Next week’s ballot could decide whether the UK is set upon an internationalist future of peace and progress, or a nationalist future of slump and war. The stakes for the country, Europe and indeed the world could not be higher, argues a leading academic
“Get Brexit done” is a snappy slogan, but it is easier to say it than to say what it means. Into three words it packs three messages, all of them deceptive. And the first is that what is on offer is not Brexit. What is on offer is ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by Mrs May, as amended by Mr Johnson’s alternative to the Irish “backstop”.
But Brexit – in so far as it is not the fantasy of the United Kingdom’s independence of any relations at all with everyone else – is the reconstruction of the UK’s relations with everyone else on the basis of non-membership of the European Union.
For that historic reconstruction the Withdrawal Agreement merely clears the ground and in Mrs May’s form was almost entirely retrospective. It settled the UK’s past debts and attempted to regularise the position of continuing EU citizens already living in the UK and of UK citizens already living in other EU countries. Mr Johnson was able to persuade the EU to insert one provision relating to the future that strictly speaking did not belong in a mere Withdrawal Agreement – an alteration to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland that cost him the support of the Democratic Unionist Party.