Fintan O'Toole: There is no good Brexit option for Johnson this weekend - only lesser evils

Shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016, Michael Gove made a joke about the Irish famine. As co-leader with Boris Johnson of the Leave campaign, he was giving a major set-piece speech, one of the very few that actually made some effort to describe what would happen if they won.

Gove was mocking the Remain side’s scare stories about the dark consequences of Brexit: “The City of London would become a ghost town, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the Potato Famine”.

Let us leave aside the news this week that British Land Rovers will, after Brexit, not just be sold in France – they’ll be made in France. It was still quite some rhetorical feat to move so briskly from Mr Kipling cakes to the Great Hunger, which is the greatest human catastrophe in the modern history, not just of Ireland, but of the country in which it happened, the United Kingdom.

To manage it, you would need, not just a supreme talent for crassness, but a contempt for the whole idea of consequences. For, insofar as it constituted anything that might be called an argument, Gove’s line of reasoning was: Brexit won’t be as bad as the Irish famine, so let’s not worry.

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It’s an old trick, one that Johnson and Gove presumably learned in debating societies; inflate your opponents’ claims to ludicrous dimensions and then burst them with your rapier wit. It was useful because it allowed them to evade the question of what consequences they actually envisaged for Brexit and how tolerable or otherwise they might be.

This was always the fundamental problem: the idea that the EU might have its own collective interests remained essentially incomprehensible to the Brexiteers

This has been the core conceptual problem of Brexit all along. In principle, it is an entirely defensible project – on one condition. The condition is that it should be honest about the trade-off it involves. This is the economic pain; this is why we think it’s worth it.

There is nothing innately ignoble in this kind of calculation. Most Irish people experienced it after independence, when their new State was an economic basket case. Most would still have chosen to retain their independence anyway.

But the fatal flaw in Brexit is that the Brexiteers never had the courage to put this proposition to voters, presumably because they knew they would lose. Instead, they drew a map on which the route to Nirvana was Easy Street all the way.

It was in that same speech that Gove laid out for voters the basic promises of Brexit.

“The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.” Britain would unilaterally “decide the terms of trade” with the EU. While there would be “some questions up for negotiation”, resolving them “won’t be any more complicated or onerous than the day-to-day work” of dealing with the usual EU bureaucracy.

The question of what the EU might think of any of this was of no account. It was overwritten, ironically for a reactionary Tory project, with a Marxist magic marker.

As Gove, and many of the other Brexiteers, explained, the German car manufacturers, the Italian fashion houses and the French wine makers would all demand continued access to the British market. Since governments are just fronts for the capitalists, their prime ministers would instruct the EU to accept whatever terms Britain demanded in return.

This was always the fundamental problem: the idea that the EU might have its own collective interests remained essentially incomprehensible to the Brexiteers. In another irony, their ignorance was one good argument for Brexit – it showed that, after nearly 50 years of membership, a large part of the British ruling class still did not understand the EU.

There were two big things in particular they did not get. One was the simple logic that if a country could leave the EU but still enjoy all the benefits of membership, there would be no EU. Giving Britain what it wanted would be terminal.

A no-deal Brexit would be horrible. A deal on British terms – access to the Single Market without a level playing field – would be suicidal

The other was that the EU has a lot of people who can read English and listen to what the Brexiteers were actually saying. What they were saying was that, as Gove put it in that speech, the economic point of leaving the EU was “shedding unnecessary regulation”.

The Brexiteers were perfectly right to think that, if they could still have frictionless trade with the EU while allowing their firms to cut labour, environmental and safety standards, those firms would devastate their European competitors.

It did not occur to them that no EU country, not even one that sold Armani suits or BMWs or champagne to London hedge fund managers, might see this, too, as an existential threat. To sign a deal on British terms would be signing the EU’s own death warrant.

Not choices

This was always, from the beginning, clear to every EU state. A no-deal Brexit would be horrible. A deal on British terms – access to the Single Market without a level playing field – would be suicidal. Pain is bad, but death is worse.

To avoid this fate, the EU would always have to do two things. Firstly, it would have to ensure that the UK’s position in the Single Market after Brexit is much worse than before. Secondly, it would have to stop a post-Brexit UK from lowering its standards, not just now, but into the future.

These were not choices; they were imperatives. They were not about punishing the Brits. They were not susceptible to charm or bluster. They were just facts. This is why the basic EU position remained highly unified and did not change. The British strategy of exploiting differences between members states could never have worked because, on these fundamentals, there were no differences to exploit.

This left, for Britain, the excruciating choice that Boris Johnson can, finally, no longer avoid. It either destroys its trading relationship with its largest partner. Or it accepts the “vassalage” he himself rhetorically conjured into being; being bound by rules it has no voice in making.

Never mind the fish. This is, and always has been, the rub. Britain joined the EEC in 1973 because it realised that, if it did not, it would end up having to adopt its standards without being able to shape them. That was intolerable then – and it will be intolerable in 2021.

Brexit did not create the absolute freedom Gove and Johnson promised. The only real choice it generated is the decision on which is the lesser of two evils. Either follow rules you do not make; or accept, on behalf of the most vulnerable in your society, the inevitable pain.

There is no good option for Johnson this weekend. At the end of a tragedy, there never is.