When the history of Brexit is written, the Lib Dems’ decision to let Johnson hold this miserable election will be seen as a key strategic error.
Boris Johnson has a big majority in Parliament, but he didn’t get a majority of the popular vote. Even if you add his buddies in the Brexit Party and his previous allies in the DUP, they got only 46%. If we’d had a referendum instead, we could have won.
Sensible Labour MPs stopped Jeremy Corbyn multiple times in the summer and early autumn from agreeing to an election. But when Jo Swinson broke ranks, the SNP immediately followed suit and Labour couldn’t hold the line.
The tragedy is that we were close to getting a People’s Vote through Parliament. And if we had held one, we would have been in a good position to win.
Tribalism
Our side made other errors, of course. Corbyn was an incredibly weak leader, with a mushy approach to Brexit. In a referendum, that might not have mattered too much as he could have sat on the sidelines while others campaigned. But he was unelectable as a prime minister.
The pro-referendum majority was also too split between different parties. Many people voted tactically, but not nearly enough of them. And the so-called “Remain Alliance” didn’t amount to a row of beans. The Lib Dems wouldn’t stand down for Labour even in Johnson’s seat and Labour wouldn’t support the Lib Dems even in Dominic Raab’s constituency. Again, in a referendum, tribalism wouldn’t have been an issue.
Lack of scrutiny
Another tragedy is that the prime minister’s deal wasn’t properly scrutinised. It splits the country into two. Northern Ireland follows EU rules without a say on them, effectively becoming an EU colony. And Johnson hasn’t agreed anything for Great Britain. He’ll be in an incredibly weak position when the negotiations start next year.
If there hadn’t been an election, we could have stripped the lipstick off his pig of a deal. MPs would have examined it line by line. And there is every chance the people would have said “no” when it was put to a referendum.
But Johnson was able to avoid questioning. He told bare-faced lies about what he had agreed with the EU. He refused interviews with top-rank journalists, in one case literally hiding in a fridge. As a result, few voters had a clue how bad a deal he has done.
No positive case
Pro-Europeans have also failed to make the positive case for being in the EU. We didn’t connect Europe to the issues that people care about and that led so many to vote for Brexit in the first place – such as the crumbling NHS, austerity, crime and lack of investment in huge swathes of the UK.
We have a country that is terribly split on geographical lines: between big cosmopolitan cities and old industrial towns; between Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. The election has made these divisions worse. The UK may literally break apart.
We could fix these problems if we were staying in the EU with a healthy economy. We would be better able to tackle pressing global problems, such as the climate emergency, if we remained an influential member of a powerful club. But too few politicians said any of that.
What next?
We will now leave the EU on January 31. We can’t stop that.
Johnson will then have to figure out what Brexit means. He will face a terrible dilemma between damaging our economy by ripping us out of the EU market or following the bloc’s rules without a say on them. But pro-Europeans can’t influence that choice. It’s a debate that will be held entirely within the Tory party.
The rest of us will now need to decide how to direct our energies. There will be many political battles ahead. Some will want to fight to rejoin the EU, but the chance of that happening in the foreseeable future is very limited. Others will wish to focus on different causes, such as stopping our democracy becoming further polluted by lies.
I, for one, will take some time to reflect. In the meantime, I wish to thank all our readers, donors and colleagues. We have lost. But day after day we made the fact-based case for staying in the EU. We fought as hard as we could. We couldn’t have done it without you.