May's Brexit is an English rebellion wrapped in a Union flag

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The Maybot, normally as stiff and inhibited as can be, all of a sudden burst forth into a lyrical celebration of the prospects we now face outside the EU, even though nearly half the UK electorate never wanted to face them anyway. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and London, that translated into an actual majority for Remain.

It is interesting May chose this unusual channel of communication. The real way to get among the voters and win them over would be to hold a General Election, but somehow I can’t see her calling one any time soon (though we may get one in spite of rather than because of her).

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Short of that, a broadcast to the nation was presumably out of the question because it would have counted as party political, requiring a response from Labour, LibDems and SNP too. May might in her own mind have been comparing herself with Winston Churchill, who in wartime likewise appealed to the whole nation, in prose rather more sonorous than hers. In any case, the nation truly was united in fighting Nazism, whereas the Common Agricultural Policy is hardly in the same class of vileness.

May might equally have been comparing herself with Margaret Thatcher, pictured below, who in her stentorian way proved an effective orator, whether you agreed with her or not. This is why she won three General Elections while May has won none – and she did it with public speeches, not with letters addressed into the void.

Apart from anything else, it is impossible for the Remainer parts of the UK to identify with May’s position in the way she urged us to do. The false bonhomie in Brussels, from fellow leaders eager to get a deal in the bag at last, was in her words also supposed in this country to “mark the point when we put aside the labels of Leave and Remain for good and we come together again as one people. To do that, we need to get on with Brexit now by getting behind this deal.”

But speaking for myself, who has had to engage with Brexit from the start in order to earn my living, I feel no such need. I’m glad the negotiations are over but I can’t see their outcome will make life better. Nor could May, when pressed by a caller during a radio phone-in: “Life will be different,” was all she would venture by way of reassurance.

Let’s pause and ask what are now the realistic prospects for the Remainer parts of the UK. For London, Brexit still means the risk of losing a large part of its business in financial services and of its role as a locus for the corporate headquarters of multinational companies that have set up in the city just because it was part of the EU.

Some have already moved across the Channel and more will follow, at an as yet unknown cost to jobs and rewards in the English capital. The Brexit agreement does promise UK firms basic access to Europe for the future but, as with a number of other delicate matters, the meaning of this promise is yet to be worked out in the transition period over the next couple of years. Incidentally, the problems in the financial sector will be felt in Edinburgh too.

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For Northern Ireland, it is enough to recall that the Democratic Unionists, the province’s only representatives at Westminster and up to now the props of May’s Government, grew ever shriller in their rejection as her day of compulsory jollity in Brussels drew near. The problems of the Irish border have in their turn been kicked down the road into the transition period. While it is agreed on every side that a hard border must be avoided, an alternative equally unpalatable to Unionists, a softer border of some sort down the Irish Sea, is highly likely to come about through all-round inability to agree on anything else. It’s been said that every time the Brits think the Irish question has been solved, the Irish change the question. Here’s a good example.

In Scotland the main lessons from the Brexit process have been all about the Union rather than anything more specifically European. The initial promises from London of how we would be engaged in the talks have been exposed as totally false. On the contrary, the consistent tendency has been rather to exclude the Scottish Government from any meaningful participation. For example, protests that we need immigrant workers for our economy and that we reject the May’s personal vindictiveness towards them have fallen on deaf ears. She talks about immigration as if Scotland did not exist.

We can expect the same metropolitan disdain to continue into the transition period. This time the Scottish or largely Scottish issue of fishing will figure prominently, as no other has done up to now. The Common Fisheries Policy will come to an end in our waters but that in itself settles nothing, because the tricky question of what happens next has once again been left for settlement at a later date. Under the CFP, other EU member states could send their fishing fleets right up to the beaches in Scotland. At home, they all have salty seaboard constituencies facing ruination in the new order of things. As President Macron of France is already hinting, they will use May’s fervent desire for a unique long-term trading relationship to force future concessions on fishing, among other things. His aim will no doubt be to keep the CFP in being in all but name. So far, it must be said, EU leaders have been good at winning such trophies from the feeble Brits.

Altogether, Sunday’s Brexit deal might look good to 17 million Leavers (and even that is uncertain) but the 16 million Remainers could find it pretty difficult to see the outcome as the herald of what May called “a new chapter of national life”. Quite the reverse, the Tory Government seems ready to cut and paste some older chapters of national life into the blank page of the future.

It has reverted to asserting the absolute sovereignty of the Parliament at Westminster. It has weakened the devolution deal of 1999 and made clear it is not finished yet. No doubt we will see several of the powers that are returning from Brussels now allocated to Whitehall rather than sent back to Edinburgh where they were exercised before we joined the EU. Till Brexit came along, it was possible to argue decentralisation had become a novel principle in the British constitution. Today we see decentralisation turning into its opposite.

And so we get down to the true nature of Brexit, and to an explanation of the difference between England and two of the other nations joined with it in the Union (obviously I cannot include London, but that is a complex subject I must leave for another time).

What we have seen, reaching a preliminary climax last Sunday, is an English national rebellion wrapped in the Union flag. The rebellion is ignorant of and indifferent to interests other than the ones it directly represents. It is indeed not so much a “new chapter” as a further stage in the dissolution of any loyalty, even English loyalty, to the concept of the UK. For Scotland this can have only one consequence, the sooner the better.