Learning the Hard Way

The political education produced by Brexit.

Brexit Daydreams for some. Nightmares for others.

It was my birthday this week (and I was regaled with a very hearty rendition of “Happy Birthday” by my freshman class thanks to letting slip that infelicitous development while lecturing), and while I am far too old and curmudgeonly to care about birthday gifts (although feel free to pledge money!), nonetheless there is one gift I am happy to receive, and it is one that keeps on giving and giving and giving.

I refer to the watching-from-the-sidelines enjoyment I get from the ongoing shitfest known as “Brexit.” When I first started this stack, I wrote a post entitled “Fiasco of the Year,” the TLDR of which was how struck I was by the juxtaposition of Brexit being responsible for a slew of very serious problems, while essentially being largely ignored by the political class and, even more astonishingly, the media. I don’t mean to say that Brexit is never referenced, because of course it is. But it has not been acknowledged nearly enough for the gigantic colossal error in judgment and spectacular own-goal that it was. At this point, Brexit is either the direct cause or else has sorely aggravated many of the country's problems (e.g. economic stagnation, high inflation, shrinking exports, chronic strikes, no one to take your coffee order). One problem that it has aggravated severely has been the “small boats” illegal immigration problem Britain faces, which is especially ironic considering that a major source of Brexit support to begin with was the “restoration” of sovereignty over its borders and immigration policy. But now that the UK is no longer in the EU, as flotillas of dinghies enter la Manche towards perfide albion, the French overflow with Schadenfreude: a German word that captures the French fuck-you attitude towards the English: Brexit in a nutshell.

This week, an astonishing exchange was circulating between Brexit hyper-onanist and animated-coffin-sent-to-public-school Jason Rees-Mogg and a farmer named David Catt, a salt-of-the-earth type from Kent, discussing the impact of Brexit four years after the formal divorce (and almost eight years since the infamous referendum unleashed the ensuing clusterfuck). Cheerleader-Mogg invited Catt to “join him in celebrating” the UK’s departure from the EU, but he was having none of it. Brexit “hasn’t benefited British agriculture one iota. … It’s destroyed our ability to export to the EU. We had built massive trade with beef, sheep, lamb, fish, dairy products which now we’re not allowed to sell, we can’t sell to the EU because of the red tape.” Faced with is unexpected pushback, Etonian-toff-investment-banker Mogg retreated to Brexit-fantasy talking points, suggesting that British farmers were better off because the UK was no longer a “captive market” for EU food exporters. But as he was talking to an actual farmer, this was a risky strategy. However, when Catt then pointed out that British farmers no longer enjoy the protections created by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), keen-eyed-Mogg sensed an opportunity to regain the upper hand.

This is because the CAP was for decades a hated bogeyman in Eurosceptic circles, the central exhibit in the case against the European project as economically destructive and bureaucratically bloated. At the time of the Brexit vote, the CAP consumed roughly half of the EU’s budget (it has now declined to under 40%, but it still remains by far the single largest budget item of the EU) and was a frequent target of howling outrage and febrile abuse. A 2016 opinion piece published in the (pro-Brexit) Daily Telegraph was not deviating too far from the general perception of the CAP as the standout example of flawed European policy initiatives when it argued that the “Common Agricultural Policy is iniquitous and inefficient. Now, with Brexit, we can be fairer and more productive.” And the CAP was not just the favourite whipping boy of Eurosceptics, either. George Monbiot, a leftwing, anti-Brexit Guardian columnist (who currently is on a campaign to ban wood-burning stoves, because, you know, priorities), noted in 2018 that “one good thing about Brexit? Leaving the EU’s disgraceful farming system.” Those infamous “butter mountains” or “wine lakes,” which were offshoots of how agricultural production is steered by the CAP, were much-publicized examples used by the CAP’s many critics to argue it was a failed policy that created confounding absurdities.

British farmers, especially, loved to grouse about the CAP, in large part because of the perception that it was unfair to British farmers since they received comparatively less in subsidies than their continental counterparts. That was true, which explains why the UK received much of its contribution to the EU budget back - the famous rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Moreover, it was widely argued that the CAP prevented UK farmers from being competitive in global markets, undercutting their efficiency and productivity in the name of central planning. That was much less true, but either way, no-one was letting facts get in the way of non-stop grumbling about how bad the CAP was for everyone, and especially the stalwart, son-of-the-earth British farmer.

So, when the no-nonsense, raining-on-the-Brexit-celebration-parade farmer Catt pointed out that British farmers were MUCH worse off because they were no longer part of the CAP, you can literally see Slouchmeister Mogg react with a kind of salacious pleasure that he had suddenly been given space to seize the tactical upper hand to get the interview back on track: no-one, surely, would ever defend the CAP! The man was mad!

“Every farmer I ever spoke to loathed the CAP,” sassed a gleeful Mogg, “the constant regulation, the interference.”

But sensible farmer Catt was having none of it:

The CAP guaranteed a food supply at a known cost over the last 30 or 40 years … We are in a situation in this country at the moment where agriculture and farming is falling off a cliff. In Kent here, the Garden of England where I am, apple trees are being grubbed [i.e. removed] at a far faster rate than ever before. We’re planting vineyards. We can’t get any labour, or the labour we can get now, comes instead of from Europe freely, it comes from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan or all around the world on visas, which are very expensive, creates a lot of red tape, so most fruit farmers down here are packing up. We’re planting vineyards.

Gobsmacked (a farmer praising the CAP?!), man-of-the-people Mogg tried to talk up the benefits of having local British grapes, presumably to provision that well-known and much sought after commodity, British wine, because when people were voting Brexit what they most coveted was freedom from the tyranny of having to drink Eurocratic cuvées like Bordeaux. Oh! For a good British Claret, said no one ever. Mogg, no doubt sensing that this line of defence was making him look increasingly idiotic (not for nothing his Oxford education), cut the interview short so he could get his Brexit fantasy show back on track.

The sad irony here is that Mogg’s producers probably thought he’d be safe talking to a British farmer because, on the whole, they were a pro-Brexit group, despite the fact that it was plain as daylight that the loss of the EU market would be catastrophic for them. The farming sector in Britain is small. Yet it played an outsized role in creating an emotional argument for an economic prowess enabled by a reinvigorated British sovereignty. Farmers’ often enthusiastic support for “Leave” was a vivid demonstration of the power of magical thinking: once free of the hated CAP, a wave of benefits would follow. To my mind, this is why the exchange was especially interesting – because it reveals how folks (excluding to-the-manor-born Mogg) are now contending with reality after having spent literally decades living inside a continually-reinforced political fantasy.

Precisely because the CAP has been widely perceived as a scourge for so long, I would be very surprised if that farmer from Kent had not himself frequently bemoaned the policy; if he did not, his neighbours were certainly doing so. It is only over the last four years, as farmers have been rooting up their apple trees and learning rudimentary Uzbek, that the market-stabilizing function of the CAP has become clear. Sadly, this realization is hardly a case of better late than never, because they’d all be better off still venting about the bureaucratic idiocy of the EU over a pint of bitter while still inside the union, than now having actually discovered its benefits from the outside looking in, drowning their sorrows in a glass of home-grown British sparkling rosé.

This one exchange recapitulates why Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving: it is an exceptional reminder of what happens when politics moves too far away from fact-based reality. For one thing, Brexit has done more than anything to shore up the EU. Pre-Brexit Euroscepticism has all but vanished, now limited to fringe parties, and even then often just at the fringes of the fringe. Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders, who I discussed in a recent post, has toyed with the idea of a Dutch withdrawal from Europe (“Nexit”), but has made virtually no mention of it since his unexpected victory. Not only has Britain helped reinforce European integration, it has also – irony of ironies – buttressed the institutional power of the EU itself; the recent deflation of Hungarian loudmouth Orban’s braggadocio is a good example. The EU is much stronger institutionally and ideologically as a result of Brexit, and somewhere Charles De Gaulle is having a good laugh while emphatically declining a glass of British Pinot.

But the exchange between Ra-Ra-man Mogg and farmer Catt also shows something deeper. Note that the farmer was versed in policy, aware of the facts, and sensitive to their consequences. That was patently NOT the case (I don’t impugn the good farmer, I mean more generally) in 2016 when the Brexit vote unfolded. The tumult provoked by Brexit has done more to educate the British electorate than anything in recent memory. Fantasies about wasted money, uncontrolled immigration, underfunding of services, loss of sovereignty, inability to be competitive globally, and democracy deficits – all pinned on the EU – have given way to the unavoidable conclusion that by no measure has Britain benefitted from its decision to leave, which is why roughly two thirds of Brits would like to go back (although that is not going to happen anytime soon).

Later this year, Rees-Mogg will lose his seat, and his sadsack party will be voted out of office in what could well be the worst electoral bludgeoning in modern UK politics, because the Tories managed to achieve one thing with their Brexit misadventure: a better-informed electorate. That’s a salutary development, but surely, we can all agree it would be better to come to such enlightenment before one actually has to suffer the consequences of ignorance. And that is the deeper message of Brexit: a reminder that cheap, low-information politics, like British wine, can have rough aftereffects.

Many thanks for reading, and if you made it to the end, please throw me a like and/or leave a comment with your thoughts. If you know someone who might like this post, here’s a share button: