There is an excellent article in the New Statesman by David Gauke, an ex-Tory politician writing about the current state of his old political party and what comes next.

With the drip, drip, drip of constant scandals from No10 where our leaders seem to be shameless in their partying whilst the rest of us were left isolated and alone, it feels somewhat like the final series in a tv soap opera. We all expect the PM to go. The only question is when and who puts in the knife.

It is tempting to believe that the new leader will remake the party, which is in power in the UK two thirds of the time, into it’s old rather staid and, well, conservative, image.

The politics of 2019 were certainly extraordinary and, it is certainly tempting to view Johnson as an aberration, someone that only came to power in those very extraordinary circumstances. Now that those circumstances have passed, the argument goes, we can return to normality. The Conservative Party can elect a more conventional leader and pursue a more conventional Tory agenda. Post-Johnson politics can look like pre-Johnson politics (only with the UK outside the EU because, after all, he got Brexit done). Let us never speak of him again.

But this ignores the causes of the Brexit impasse, it ignores the political risks that faced the Conservative Party in 2019 and it ignores the political opportunity which Johnson seized at the last general election and which the Conservatives are likely to want to replicate.

Johnson skilfully exploited the nation’s weariness with a problem he had helped to create – the apparently endless drama that was leaving the European Union. Reassured by Leave politicians that this would be a simple and straightforward matter in which the UK held all the cards, it came as a shock to the electorate that negotiations proved to be complicated and that the EU was not prepared to give the UK everything it demanded.

Matters were not helped by the most intractable issue being one of little direct relevance to the population of Great Britain – the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This received little attention at the time of the 2016 referendum (despite the best efforts of Tony Blair and John Major) but the logic of the issue meant that there was no way of delivering a ­satisfactory Brexit.

The UK’s regulatory and customs divergence from the EU meant that a UK-EU border was necessary. We could, of course, have decided not to diverge on regulatory and customs matters, but this would have brought into question the whole point of Brexit.

It was this trilemma that sunk May’s withdrawal agreement. As a sincere unionist and someone acutely conscious of the risks of creating a border on the island of Ireland, she obtained an agreement that effectively kept the UK in the single market for goods until the border issue could be resolved. This was a practical solution to the trilemma, but it failed the Brexiteers’ purity test.

Brexit had become redefined so as to mean that any compromise with the EU (or, indeed, any compromise with logic) was unacceptable. As one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, Johnson might have engaged with and understood the issue and tried to explain to his followers that it was necessary to address a real practical problem. Where he led, Brexit supporters might have followed.

Instead, Johnson dismissed the Northern Ireland border as nit-picking by Remainers (once likening it to moving between the two London boroughs of Islington and Camden) and sided with the sovereignty purists of the European Research Group. His answer to the Northern Ireland border question was to hang tough, shout louder and threaten the EU with a no-deal Brexit.

On the substance, Johnson turned out to be wrong. He thought he could avoid a border but agreed in October 2019 to putting one in the Irish Sea. He tried to reverse this while negotiating a new EU trade deal in the autumn of 2020 but again backed down and is still trying to renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol without much success. His position, however, did bring political rewards – the support of the European Research Group in the Conservative leadership election and a comfortable victory among the staunchly Eurosceptic party membership.

Johnson’s triumph among Conservative MPs was not, of course, limited to the diehard Brexiteers. It helped enormously that he was the favourite among the members and was always likely to win. That can focus the minds of those wanting a frontbench career. He was also the candidate who could most plausibly see off Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, the winner of the 2019 European Parliament elections.

The risk for the Conservatives in 2019 was that they faced being squeezed on the Brexit-supporting right by Farage while being squeezed on the Remain supporting centre by the Liberal Democrats. This had happened in the European elections and Conservative MPs were terrified that it would happen again in a general election.

Johnson’s strategy was to unite the Brexit side of the debate. Brexit had created a risk but also created an opportunity. By seeing off Farage, it meant that the Conservatives could appeal to a new part of the electorate – cultural conservatives who had voted Labour and Ukip in the past and who wanted to see Brexit done. They liked Johnson – a charismatic, anti-establishment, politically incorrect, optimistic, patriotic, affable character who did not take himself too seriously. He promised them change, more nurses and police officers and a bit of a laugh. He was also up against Jeremy Corbyn, an historically unpopular figure. In December 2019, Johnson’s ambition was fulfilled and he won an 80-seat majority.

It is worth dwelling on this moment. It tells us three things about modern politics that are relevant to the post-Johnson world as well as his emergence as Prime Minister – the nature of the parliamentary party; the determination to close down space to the Conservatives’ right; and the changing alignment of British politics.

Johnson’s three predecessors as Conservative prime minister – John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May – were all brought down (or, at least, deeply damaged) by their inability to control the Eurosceptic right. Johnson, in contrast, exploited the right.

For a sizeable element of the Tory party, sovereignty has assumed an almost theological quality. They no longer exist in a world of trade-offs and compromises, of pros and cons, but a world of absolutes. In the context of Northern Ireland, this requires a continued refusal to accept the choices available and an insistence that we can avoid a border in the Irish Sea and diverge from the EU. Future leadership candidates will be acutely aware of this.

Incidentally, for most of these MPs, they also have a vision as to what Brexit means. Divergence is for a purpose and that purpose is to make the UK more competitive, to deliver the next stage of the Thatcherite revolution. The reality is that Brexit means reversing much of Thatcherism – putting up taxes because the economy is smaller than it otherwise would have been, erecting trade barriers and imposing new regulatory burdens on business – but the increasing tendency is to blame Johnson’s Big State instincts for this predictable turn of events.

The events of 2018-19 also revealed a wider change of temperament within the parliamentary party. Conservative politics became about campaigning not governing, with well-organised factions talking to the like-minded, and using every method possible to exert pressure on the government. The Tories became more a party of protest than of government, with a research group for every cause.

In recent weeks, the most prominent of these groups has organised opposition to Covid restrictions. The country is fortunate that Omicron has turned out to be as mild as it has – something that was not certain when a hundred Conservative MPs rebelled over the Plan B restrictions. Had these MPs got their way, with Plan B not implemented, (and had Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, not warned the public to ration their socialising), the NHS may well have been overwhelmed this January.

Again, as with Brexit, Covid-19 has ­exposed a tendency among Conservative MPs to view the world as they would like it to be, not as it actually is. Their risk appetite is insatiable. Johnson’s removal would not change this – he was relatively cautious on Omicron.

The threat of an alternative party to the right of the Conservatives has diminished since 2019. This is partly due to Johnson’s positioning and partly due to coronavirus. Farage and other Brexit veterans have ­associated themselves with the anti- lockdown cause, which has had little cut-through with their traditional older, Covid-vulnerable supporters. The Reform Party has consistently performed poorly in by-elections and opinion polls. 

Post-Covid, however, the opportunity to change the subject and prompt public ­animosity towards immigration will increase. A significant breakthrough for the Reform Party remains unlikely but Farage’s influence comes not from his own success but his influence over those Conservatives easily spooked by the prospect of losing votes to him. If anything, Johnson’s removal would increase these Tory concerns because his successor will not have Johnson’s track record of diminishing Farage’s appeal.

The final lesson is that there is a long-term realignment of politics in the UK and throughout the developed world. Whereas once the economically secure voted centre right and the economically insecure voted centre-left, voting behaviour has become increasingly influenced by cultural matters. The way in which a particular constituency votes increasingly depends not on income levels but upon population density, ethnic diversity and education levels.

This has created an opportunity for the centre right and helped deliver the Red Wall to the Tories. Johnson, with his performative patriotism, ideological flexibility and apparently disarming personality, was able to woo this part of the electorate in a way that few Conservatives can. Reconciling the small-state instincts of many Tories with this electoral opportunity is a challenge that any leader of the Conservative Party will have to address but, with our current political geography, it is hard to see how the views of the median voter in a Red Wall swing seat (economically to the left, culturally to the right) can be ignored. This does not suggest a return to Cameroon-style liberal conservativism any time soon.

Johnson’s period in office may be coming to an end. What replaces him will not be Johnsonian as such. He never offered a coherent philosophy and, ethically, any change will be a step in the right direction. Rule-breaking parties won’t be an issue. But the forces apparent in 2019 – an unruly, even delusional, parliamentary party, the fear of a threat from the right, and a realigned ­electorate that rewards cultural conservatism – will continue to drive the politics of the Conservative Party for years to come. 

A recent article in the Times newspaper looked at the Labour strategy in the recent election.

Hidden from staff, this version was updated 15th Nov and leaked by a trade union (1/5)

It reveals that despite polls Labour targeted 60 seats and defended just 26

The list includes Tory seats with majorities of more than 5,000 like Stourbridge, Dover and Gloucester

Echoes Murphy’s claim that Labour would reject polling. “We ripped up those rules,’ she said. (2/5)

It included Labour’s secret list of target seats for the election It reveals Murphy and Milne, policy makers and shakers for Labour, fought a “deranged” offensive campaign focused on Tory Leave seats

Hidden from staff, this version was updated 15th Nov and leaked by a trade union. It reveals that despite polls, Labour targeted 60 seats and defended just 26. The list includes Tory seats with majorities of more than 5,000 like Stourbridge, Dover and Gloucester Echoes Murphy’s claim that Labour would reject polling: “We ripped up those rules,’ she said.

Unsurprisingly this kamikaze strategy resulted in just 1 win (Putney) out of the 60 seats targeted and multiple losses in undefended seats, as the so-call Labour “red wall” crumbled.

Some seats targeted appear to be political – for example Labour continued to target Luciana Berger in Finchley and Golders Green but it did not prioritise Ruth Smeeth in Stoke on Trent North . Similarly with several Corbyn sceptics abandoned as resources were marshalled elsewhere.

The source for the article said that the campaign was based on three motives:

– disprove the defensive approach of 2017

– show that Lab support concentrated in non-Remain areas

– internal politics, change complexion of PLP “Unite are behind this,” they say

With the largest defeat in generations it certainly seems to have provided a clear answer to all of the above.

A defensive strategy would most likely have resulted in another second hung parliament, not a win but certainly not a loss for Labour.

The sources for the article were clear that the Labour leadership was warned but chose to keep this document as their central strategy, refusing to develop a new plan.

“Murphy and Milne are responsible for the most catastrophic defeat in almost a century.”

Ex-PM Tony Blair made a speech after the recent General Election which basically summarises the challenge for the Labour party.

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This Election was no ordinary defeat for Labour. It marks a moment in history. The choice for Labour is to renew itself as the serious, progressive, non Conservative competitor for power in British politics; or retreat from such an ambition, in which case over time it will be replaced.

The Election can be analysed in conventional ways – and here it does not take political genius to work out what happened.

I feel deeply for those good Labour MPs and candidates who lost through no fault of their own and the thousands of Party workers and volunteers who, as I know well, are the backbone of the Party.

Of course, Brexit was an issue. It was a Brexit General Election – which was why it was a cardinal error for Labour ever to agree it. But an already difficult situation was made impossible by the failure to take a clear position and stick to it.

I take very seriously the argument that we ‘deserted’ or ‘disrespected’ our working class voters by reopening the referendum result.

But the problem with this position, is that there was no way of uniting the country over Brexit. Britain is deeply divided over it. Now that Brexit will happen, we must make the best of it and the country must come together.

But until the Election settled the debate, as unfortunately it has, if Labour had gone for Leave it would simply have alienated the half of the nation that opposed Brexit; as well as the vast bulk of Party members

Post Election polling shows that between 2017 and 2019, we lost only a small number of voters who were Leave and all the way through we had more than double the number of Remain voters. The biggest percentage fall in Labour voters between 2017 and 2019 was amongst young people, probably dismayed by the ambiguity over a Brexit they detested.

What we should have done, following June 2016, is accepted the result, said it was for the Government to negotiate an agreement but reserved our right to critique that agreement and should it fail to be a good deal for the country, advocate the final decision should rest with the people. Ultimately, we might have lost the most ardent Brexit support, but I believe, with different leadership, we would have kept much of our vote in traditional Labour areas, whilst benefiting from the fact that even in those areas, the majority of those voting Labour, were Remain.

Instead we pursued a path of almost comic indecision, alienated both sides of the debate, leaving our voters without guidance or leadership.

The absence of leadership on what was obviously the biggest question facing the country, then reinforced all the other doubts about Jeremy Corbyn.

What is important is to understand why his leadership was so decisively rejected.

This is not about Jeremy Corbyn as a person. I have no doubt he is someone of deeply held and sincere beliefs, who stayed true to them under harsh attack.

But politically, people saw him as fundamentally opposing what Britain and Western societies stand for. He personified an idea, a brand of quasi revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.

No sentient political Party goes into an Election with a Leader who has a net approval rating of – 40%.

The takeover of the Labour Party by the Far left turned it into a glorified Protest Movement, with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible Government.

The result has brought shame on us. We let our country down. To go into an Election at any time with such a divergence between People and Party is unacceptable. To do it at a time of national crisis when a credible opposition was so essential to our national interest, is unforgiveable.

Anti-Semitism is a stain. The failure to deal with it, a matter of disgust that left some of us who voted Labour feeling, for the first time in our lives, conflicted about doing it.

So, at one level, sure let’s have a period of ‘reflection’; but any attempt to whitewash this defeat, pretend it is something other than it is, or the consequence of something other than the obvious, will cause irreparable damage to our relationship with the electorate.

Let us demolish this delusion that ‘the manifesto was popular’. The sentiment behind some of the policy reflected public anxieties, but in combination, it was one hundred pages of ‘wish list’. Any fool can promise everything for free. But the People weren’t fooled. They know life isn’t like that. And the loading in of ‘free broadband’ run by Government was the final confirmation of incredibility.

So, Messrs Johnson and Cummings had a strategy for victory, and we had one for defeat. And I noted the cockiness of the Johnson visit to Sedgefield to rub salt in the wound!  But I would like to see their strategic brilliance measured against a team other than one whose striker was directionally oblivious, its midfield comatose, the defence absent in the stand chatting to a small portion of the fans and its goalkeeper behind the net retweeting a clip of his one save in a 9-0 thrashing.   

For the Labour Party the choices are stark, starker than it realises.

It is gearing up to fight an ‘ultra Thatcherite’ Tory Party.

But Boris Johnson also understood that the country can’t be united over Brexit. So, his strategy is to do it and then treat it as an uncomfortable fact of life but not one defining the Conservative Party. He will adopt centre ground rhetoric on everything other than Brexit and possibly even on that; expect to see some former rebels back in the fold and the Lords; and having turned Brexit from a Tory problem into the nation’s problem, expect the tenor of the debate around Brexit to change.

His challenge will be formidable not least on the new trade deal and the threat to the Union, quite apart from delivering on all those promises to Northern former Labour voters.

But most people would not bet against 10 years of Tory Government.

The first rule of politics, however, is there are no rules of inevitability.  

Labour can keep with the programme and positions of Corbyn with a new Leader. In which case it is finished.

Or it can understand that it must recapture the Party from the Far left, make radical changes and begin the March back.

But the biggest necessity is understanding the challenge didn’t begin in 2015. It is rather the culmination of political and socio-economic changes over the last half century and the circumstances of Labour’s birth more than a century ago.

This is a moment where either we use the lessons of defeat to build a progressive, modern political coalition capable of competing for, winning and retaining power; or we accept that the Labour Party has exhausted its original mission and is unable to fulfil the purpose for which it was created.

As the 19th Century Industrial Revolution gathered pace, the Whig Party became the Liberal Party and the effective alternative to the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party suffered the stresses of Home Rule for Ireland and the cleavage between the Radical elements represented by Chamberlain and the more conservative remnants of Whiggery and then later still had to cope with Chamberlain’s departure from the Party and shift to a populism combining support for the working class and Imperialism; but it was the main instrument of social reform and could still win the election of 1906 and govern up to and through 1914 and the outbreak of World War 1.

 A competitor appeared: the newly formed Labour Party born out of the Labour Representation Committee, a trade union based organisation designed to bring true representatives of the working class into Parliament; and socialist.

In time, the Labour Party took over as the main alternative to the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party retreated to minority status.

So, Lloyd George a great Liberal reformer and Clement Attlee a great Labour reformer ended up in different parties.

 But the division in progressive politics had long term deleterious consequences. In the last century with the Labour Party and Liberals separated, Tories have been in power much longer than the Opposition, including winning 8 out of the last 11 elections, whereas in the years of Tory/Liberal Party competition, the Liberals were ahead .

The Labour Party became reliant on traditional working class organisations and constantly pulled towards a socialism which blunted at crucial moments its appeal to the aspirant working class. It had its Liberal wing represented by the likes of Roy Jenkins, but it was always viewed with some suspicion.

The traditional left and right of the Party – Bevin and Bevan – were themselves often uncomfortable bedfellows, but they united around: Labour as a Party of Government, Parliamentary not revolutionary politics, pro NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance, and within the mainstream of European socialist and social democratic politics.

Then there was a third strand of leftist politics which derived from Marxist/Leninism and was an early thorn in the side of the Labour leadership. From the beginning, the leadership shoved this strand to the fringe of Labour politics. It mounted an assault on the Party’s commanding heights through Tony Benn in the 1970s and 80s, but it was repulsed under Michael Foot who supported Denis Healey against Benn and moved to expel the Militant Tendency.

Throughout this time, something else was happening. The economy and society were changing. The middle class grew and those instruments of collective power like unions lost their industrial base.

And as the State also grew, in size and authority, it became clear that though it was a means of social progress, it could also be a vested interest, and the limitations of the State in an era of individual choice and increased income became more apparent.

The trade union and industrial base became hollowed out. The Labour Party structures had shown themselves vulnerable to infiltration. The values remained strong; but the offer to the People weak and outdated.  

New Labour was an attempt to reunite the Liberal and Labour traditions of progressive politics. Both traditional left and right of the Labour tradition were expressly included, symbolised by me and John Prescott; but the Far Left was back to the fringe.

A study of Labour history showed that in the 20th C it had governed only intermittently. The longest unbroken period of power was 6 years. Never had the Labour Party won two full successive terms.

So, the Party programme was reshaped around an appeal to aspiration as well as social justice, to business as well as unions; culturally it was strong on defence and law and order but also socially liberal.  

We won three successive full terms and governed for more than twice the length of any previous Labour Government.

The Party reached out beyond tribe but didn’t neglect its traditional voters.

It placed itself firmly on the side of the victim, not the criminal.

On the side of the working class who believe you must earn what you get.

On the side of the patient and pupil interest, not the producer interest.

It championed investment in public services but matched it with reform to ensure this money was spent wisely.

It explicitly rejected the anti-Western worldview of the far left and was on the side of people who were patriotic about their country.

It was not – for all the caricature since we left office – a project of the metropolitan liberal elite.  It assembled a new coalition of traditional working class voters, aspirational voters who had previously turned to Margaret Thatcher, and it fused together the progressive vote that had been split in the previous century.

The extraordinary thing is the Labour Party’s desire to re-write its only period of majority Government in half a century in negative terms.

We did not ‘neglect’ those traditional Labour heartlands in some appeasement of the middle class. We made the largest ever investment in schools and hospitals in those communities; re-distributed wealth through tax changes and tax credits; cut pensioner and child poverty; took the homeless of the streets; and through Sure Start, the Minimum wage and a host of other programmes helped those who needed help most.

And we kept their support. In 2005, in Sedgefield, my majority was almost 20,000. In Bolsover, it was 18,000.  In Scotland we had 41 of the 56 seats, including two with increased majorities over 2001. The support we lost was mainly amongst the middle class especially over tuition fees and Iraq.  

The point is not to go back to the policies of New Labour, but to understand New Labour’s place in Labour’s history, so we better understand how to forge Labour’s future; and to set it within the history of progressive politics in Britain where Labour sits, but not in sole occupation.

This defeat is seminal. We cannot afford to repeat 1983, moving crab like towards reality. You know the narrative. Among the far left, ‘we won the argument’ it’s just for some inexplicable reason the British people having accepted we were right, decided to vote for the other guys.

Among others, it is: many of the policies were really popular, but too many of them, our leadership was a problem but did inspire a lot of people, it wasn’t that we were too extreme but we allowed ourselves to be portrayed that way, we now have to stand with our communities in the assault which will be mounted upon them by the Tories etc. etc. plus a bit of we need to be with  working class communities against the ‘liberal London elites’ sort of populism.

If we go down this line, it will be 15 years more of Tory Government.

The country won’t tolerate this. There are people disenfranchised in our politics today, angry at the way the country has been let down by its non Conservative opposition, and feeling hopeless. And for the country, there is a generation of smart, capable, politically conscious people who will never be Tories but have no place in Parliament because of the state of the Labour Party and whose talent is therefore shut out.

Two things must happen.

First, there should be a parallel debate in and out of the Labour Party about the future of progressive politics, how it is reconstructed and reshaped into a winning coalition. This should include Labour, traditional left and right, the Lib Dems, those disenchanted with both main Parties and those not at present engaged in any Party. It must be a Big Tent debate, open and frank.

Second, we need urgently a new policy agenda for progressive politics. At the heart of it will be understanding and mobilising the Technological Revolution, the 21st C equivalent of the 19st C Industrial Revolution. It will mean a complete re-ordering of the way State and Government is conceived and organised; huge focus on education and infrastructure; new ways of dealing with generational poverty; a recasting of corporate governance and responsibility; a stimulus nationally and internationally of the science and technology for environmental change; and very specific measures to connect communities and people left behind by the changes driven by globalisation.

We need policy for the future. Radical but modern. The agenda of the Far Left is not progressive; it’s a form of regression to an old Statist, tax and spend programme of the 60s and 70s.

I understand why for some it has real attractions. It speaks to the intense feelings of marginalisation and desire for radical change.

It is a cry of rage against ‘the system’.

But it isn’t a programme for Government.

To win power, we need self discipline not self indulgence; listening to what people are truly saying, not hearing only the parts we want to hear; understanding that you can’t play with passion alone, but require strategy, preparation and professionalism; winning the intellectual as well as political battle.

In 1983, after my first Election, having been out on the doorstep for several weeks listening to Labour voters telling me that they were voting Labour despite the state of the Party rather than because of it, I attended a meeting in my constituency organised by the Far left, still strong after the Bennite surge, entitled ‘Learning the Lessons of Defeat’ or some such.

Dennis Skinner was the main speaker. At the outset, the Chairman urged us to be honest. Naively, I took this instruction literally. I did speak honestly. I said we were way out of date in our thinking, were far too left, seemed like we were living in the era of black and white TV, in an age of colour, and so on.

I was heard in silence. Right after me, came Dennis, who tore me limb from political limb.

I came out of the meeting in shock. My very wise agent John said to me: ‘you were the only person talking sense, but in future learn to say it better.’

By 1994, when standing for the leadership, I had learnt to say it better. I chose my ground carefully. I didn’t unnecessarily offend.

But, no one doubted where I stood.

The Labour Party is presently marooned on Fantasy Island. I understand would be Leaders will want to go there and speak the native language in the hope of persuading enough eventually to migrate to the mainland of Reality.

But there is a risk that the only people speaking the language of Reality to the Party are those who don’t aspire to lead it.  

Unfortunately, 2019 is much worse than 1983.

Then was our second defeat; now is our fourth. The country is different. Politics is different. The country is less fixed in political affiliation. Politics moves at speed accelerated by social media.

We don’t have the luxury of the Slow March back.

We can correct our historical and contemporary weaknesses; or be consumed by them.

But that choice is unmerciful.  

And before us, NOW.  

I have moved through the various stages of grief and appear to have hit resignation. This does not (and never will) mean that I believe brexit to be in any way shape or form the right direction for my country but I am totally convinced that it’s happening: convenient given the outcome of the recent general election.

So now we wait to see where this road leads us.

I am told that with such a very large majority Johnson, the prime minister will suddenly tack to the centre and towards a more gentle version of leaving the single market. These same people tell me that in terms of domestic policy he will become more liberal, a gentler, kinder version of Conservatism.

In other words, I am told that he will basically make a mockery of his recent campaigning. I am told to rely upon the fact that he has not meant anything he has said for the last twelve months, to rely upon the fact that he is a liar.

It is possible that these people are right. Let’s hope so. The country has elected a person who is on record as describing people such as my gay daughter as sub-human, someone who should not have the same rights as other people and who, as well as writing on the topic, has voted in parliament accordingly.

So aside from brexit, I have very real concerns about where this world of mine is heading and what it might mean for my children.

Turns out that the best explanation of my personal experience of the brexit process so far is the five stages of grief. Obviously it is neither sensible nor appropriate to equate a political decision to the personal loss of a loved one, but the process of coming to terms with brexit does seem to be moving through the same five stages

DENIAL

Denial is the first of the five stages of grief and brexit – surely this cannot be happening? There has to be some sort of mistake. In this stage, the world became somewhat meaningless and overwhelming. Life mades no sense. We were in a state of shock and denial. Numb. Initially the focus was just on finding a way to get through the day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible by helping us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you begin the healing process. You are become stronger, and denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.

ANGER

Anger is a necessary stage of any healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing.

The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.

BARGAINING

After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if we hold a second referendum. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our life and country restored. We want to go back in time: find the political tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only.

Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain.

We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

DEPRESSION

After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss.

We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of.

The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case.

Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. Thus people who voted to remain in the EU may well accept that we’re leaving but they won’t ever be ok with leaving and will never like this reality. We may learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live.

In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganise. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones.

Beyond tired of brexit, like most people however they voted, I still couldn’t describe myself as resigned.

Certainly I would not characterise myself as wanting my MP and the government to push ahead with the current brexit plan to “get it over with” not least because we haven’t even started the trade negotiations with the EU yet so this process is going to run for years.

But I have been trying to work out what to expect next.

There seem to be two scenarios coming into focus: a shitty deal where limits to immigration are prioritised followed by trade in goods or leaving with no deal at all.

Since the UK makes most of its money overseas from trade in services, even with the shotty deal now being discussed, our economy will obviously be damaged and as the negotiations go by, more and more compromises will be required to limit the damage to our economy from setting those two priorities.

Each one of those real-poilitik compromises will be met with horror by those currently cheerleading for brexit. The lack of transparency by the UK government means people have been allowed to keep their illusions so when each and one of those illusions fractures, people will be looking for someone to blame. Never themselves. They will claim that leaving with any deal at all was the mistake, not leaving itself. WTO rules only will become the mantra because unhappiness needs a meaningless slogan to coalesce around.

So politics will stay fundamentally divided and fractious. Society will remain divided and fractious. And people will still split between “remainers” and “leavers”. Economically things will get worse. Nothing will be fixed.

If we leave with no deal at all, then things will get difficult quickly. A developed country will see empty supermarket shelves for the first time in a generation. We will risk medicine shortages and see immediate price rises as WTO tariffs are applied to all imports.

But the world won’t come to an end. We are wealthy and the cost increases won’t stop us eating what we want when we want. Food used to talk cup 30% of people’s disposable income compared to today’s 10% so maybe it will just rise, offset by falling housing costs. Neither will the increased costs stop us taking holidays and living our lives much as today. We will have less but we won’t have nothing. Plenty of people will be significantly worse off. London will be damaged, but it is wealthier and perhaps more able to mitigate that damage.

Our children are maybe now more likely to go and work and live overseas.

We will see a slow decline of our economy relative to the rest of the world. Initially we’ll be able to pretend it’s a worldwide phenomena as we pull the EU down with us, as the US-China trade war starts to bite.

Away from the sheer anger that brexit creates, I’m left with just a sad resignation. For my generation the walls came down, the threat of war receded and we all felt we were going to be richer, healthier and better. For my children’s generation, that is no longer true. The walls are going up, the threat of war is rising and they will be poorer, less healthy and generally worse off.

My expectations are sad.

Brexit means brexit: it means leaving an organisation and all that we’ve built up over 40 years and it will be both difficult and time consuming. It’s a big deal. People who have been told they should expect an easy negotiation, a straightforward transition with no need for a period of adjustment will react badly when that turns out to be untrue.

Sovereignty is not a one-way street; neither is brexit. Having chosen to leave, we cannot sensibly expect the EU to change, to alter its behaviour for us. We have chosen to become independent and compete with the EU: we need to accept being treated as independent competitors

The EU is very good at process, and we need to start taking the process seriously, to get much better at managing the process, if we expect to come out the other side of brexit with anything worth having.

It is not possible to suggest that there is only one way to leave the EU that happens to be the way the government of the day, or certain leave campaigners, choose to leave. The method, the distance from the EU etc were not on the ballot and it is dishonest, disenfranchising and fundamentally and unnecessarily limiting to insist otherwise. Where we end up, our post-brexit relationship with the EU will be as a result of political choices made by our government, not by the electorates vote in the referendum.

WTO rules are not good enough for the UK. It is not possible to argue both that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else……. AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable. .

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services. And make no mistake, the current plan sacrifices the UK’s trade in services where we run a healthy surplus, for limiting freedom of movement.

There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it and are simply not true.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave people in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face. The electorate need to be aware of the choices and inevitable trade-offs that the UK will need to make.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy. And we haven’t seen much honesty from either side of the debate in the UK so far. That has to change.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy.

The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides.

The Prime Minister’s call for opponents of her deal to “be honest” and not simply wish away intractable problems like the backstop, which was always, and will remain, a central question in any resolution of the issue, is reasonable enough.

And at the extremes we have the “no dealers” quite happy to jump off the cliff, lying openly about the extent to which WTO rules provide a safety net if we did, and producing fantasy “managed no deal” options which will not fly for the reasons I have set out.

And the “people’s voters”: they want a second referendum with remain on the ballot – for which one can make a case, given the dismal place we have now ended up, and given possible Parliamentary paralysis, but must surely understand the huge further alienation that would engender amongst those who will think that, yet again, their views are being ignored until they conform.

Where is the great idea or plan to address that alienation?

And even now we can hear a Shadow Cabinet Member promising, with a straight face, that, even after a General Election, there would be time for Labour to negotiate a completely different deal – INCLUDING a full trade deal, which would replicate all the advantages of the Single Market and Customs Union.

And all before March 30th. I assume they haven’t yet stopped laughing in Brussels.

Too much of our political debate just insults people’s intelligence and suggests that every facet of Brexit you don’t like is purely a feature of only the Prime Minister’s version of it, rather than intrinsic to leaving.

The Prime Minister’s deal is obviously a bad deal. But given her own views and preferences, her bitterly divided Party and the negotiating realities with the other side of the table, I can at least understand that she is on pretty much the only landing zone she could ever reach.

Those aspiring to a radically different one owe us honest accounts, not pipedreams, of how they propose to get there, and the timescale over which they will.

But the dishonesty of the debate has, I am afraid, been fuelled by Government for the last 2½ years.

It took ages before grudging recognition was given to the reality that no trade deal – even an embryonic one – would be struck before exit, and that no trade deals with other players would be in place either.

Even now, though, the Prime Minister still talks publicly about the Political Declaration as if it defined the future relationship with some degree of precision, and defined it largely in line with her own Chequers proposal, when it simply does neither.

It is vague to the point of vacuity in many places, strewn with adjectives and studiously ambiguous in a way that enables it to be sold as offering something to all, without committing anyone fully to anything.

Any number of different final destinations are accommodable within this text, which was precisely the thinking in drafting it, to maximise the chances of it being voted through, when all the EU side was really determined to nail now was within the Withdrawal Treaty: rights, money and the backstop.

For the same reason – the desperate inability to acknowledge that it was going to take very many years to get to the other side of the Brexit process – we have had the bizarre euphemism of the “implementation period” after March 2019, when there is nothing to “implement”, and precisely everything still to negotiate.

I dislike the “vassal state” terminology, but anyone can see the democratic problem with being subject to laws made in rooms where no Brit was present and living under a Court’s jurisdiction where there is no British judge.

And if we are to avoid the backstop coming into force, we are now going to end up prolonging the transition, because the FTA won’t be done by the end of 2020, and the EU well knows the

U.K. won’t be keen on cliff jumping in the run up to an election.

We have had the several bizarre contortions over trying to invent a Customs proposal which enabled us to escape the Common External Tariff but still derive all the advantages of a quasi Customs Union. Even the all U.K. backstop proposal has ended up being called a temporary Arrangement, when we all actually know it to be a temporary Union, as nothing else could fly under WTO rules. But the U word is too toxic for polite company evidently.

On the backstop itself, it was obvious, reading the December 2017 Agreement document from outside Government that this must lead inexorably to where we have now reached.

There was no other endgame from that point.

But we got sophistry, evasions, euphemisms and sometimes straight denials at home, whilst in the EU, the PM and senior Ministers several times appeared to be backsliding on clear commitments as soon as they saw draft legal texts giving effect to agreements they had struck.

That deepened the distrust and if anything hardened the EU’s resolve to nail the issue down legally. And, from the apoplectic reaction to the Attorney General’s advice, which elegantly stated the totally obvious, you can now rather see why.

There is no point in my speculating here precisely on what might now get manufactured and its legal status. The EU is always very adroit at such exercises in solemnly reframing things which have already been agreed in ways that make the medicine slip down.

But however they re-emphasise their intention, which I believe, that the backstop should not be permanent, it is the very existence of it in conjunction with the cliff edge which will dictate the shape of the trade negotiations.

We may well now be beyond the point at which any clarification Declaration or Decision can sell.

And if we are, it’s largely because the whole conduct of the negotiation has further burned through trust in the political class.

That should force a fundamental rethink of how the next phase is conducted; whether this deal staggers, with some clarification, across the line in several weeks time and we go into the next phase with the cards stacked, or whether we have a new Prime Minister who attempts to reset direction, but will find, as I say, that whatever reset they attempt, rather a lot of the negotiating dynamics and parameters remain completely unchanged.

Either way, the final lesson is that we shall need a radically different method and style if the country is to heal and unify behind some proposed destination.

And that requires leadership which is far more honest in setting out the fundamental choices still ahead, the difficult trade offs between sovereignty and national control and keeping market access for our goods and services in our biggest market, and which sets out to build at least some viable consensus.

The time to lose ourselves in fairy tales has ended. Our politicians can no longer get away with strutting and fretting or with sound and fury. It’s time to wake up from the dream and face the facts.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate.

At virtually every stage in this negotiation, the EU side has deployed transparency, whether on its position papers, its graphic presentations of its take on viable options and parameters, its “no deal” notices to the private sector to dictate the terms of the debate and shape the outcome.

A secretive, opaque UK Government, hampered mainly by being permanently divided against itself and therefore largely unable to articulate any agreed, coherent position, has floundered in its wake.

It is a rather unusual experience for the EU – always portrayed as a bunch of wildly out of touch technocrats producing turgid jargon-ridden Eurocrat prose up against “genuine” politicians who speak “human” – to win propaganda battles.

Let alone win them this easily.

But, in fairness, bruising experiences over recent decades as it has had to cope with demands for vastly greater transparency in its conduct of trade policy have forced Brussels to up its game.

Failure to do so would mean losing all public support for driving trade liberalisation and signing trade deals – which, whether U.K. politicians wish to believe it or not, is what the EU does more of than any other trade bloc on the planet at the moment.

There is absolutely no chance of doing deals with Japan, Canada, the US or Mercosur – or indeed, the UK when that moment comes – unless you can explain comprehensibly to your publics what is in it for them.

The battle for free trade policies – always difficult in the US – has, after all, gone rather convincingly backwards in both major US parties in the last 20 years. Alas, much of the Tory Eurosceptic Americanophile Establishment appears not quite to have noticed that.

To be clear, this is not an argument that by applying lipstick to the pig of the Chequers proposal, or the proposed deal now on the table, the course of history would have been changed.

You can’t redeem a bad deal by advertising on Facebook.

But the negotiation process, politically, in and beyond Parliament, had to be different from the outset. And it will have to be different at the next stage. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave most supposed insiders, let alone a much wider public, in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face.

At extremely sensitive stages negotiators of course have to disappear into a “tunnel”, to have any safe space in which to explore potential landing zones. That is inevitable.

But this Government has repeatedly failed to explain to a wider audience what the real constraints and trade-offs are in arriving at the sort of landing zone the Prime Minister views as some combination of desirable and unavoidable.

And because of that choice, the electorate are vastly unprepared and frankly bitterly disappointed by each and every compromise the UK makes as part of those negotiations.