Book Review: Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now?

Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now? by Ian Dunt (2016) 188 p.

In the opening chapter of Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now? Ian Dunt paints a nightmare scenario lying ahead for the United Kingdom. No trade deal with the European Union, hard borders, re-implemented tariffs and customs red tape, and the British government at the mercy of Washington, Beijing and Tokyo. The pound plummets, the economy goes into freefall and dark times lie ahead for the British people. “That was the worst-case scenario,” Dunt explains at the beginning of the next chapter. “It is also Britain’s current destination.”

Dunt is the editor of politics.co.uk and the political editor of The Erotic Review. I’ve followed his writing for some time, and respect his level-headed and journalistic approach to writing editorials and opinion pieces, which seems increasingly uncommon on both the right and the left. By this I do not mean that he sits in the middle and gives equal respectability to all sides. I mean that he states the plain truth even when it seems unfashionable or uncomfortable to do so – and if you find the headline I just linked to strident or inflammatory, I suggest you read the entire piece. He deals with facts and figures and resents the increasing role that emotional, gut-level tribalism has come to play in politics, not just in Britain but around the world.

This has only been exacerbated by the Brexit divide in Britain. Dunt is a Remainer, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from reading this book. He wastes no time on recriminations, finger-pointing or a dissection of the referendum campaign (riven as it was with misinformation, ignorance, propaganda and outright lies). Instead he looks ahead, to the enormous challenges Britain now faces, in the hope of making the best of a bad situation. To that end he’s interviewed dozens of economists, professors, lawyers and public servants to try to provide an outlay of exactly how Britain can extract itself from a political, legal and trading network that it’s been part of for more than forty years.

As the opening chapter explains: outlook not good. The problem with Brexit is that it’s not a simple proposition. “Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May said firmly upon entering Downing Street, a meaningless tautology that will nonetheless go down in history textbooks which are unlikely to look kindly upon her and her current cabinet. After explaining exactly what the EU is and how Britain relates to it (not as silly as it sounds, since most Brits probably have only a vague idea) Dunt spends some time examining the three Brexit ministers – Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox – and how they’ve behaved since the referendum. Johnson has published multiple articles which contradict each other and ludicrously state that freedom of movement will continue; Fox repeatedly failed to understand that it’s illegal for the UK to make trade arrangements with other countries while still part of the EU; Davis conducted a meeting shortly after the referendum with business leaders who were pulled aside by civil servants beforehand and warned to only say they were positive and excited about the “opportunities” of Brexit.

By the end of this short and sobering book it seems very clear that few British people, whether they’re Merseyside plumbers or Tory Cabinet ministers, have much of an idea about exactly what the EU does and how catastrophic Brexit has the potential to be. Go on any Facebook or Twitter thread, or the comments section of online articles, and you will find a legion of Leave voters, lecturers at the University of Some Bloke At The Pub, happy to scoff at the notion that Britain will be anything other than enormously successful. There are no challenges or problems in Brexit-land, just a happily-raised middle finger at those faceless eurocrats in Brussels.

This is the problem Dunt finds so infuriating: not the concept of Britain leaving the EU in general, but the fact that it’s doing that so recklessly, so thoughtlessly, in a maelstrom of jingoistic tub-thumping and blind nostalgia for the British glory of a forgotten age. And, worse, that this shortsighted nationalism has infected the very highest level of politics. The book’s epigraph is a quote from Michael Gove:

“I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms, saying they know what’s best and consistently getting it wrong.”
Michael Gove
Justic Secretary
Sky News, 3 June 2016*

*When told that the leaders of the US, China, India, Australia, the bank of England, the IMF, the IFS, the CBI, five former NATO Secretary-Generals, the chief executive of the NHS and most of Britain’s trade unions opposed Britain leaving the EU.

Foreign readers may not find Brexit particularly compelling reading; I’m Australian, but I care about politics, I lived in Britain for a year and I still have a job which means I need to watch a lot of BBC and Sky. (On a side note, as an Australian, the Remainer assumption that the UK can just turn around and find all the old countries of the Commonwealth waiting for it is hilarious. Nations don’t have friends, they have interests, and they also have their own scheming politicians and hysterical tabloids.) I also think the world’s fifth-largest economy cutting off its nose to spite its face will ultimately affect all of us. But the reason I think Dunt’s book is worthwhile reading no matter where you live is because it touches on that nerve of modern ignorance: the insidious influence of populist politics and the dismissal of people who actually know what the fuck they’re talking about. The most obvious example of this is Trump, but you can see it everywhere, as Facebook echo chambers slowly replace actual news and opinion from measured, intelligent sources. A few years ago I started working for a news network and was subject to countless hours of vox populi, and the inane, pig-headed, simple-minded nonsense that spouts from the mouth of the man on the Manly ferry when you put a microphone in front of him slowly eroded any respect I ever had for the intelligence of the common citizen. I try to avoid using the word stupid – many of these people are mechanics and doctors and engineers and environmental scientists, all of their heads swimming with skills and abilities I could never have. But they’re ignorant. Everybody is ignorant of something, and nearly all of us are ignorant of EU political relationships and trade law. So putting a loosely-worded referendum to the entire populace, after years and years of tabloid propaganda, purely as a domestic political move to placate the right wing of your own party, arrogantly assuming you’ll easily win – was that maybe a stupid thing to do, Dave?

A lot of people, particularly Remainers, assume it will be no big deal. They are going to be painfully proven wrong. What we’re going to see is millions of EU citizens in the UK now living in fear of deportation, every British citizen being stripped of their EU citizenship rights, the jeopardisation of decades of peace in Northern Ireland with the possibility of the return of a hard border (astoundingly, David Davis seemed to believe in one interview that the Republic of Ireland is part of the UK), a second Scottish independence referendum, and a volatile economy and weak pound for a decade to come. But I’m sure it will be worth it for English people to get their bendy bananas back.

I’m clearly a tad more partisan about this than Dunt. But as I said, it’s not really Brexit itself: it’s the worrying trend of abandoning facts, reason and logic and replacing them with sloganeering and feelgood fantasies. It’s about understanding exactly what it is you’re tinkering with before you rip it apart (see also: the “Washington establishment”). I can guarantee you that the vast majority of Leave voters – and Remain voters, for that matter – and even the vast majority of the British Parliament would be unaware of the problems examined in this book, even now, nine months after the referendum. For those of us outside Europe, this is worthwhile reading. For those poor sods in Britain it’s essential.