It’s about sovereignty, stupid. The insistence of taking back control has become more strident in recent days.
One of the many young fresh-faced English journalists, who are popping up on television on a nightly basis, argued that the kernel of Brexit is sovereignty and not economics. His view was that the threats from the big companies such as Airbus and Jaguar of moving their production plants to other countries were not and would not persuade voters to convert from leavers to remainers. He believed that people were prepared to suffer economically as long as they could take back their legal, economic and parliamentary independence.
I think he is right. There is a detectable longing among swathes of English people to re-find something that they feel they have lost. When that loss is accompanied by another English characteristic of Churchillian stubbornness and pride then all attempts at exhortation and threat are likely to fail.
It is easy to mock and ridicule these traits and even easier to analyse the flaws and the incongruities. But those responses do not change minds.
What should be questioned and challenged is the contradiction that is at the heart of what the young fresh-faced journalist described as the kernel. If sovereignty is the desire and need of the English people, then they should understand and empathise with similar emotion in others.
Up to now they have shown little understanding that we live in relationship with others and what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If sovereignty is good for England then that surely enhances the same argument and desire in Scotland, in Wales and in Ireland. That is what has allowed commentators to speculate that the UK union is now under threat, in that there is a growing demand among large swathes of people for separate national identities.
Sovereignty has been at the heart of Irish politics for more than a hundred years. For forty or more years we in the north fought and killed each other in a struggle for sovereignty. Eventually, as is the case in all disputes about sovereignty, a mechanism was established that allowed us negotiate a partial settlement that was better and less violent than the previous forty years. But that settlement could never be complete because it lay within the unresolved sovereign tensions between Britain and Ireland. Which means that the north is now caught in the vortex of the larger sovereignty tensions between all the nations of these islands and Europe.
The Scottish government held an independence referendum a few years back that was narrowly defeated. They wanted their sovereignty back. Ironically, the main political argument by its opponents and the one that probably won the referendum was that the Scottish economy and independence were poor bedfellows. The government in Scotland is presently so annoyed by the possibility of being taken out of Europe against the wishes of the majority of its people that it is waiting for an optimum time to call another referendum. Wales has always been more apathetic on these issues but in the wake of the number and spread of factory closures in recent times there are mumblings even there.
Europe is a macro example of our sovereignty disputes. After killing each other for centuries they found a method of sharing some of their sovereignty while retaining their independence. It was not perfect but a lot better than what went before.
Brexit has not yet fully played itself out. There are more scenes to be enacted. But even at this stage there is a beginning clarity that there needs to be a mechanism to address and negotiate these competing sovereignties. To borrow the language of the Good Friday Agreement, there is the totality of relationships to be considered and addressed.
Out and beyond what is happening between Westminster and Europe, out and beyond what happens to Theresa May’s deal, out and beyond a hard, soft or no deal, the sovereignty issue is not going to be put back in the box. It will affect all the relationships on these islands for years to come. If it is ignored, it will fester and might even turn cancerous.
Now is the time to face the kernel of what Brexit entails. It requires a structure similar to what was provided to facilitate the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement. It will involve the two governments and all the devolved parliaments. Europe, I am sure, would be willing to facilitate such a mechanism.
