How is Brexit going?  Well, time is running out and the government still seems unable to agree about what they want to try and achieve.  The problem is that the referendum solved nothing.  The Conservative Party remains bitterly divided and so the government remains bitterly divided.  Opposition MPs are caught, as they always are, between saying what they believe and saying what is politically expedient in order to weaken the government.  Parliament, therefore, is also bitterly divided.  Because of this, the issue of EU membership will continue to haunt us for decades, regardless of what sort of Brexit we end up getting, or even whether Brexit happens at all.

The problem is that the referendum was always about winning and losing so it created winners and losers, who continue to see the issues around EU membership (not to mention each other) in black and white.  There’s nothing like winners behaving like winners to magnify the negative feelings associated with losing.  There’s a reason why “loser” is such a toxic form of abuse in schools up and down the country.  Losing is always hard to accept, especially losing by a narrow margin.  Had the result gone the other way, I doubt that the leaders of the Leave campaign would have accepted losing by such a narrow margin and channelled their energies into making our continued EU membership work.  They would inevitably have “carried on the fight”.  Having winners and losers inevitably prevented us from working together afterwards.  Our inability to work together is what is handing all the cards in the negotiations over to the EU.  It could have been different.

Democratic politics should be about taking decisions collectively in order to avoid having a battle with winners and losers.  The referendum could have been about taking such a collective decision on a complex topic in its varying shades of grey.  This would have allowed us all to recognise the decision and then try and make it work together.  This might be beginning to sound like some sort of tabloid “Remoaners” rant, but I’m saying something profoundly different.  It is not about some people having to swallow their pride after the result and accept defeat.  That would be a cruel thing to say:  when people lose something they care deeply about they are bound to need a lengthy period of mourning before they can even begin to move on.  No, taking a collective decision means everyone has to swallow their pride before the decision making process even starts by acknowledging that the decision taken might be one with which they disagree.  That way there are no winners and no losers, just a collective decision that has been made by a process that everyone acknowledged.

Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to the EU referendum, but is endemic in our politics as a whole: we have turned it from a method of collective decision making into a battle with winners and losers.  This is inevitable when political parties dominate the scene.  They are the armies we create to fight the political battles we seem compelled to seek.  At a general election, voters in each constituency should be collectively choosing one person to represent them in parliament.  However, because of political parties we have winners and losers.  It becomes all about parties winning or losing constituencies rather than about individuals being collectively chosen to take on the responsibility of governing the country.

In parliament, all MPs should be equal in having been chosen to represent their constituents.  However, because of political parties they are labelled as winners and losers and physically divided along those lines by the design of the Commons Chamber.  The government is formed from amongst the winners.  The losers are frozen out.  Hence our governments are never representative of parliament and so are never representative of the people (except, perhaps, in representing our collective unwillingness to enter into collective decision making).  The government could be chosen so that all MPs have a stake in it so that, by extension, we all have a stake in it.

I would like to finish with some hopeful solution to the Brexit chaos but, as we have seen, the disease of winners and losers is so endemic in our politics that it is difficult to see a way forward.  I understand the calls for a second referendum.  However, unless it were to be about making a collective decision rather than being another battle to be won or lost it could only solve what the first referendum has already solved:  nothing.