Brexit is done but the public aren't happy

Five years ago, the referendum on EU membership took place. A bit over a year ago we lost political representation in the EU - our citizenship and our rights.  Earlier this year we ended the transition out of the economic institutions. By any definition, Brexit has happened. We are definitively in a new world. 

And what do we make of this place in which we find ourselves? Polling from this week suggests we are unhappy and divided.  

In spite of the pro-Brexit lean of our politics and media, there's little celebration among ordinary people for what we have now. By 48% to 40% people feel that in hindsight, the decision to leave the EU was the wrong one. 

Only 25% of voters believe Brexit has been going well so far. Almost 40% believe it has been going badly. 

A mere 21% believe the UK-EU free trade agreement was a good deal for the UK, compared to 36% who say it was bad. Even among Leave voters, who overall feel the deal was more good than bad, the positive sentiment only rises to 35%. 

Some would counter that Leave voters could also be unhappy that the deal was not even weaker - that their preferred outcome was for no trade deal at all (at least not one on any terms that the EU might agree to). And this assumption might be right, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing - Brexit put us in a weak position and we ended up stuck. The strengths that we were supposed to hold, which would give us the upper hand in negotiations and make it all go our way, never materialised. 

Few people are happy with the cards the Brexiteers have dealt us. But in spite of this neither side of the Brexit debate has really moved. Depending on how the question is framed, today the public would either narrowly vote to Remain or narrowly vote not to Rejoin. 

We can agree things are bad, but we don't agree on what we should do about it. 

Partly this is because Leave voters still have faith that, at some point, Brexit will deliver the things they want. Though Brexit should be seen as 'over', the vast majority of the public does not see it that way. The bright green pastures of Brexitania were not a mirage, we simply have not arrived yet.

For pro-Europeans meanwhile, the negative impacts of Brexit have not stopped. Indeed they are repeated again and again, day after day. 

And we are not speaking here only of the economic costs - although they are a real ongoing problem that is causing damage to UK businesses in a wide variety of sectors, wrapped up in reams of new red tape. It is the ongoing pain of having part of your identity stripped away, the sorrow at the loss of freedoms, the anger at an unprovoked attack. 

This is the point that so many pundits miss. Among our leading commentators, those who take the lion's share of broadcast minutes and newspaper column inches, there are few actual pro-Europeans. Sure, a good number of people who on balance believed it is better to be in than out, but fundamentally they are sceptical at heart - hardly anyone represents the much larger group of people who believe in being European as part of who we are. 

And so these eurosceptics, to give them their accurate name, imagined that this would all die down after a few years. They thought that people would adjust, find compromises and work around the new system that was now presented before them. As they had made a cold calculation on being in the EU, so the general population would make a new calculation on Brexit and, with a new result, would forget about it.

They were wrong, and they will continue to be wrong if they think it will come at some later date. It did not happen after five years and there is little reason to believe it will happen after ten.

Brexit is not an event that will auto-adjust. There is no status quo for us to revert to. Indeed that was the very point of the act of Brexit, to destroy the status quo compromise that had balanced pro- and anti-European interests in the UK for 40 years. With that compromise in ruins, nothing new has been built in its place. 

There seems to be some notion that Brexit might just prove itself one way or another. Brexit's consequences would then tell us if it's what we hoped for. It seems to me this might be the wrong way round. More likely, people will believe Brexit has succeeded or failed when we reach a consensus on whether it is what we actually want - whether it reflects who we are. In a battle for identity, there needs to be wholesale conversion, not simply an examination of facts developing over time. 

So of course we are still divided. The truth is minds won't change until hearts do. And the truth is you can't meet me halfway on who I am.