-edge votes were held under sometimes arcane procedures in the House of Commons. People also began to become aware of and interested in things which, in many cases – including in some respects my own – they had hardly registered before. These included the intricacies of international trade and its laws and regulations; the nature of the Good Friday Agreement; how fishing quotas work; what a customs union is; how international supply chains operate – and much else besides.
This has led to two problems, both of which are highly relevant to this book.
The problem of expertise and Brexit
One is about expertise. Most, if not all, of those areas have (mainly) small groups of seriously knowledgeable experts, whether they be academics, journalists, business people or think-tankers. As public interest grew, they became more visible but, at the same time, they were joined by (and were sometimes irritated by) hordes of ‘instant experts’ who, very often, partially or totally misunderstood what are very complex subjects. This was true on both the leave and remain sides.
But the genuine experts also had their limitations, which were precisely those of expertise. Brexit is such a hydra-headed phenomenon that no one could claim to grasp it in its entirety. And that isn’t just about the multiplicity of relevant ‘topics’, it’s about the way that Brexit interweaves the domains of domestic and international politics, economics, business, culture, law, history, psychology and much else besides.
This is a problem for me, too, but also one in which it may be helpful to work in the cross-disciplinary field that I do. I’m fairly used to hopping across some of these different domains. But I am also conscious of the limitations of this. I am neither a trade expert nor a politics expert, to take what are probably the most central bodies of expertise relevant to this book. My attempt is to use the knowledge and skills that I have to dip into different areas of expertise, but I recognise that this ‘jack of all trades’ approach will be offensive and unsatisfactory to those who are ‘masters’ of any one of them. It may also lead me to make errors, for which I apologise in advance.
Equally, there is no need to be too apologetic. Academics and other experts have arguably become too narrowly focused and, in the process, lost a sense of the big picture which Brexit presents. This book is an attempt to present that big picture, which means using some broad brush strokes.
The problem of how to make sense of Brexit
That links directly to the second problem. The Brexit process has been confusing precisely because of the scope and scale of events. That is particularly true for people who may have dropped in and out of giving attention to them, but it’s also true for those who have become immersed in the thickets of those events. Making sense of Brexit requires both continuous engagement with what has happened (unlike the first group) and standing back from what has happened (unlike the second group). In this book, I aim to draw upon my efforts to do the first in order to do the second.
It is here that the recurring themes sketched above become crucial in understanding how Brexit has unfolded. What they enable is a way of making sense of the complexity and confusion of what has happened. For whilst the story of Brexit has unfolded chronologically, it has, throughout the years since 2016, shown the patterns and repetitions of these recurring themes. So I will tell that story so that it does not just chronicle what happened, but explains how and why it happened.
In doing so, I am telling it in terms of what happened in Britain and I, myself, am British. There are clearly other accounts to be given from the perspective of the EU or of individual EU members, and indeed one of the problems throughout the Brexit process was that so much of the British debate was domestically focused. However, I do seek to include in my account explanations of EU interests and motivations, and particularly those of Ireland, the country other than the UK most affected, so I hope it is not a wholly parochial one.
Underlying the idea that Brexit is a process that has unfolded via a series of recurring themes is the proposition that what has happened was never predetermined, in part because of the contradictions within – and in some cases between – the themes I’ve outlined. Throughout the process there have always been voices, usually those of remainers, claiming – either predictively or retrospectively – that such and such ‘was always bound to happen’ or even ‘was the plan all along’. Others have, with equal certainty, claimed the same for completely different outcomes. This has applied in particular to whether or not there would be a Withdrawal Agreement and, later, to whether or not there would be a trade deal.
For the most part, these voices have been mistaken – not necessarily in their predictions since, by definition, some of those predicting contradictory things were going to be right, but in the assumptions of inevitability. In reality, the way that events have unfolded was contingent rather than necessary: that is, with different decisions or different actions different outcomes were possible. I will return to this in the concluding chapter but, for now, will just say that no one writing in 2016 could conceivably have predicted even the broad outlines of what actually happened over the following years.
Although I am an academic, this is not an academic book; it does not for the most part use academic sources, and it is not written for an academic audience. In the ways I’ve already suggested, my academic background has some relevance, and is probably what enabled me to write both this book and my other works on Brexit. But, more, it is an example of what in my opinion is the too-rare genre of academics writing for the general public in a way that is hopefully intelligent and accessible without being convoluted or condescending.
In this, there is a tricky balance between what novelists call ‘telling’ and ‘showing’. As I tell the story of Brexit, there will be constant episodes which show one or more of the themes I’ve outlined in this chapter. In most academic writing, the convention is to ‘tell, show and re-tell’, which in this context would mean drawing the reader’s attention to each example of one of the themes being in play. I think that would be an unbearably didactic approach and so, instead, I rely on readers’ good sense and intelligence to see when my telling of events shows the themes I have identified. However, in the conclusion, I will spell some of these out explicitly.
BREXIT, UNFOLDED
This book does not attempt to explain what led to the referendum being held, nor to explain its result. Such explanations already exist5 and no doubt there will be many more in the future. Instead, it starts from the point at which that result was announced and discusses the events since then, culminating in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020.
The chapters are arranged chronologically, and structured around the main political phases, to show the unfolding process but sometimes, in the interests of clarity, there are slight overlaps in that arrangement and I also refer forwards and backwards as the story proceeds so as to show links or to provide reminders. In giving an account of these Brexit years, part of my purpose is to correct some of the more flagrant rewritings of history that have already occurred. In this respect, the blog mentioned earlier has acted as a valuable ‘archive’ in that it contains a contemporaneous record of events and helps to avoid errors arising from hindsight, although, used properly, hindsight can also be useful to make sense of what was not necessarily obvious at the time.
However, this book is very far from being a complete history of what has happened. It is probably too early to write anything which could properly be called a history, partly because the events are too recent for the application of a historical gaze and partly, as I will make clear, because although the end of the transition period marks a certain moment in the Brexit process, it is very far from an end. It is a semi-colon, rather than a full stop.
In any case, this cannot be a ‘complete’ account of all the twists and turns of the almost five-year period it covers. That would require many large volumes rather than a single book. It would also need insider access to the political actors and papers to provide such a completeness, whereas this book is based on (a wide range of) publicly available sources.
From those sources, and my own interpretation and analysis of them, what this book provides is a chronologically structured account of how the major events of these years unfolded. It is an attempt to make sense of what we, as a nation, have just lived through in this period which has changed so much in our lives, as well as to explain to those abroad who have looked on, often with bemusement. I hope, along the way, to convey the drama of these events for, whatever else may be said of the Brexit process, it has at times been highly engaging in ways that contrast with the perhaps rather drab and technocratic nature of ‘normal’ British politics.
Be that as it may, this book is also, as its subtitle implies, a critique of what has happened. Because of the polarised landscape which Brexit has created, some will reject that critique out of hand. In particular, although there are places at which I criticise remainers, or say things which some of them will find deeply unpalatable, I am well aware that some readers will dismiss my entire account as ‘remainer truth’ (or even as ‘remainer lies’). To them I would say a few things. First, that I have attempted to show at several points how and why a Brexiter account would differ from mine. Second, that reading the book will, if nothing else, give an insight into how some of their compatriots see Brexit. And, third, if they at least agree with my argument that the Brexit process has not given them what they wanted then it may be that they will come to agree with my explanation of how and why that came about. If so, it may also be that they will come to think, as I do, that what I provide in this book is an accurate and damning chronicle which might serve as a warning for the future.
* I use United Kingdom (UK) and Britain interchangeably, and Great Britain to refer to England, Wales and Scotland.
† I use ‘Brexiter’ to mean a high-profile public advocate of Brexit, including politicians, journalists and other leaders or opinion-formers. I use ‘leaver’ or ‘leave voter’ to mean a member of the general public who supports or voted for Brexit. I use ‘Brexit Ultra’ to mean someone highly committed to a hard or very hard form of Brexit (in senses I will subsequently define). I do not draw the same distinction amongst ‘remainers’ because remaining in the EU only took a single form in the Brexit process, i.e. to stay in the EU. I use ‘remainer’ to mean a voter for or advocate of staying in the EU, and I use ‘leading remainer’ to refer to a high-profile advocate of remaining in the EU in the same sense as for such advocates of Brexit.
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Chris Grey studied Economics and Politics at Manchester University, where he then completed a PhD on the regulation of financial services. He later became Professor of Organization Studies at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He subsequently moved to Warwick University and then to Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. He has held visiting professorships at Copenhagen Business School and Université Paris-Dauphine and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has written extensively on Brexit, including an internationally popular and widely praised blog, and is frequently quoted in the media (e.g. Financial Times, Reuters). He has appeared as a Brexit expert on the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Germany’s ARD and elsewhere. He has given invited expert evidence to the Scottish Parliament and his writings appear on the House of Commons Library and Northern Ireland Assembly reading lists.
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