How a leftist gambit could keep Britain in the EU

It's been less than a week since British voters declared their desire to part ways with the European Union. But reports of "buyers' remorse" from both prominent and everyday Leave voters have already made headlines.

A petition calling for a second referendum has gathered over 3.5 million signatures. One poll found 7.1 percent of pro-Brexit voters expressed regret over their decision; in fact 54 percent of "Leave" voters had expected to lose.

Which raises the question: Are there really, as John Oliver put it, "no f---ing do-overs?" Or could Britain rethink this?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Well, as Labour Party member and Member of Parliament David Lammy noted, "the referendum was was an advisory, non-binding referendum." To actually go through with the Brexit, Parliament must dissolve a number of national laws binding Britain to the EU and it must invoke Article 50 — the piece of EU legislation that kickstarts the separation process. And there actually isn't a legally enforceable obligation on British legislators to carry out the Brexit. They could just refuse.

Now that Prime Minister David Cameron is resigning, no one will be invoking Article 50 until at least September, when the ruling Conservative Party elects new leadership. With the British government in disarray, and given the vast majority of Parliament itself wanted to stay in the EU, Remain supporters and regretful Leave supporters might have an opening: "One scenario that could see the referendum result overturned, is if [Members of Parliament] forced a general election and a party campaigned on a promise to keep Britain in the EU, got elected, and then claimed that the election mandate topped the referendum one," the BBC reported.

The trick will be building the political legitimacy, which will take an awful lot of courage on someone's part. Ignoring and/or overturning a popular referendum, even a technically non-binding one, is serious business.

But in a sense, this is why Western civilization invented representative democracy. The point is to put a deliberative cushion between the primal impulses of the electorate and actual policymaking, but with the elite working to interpret and sympathize with those impulses in an honorable fashion. That last responsibility is what Britain has lost sight of: The Leave voters' anger and frustration over stagnating wages, disappearing jobs, and the constriction of public services like health care are all fundamentally legitimate. The Brexit referendum has all the markings of a poorly directed protest vote.

Yes, pro-Brexit demagogues have been very successful blaming these woes on immigration. But simply yelling that there's no evidence linking immigration to those woes, and then insisting that opposition to immigration is xenophobic and bad, is not enough. Nor is it enough to cite reams of research papers by experts on how Britain's economy will be left poorer, compelling as they may be, or to wave and point to panicked stock markets and currency markets.

All those arguments reinforce, rather than bridge, the divide between the cosmopolitan well-educated urban upper class that formed the core of the "Remain" vote and the deindustrialized working class voters in the Leave camp. The latter's anger and frustration are not unjustified — they've just picked the wrong target. So anti-Brexit forces must have an alternative story to tell about what went wrong and how to fix it.

That story, in a word, is austerity. Britain's inflation rates and interest rates on its debt are all in the basement. Under those circumstances, it's utter madness to respond to economic recession with spending cuts and tax hikes. That's what drove wages into the ground and cratered the supply of health care provision.

Unfortunately, the Conservative Party — which holds the bulk of seats in Parliament — was the driving force behind austerity. Even with Cameron stepping down, it's unlikely his replacement will renounce that legacy wholesale. UKIP, the hard-right, pro-Brexit party, will be even less help: Its leader, Nigel Farage, has suggested replacing the country's National Health Service with privatized insurance.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leftwing populist who shocked British politics with an upset win that made him leader of the Labour Party, is far better positioned: He reluctantly backed Remain, but has also called for a "people's QE" — essentially using the Bank of England's money creation powers to fund public spending and investment rather than merely using it to manipulate interest rates by buying up high-end financial assets.

Unfortunately, Labour's establishment has always opposed Corbyn's leftism and is using the Brexit aftermath to stage a revolt. But Labour is by far the biggest force in Parliament after the Conservatives, which could give it a lot of leverage should Corbyn survive.

Another potential public advocate for a redo is the Scottish National Party. It only has 54 seats to Labour's 229 and the Conservatives' 330, but it has consistently supported social democracy and represents a chunk of the United Kingdom that strongly favored Remain. If the rest of the British government can't get its act together, it might fall to the SNP to step up.

Ultimately, Britain's problem here is part of a far larger crisis in Western society: From America to Britain to the rest of Europe, major parties that consistently seek to uplift the working class and defend pluralism and social inclusion have vanished. Instead, we've gotten a culture war between the forces of self-satisfied cosmopolitanism and poisonous nativism, with both sides embracing cut-throat free market capitalism to varying degrees. The result has been a cascade of political crises.

If Britain has any chance of healing — and certainly if it's to have any chance of avoiding Brexit — someone is gong to have to step into that breach.