A close friend of mine remarked earlier today that he is increasingly worried about the effect Brexit will have on social cohesion. If it goes ahead, the economic shock will likely lead to a significant amount of dislocation, and if it doesn't, the existing betrayal narrative amongst leavers is likely to get worse. They may blame not just politicians, but liberally minded people in the country at large. Increasingly I think there is no outcome that a large portion of the population won't see as fundamentally illegitimate. Any move on Brexit is likely to make social cohesion and belief in the legitimacy of government worse.
Amongst Conservative Brexiteers and the leave supporting press, there has been a decisive move towards describing anything other than the most extreme rupture with the European Union as an act of betrayal. In their minds, nothing else will fulfill the mandate of the referendum.But the corollary of this is that any 'legitimate' Brexit for leavers will so egregiously exceed general expectations of the referendum mandate that it will almost certainly be seen as illegitimate by most remainers. This is not the same as saying they won't like it: they will see it as an extreme development achieved without proper democratic consent.
Add to this the increasing awareness of electoral misconduct by Vote Leave and the memory of the way in which the campaign was run and it's easy to see why the legitimacy of the vote might be called into question. And any residual sense of legitimacy of the process will then be tested by the severe shock of an abrupt departure from the EU.
This was not always the case. When May first came into power in 2016, it may well have been possible to put together a compromise position in favour of EEA membership (the so called Norway option). Sure, lots of people wouldn't particularly have liked it. Remainers like myself might well have thought the process was pointlessly damaging: a large amount of effort, and a very unpleasant campaign would have occurred, all to keep things more or less as they are, albeit with less influence than as a full member state.
Certainly many leavers would have disliked it, but it's quite plausible that it would have been seen by a broad enough chunk of the population as acceptable enough that politics could move on to other things. Indeed polling immediately after the referendum suggests this is exactly what many leavers expected to happen, and many prominent leavers had at one stage or other advocated something along these lines. Even the withdrawal agreement, something that in all likelihood would mean a final settlement with the EU which was hugely damaging to the UK in terms of trade, influence, rights and opportunities could potentially have been regarded as an unfortunate compromise.
Now, it is not only difficult to imagine such a compromise: even if one were reached in Commons, amongst the wider population, it would be viewed as illegitimate by either remainers, leavers or both. Arguably, a second referendum could shift this. But I wouldn't be so sure. The margin of victory in a second referendum would likely be small, and there is every reason to think the campaign would be equally dishonest. Leavers could easily dismiss a narrow remain victory as an illegitimate result,either by questioning whether a second vote should have taken place, or by quasi conspiratorial appeal to an establishment set up (conspiratorial ideas about 'the establishment'/the elites form an important part of Brexiteer rhetoric, regardless of their resemblance of actual power relations). Remainers in the event of another leave victory are likely to accept leaving as a politcal reality, but still see the likely tactics of the leave campaign as anti-democratic.
This is not to say that legitimacy questions can simply be tossed out the window. Perhaps the consequences of one group seeing the process as illegitimate are more severe than those of another. And a second referendum may deliver a less bad outcome in terms of percieved legitimacy of government policy. But all arguments to this effect must now be comparative. And in absence of a compelling comparative argument, it increasingly seems to make sense to just push for the best outcome in practical terms, which means remaining a member of the European Union.
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