Remainers can no longer take yes for an answer
https://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-remainers-can-no-longer-take-yes-for-an-answer-11790224
It used to be said of the Eurosceptics in the 1990s, that "they just couldn't take yes for an answer".
No matter how dexterously the then Major government and his successors contorted themselves in an anti-European direction nothing was ever quite good enough. With every concession granted, the demands became fiercer and more extreme.
It was this phrase which rang in my ears this last week as I considered what should have been a shift of some importance - one which though long sought, appeared to be forgotten and written off no sooner than it had occurred.
The fact it was so easily dismissed owes much to this idea that when it comes to the combatants in the great EU battle, nothing is ever quite good enough. But, this time that fact was at play not amongst the Brexiteers, but instead in the minds of their opponents.
Over the past week, a credible path to remain has opened up, arguably the first truly navigable one since 23 June 2016.
Jeremy Corbyn has quietly committed the Labour Party to everything Remainers wanted and were calling for only a few months ago: a government which would extend Article 50, then go to the country pledging a referendum on Britain's exit deal, with Remain on the ballot paper.
Mr Corbyn had no end of political slurry deposited on his head for refusing to make such a commitment hitherto. You might think that those same people who were pouring it would be jubilant. Yet their response was curiously muted.
Some of the blame for that lies at Mr Corbyn's feet. He has repeatedly failed to articulate a strategic vision about Brexit, giving the impression he'd rather be talking about anything else (spoiler - he would).
Every time he has granted a new concession he has seemed begrudging, appearing to have done so because he had little choice, failing to tell a convincing tale as to how he arrived there. His credibility among Remainers is therefore low. Few trust him to make good on his promise.
But another force, driving and polarising our politics in both (and opposite) Brexit directions accounts for a large part of the explanation too.
The process of Brexit radicalisation which has yielded such a dogmatic zealotry on the Brexit side, which has seen some Brexiteers go from acceptance of the single market right through to no deal in barely more than a breath, has transformed the Remainers as well.
Now, nothing, not even a serious path to Remain, is good enough. It sees people like Jo Swinson brand Mr Corbyn a Brexiteer even in a week he has offered the best chance of averting it. It has blinded them to political possibility and entrenches them in the redoubts of their own self-righteousness, a series of gilded cages which will yield nothing but defeat.
In response to Mr Corbyn's offer, leading Remainers like Anna Soubry have said that his commitment to a referendum after an election isn't satisfactory. Instead, they say, he must commit to a referendum before an election.
The myopia of this statement is profound but instructive of the wider malaise in that it reveals the extent to which this search for purity blinds them to the realistic routes to which they might actually achieve their ends.
Remainers are fond of pointing out the democratic mandate for no deal is limited. About that they are correct, but the insulation of the Remainer psyche now precludes them from the self analysis to internalise the equally self-evident fact that the mandate for a second referendum is equally non-existent.
Neither main party included even a whisper of such a suggestion in their 2017 election manifestos. From the point of political legitimisation, it is a perfectly proper and probably desirable position to put the idea before the public in a general election.
Moreover, this obliquity shields them from something even more obvious - that the numbers just aren't there to support the idea. Even if an alternative government could be formed, as soon as it attempted to bring forward legislation for another referendum scores of MPs, especially Labour MPs would fall away.
Like the Brexiteers, who speak only to others in the Commons who already share their views and spend much time engaging in self-congratulatory social media engagement with each other, most remain MPs seem to forget that most of the Commons is not actually like them.
When they talk of conjuring the government of their happiest dreams, headed up by a Ken Clarke or a Harriet Harman, they seem to forget that most MPs just don't want them.
Again, like the most extreme Brexiteers, the strength of their internal workings out seem so powerfully self-evident that they fail to grasp how others might not agree and assume somehow that reality will bend to them, rather than having to work with others, to do things they might not like and work with people of whom they might not approve to get what they want.
The Remainers, like the Brexiteers, have gone down the route of forgetting other people have politics too, that that is perfectly legitimate and you have to accommodate it (and if you want to achieve your ends) navigate it, not simply demand that others submit.
That is literally what democratic politics is. The fact that (without irony) some can call for a "national unity government" which would be comprised of people who solely agree with them is testament to this sad transition.
And in this, Remainers are in fact outdoing Brexiteers in their zealotry. For there is an imperfect but substantial parallel for Mr Corbyn's position with Remainers on the other side of the ledger: Boris Johnson himself. Plenty of the most hardcore Brexiteers do not much trust Mr Johnson or his motivations.
They have long suspected that his Brexiteer credentials are a mile wide and an inch deep. That he was interested in harnessing Brexit as a potential springboard for his own installation in Downing St more than he was in pursuing it because he truly believed.
Yet, though they might have been sceptical about his heart, they could use their heads. Eurosceptics realised that Mr Johnson was the best vehicle to drive their agenda, both in the referendum campaign itself and recently, when the no dealers realised that their parliamentary weakness meant the only objective which mattered was to seize control of the government itself; that it meant everything to have a prime minister committed to no deal, compared to one committed in name only.
That in any case they could politically box him in and bend him, the person who it paid most to bend, to their will.
So it could be with Mr Corbyn. But too many Remainers refuse to use him to achieve their objectives. It is not enough that Mr Corbyn gives them what they want, that he has moved to the position they sought because of his head. He has not given them enough of his heart.
He does not believe enough, which in this Brexit culture war is a graver sin than not providing the political means of getting what you want.
Every time he moves, the anger is that he has not moved quicker- that he should declare Labour a Remain party, that he should move straight to Article 50 revocation, that he must pledge in advance to campaign to remain against a deal of his own negotiation, that he cannot be allowed to balance delicate politics because the signal and the noise is more important than his direction of travel, that he must become an evangelical.
The Remainer Overton Window (range of policies they will find acceptable) continues to shift and Mr Corbyn can barely keep up.
Time and again I have long thought that plenty of Brexiteers preferred the vainglory of the heroic defeat. That they would rather charge into the Valley of Death and lose fighting for the cause, than compromise and get most of what they want, to navigate the art of the possible.
I suspect the same fate has come with the radicalisation of the Remainers. The quest on both sides, for a distilled Brexit purity, the failure to recognise that politics, with its ability to balance and funnel competing interests is not ignoble, that that is better than just trying to ram home your will, without regard for the consequences, that that is better than any number of retweets, accounts for much of the explanation as to why we are in the sorry place we are in.
We'd be in a far far better state if just for once someone in British politics took yes for an answer.
