Wise after the event ...

It is not unknown, but not exactly the normal course of events either, for me to agree with an opinion expressed by Peter Mandelson.

It is much rarer for me to agree with anything written by Guardian columnist and Corbynista cheerleader Owen Jones.

It is must unusual for me to agree with both of then at once.

However, that has happened this week.

At the time of writing it is not clear whether a last minute trade deal can be salvaged between Britain and the EU. What is clear, however, is that we are heading for a very "hard" Brexit on which Britain and the EU either trade on World Trade Organisation terms, or on terms involving a trade-off in which a significant amount of the frictionless and tariff-free access we previously had to the EU markets has been sacrificed in favour of greater autonomy.

Peter Mandelson wrote in the Guardian a few days ago (see my second quote of the day) that this form of Brexit was not inevitable and he came close to conceding that the inflexible stance taken by both some of the "Remain" camp and some Brexit supporters - in particular, the "both ends against the middle" alliance of the Remain and Leave extremes against both the Theresa May deal and any form of "soft Brexit" has contributed to this outcome.

He also appeared to concede that the action of the hard-line remain faction in concentrating their efforts on trying to overturn the referendum result instead of trying to get a form of Brexit they could live with had been a disastrous error of judgement. I've been writing that for nearly a year but it seems that the penny has finally dropped.

It's also dropped for Owen Jones who wrote a piece this week agreeing with Peter Mandelson.

He writes

"From the very beginning, there should have been an acceptance that our side – remain – was defeated in a democratic election. Did it feel terribly unfair, not least with the myths, bigotry and lies spread by the leave campaign? Yes, but this wasn’t a characteristic unique to this referendum alone, and the warnings of immediate economic devastation from the remain side" ... "were hardly grounded in reality either." 

and concludes

"We lost in 2016. We should have settled and fought for the closest possible relationship with the EU. But anything other than stopping Brexit was written off as both disastrous for the country and morally untenable. And so here we are, on the verge of the hardest possible Brexit, with all the terrible consequences that entails. A tragedy, and one that was avoidable."

There is a similar perspective by James Kirkup in the Spectator, "Both sides are to blame for killing soft Brexit" in which he writes

"The dance of death between the ERG and PV killed softer Brexit. Who led that dance? It doesn’t matter, because it takes two to tango, and it took two sides to destroy every attempt at compromise. However much the rump Remainers blame Leavers for it, they must take their share of the blame for whatever harmful endgame the Brexit talks are about to produce."

The lesson I take from all this is that setting yourself up against the result of a vote or referendum is usually a terribly bad idea.

Because the "Leave" campaign quite deliberately chose not to spell out exactly what a "Leave" vote actually meant during the referendum itself they have no mandate whatsoever for any particular view of what Brexit does actually mean. 

To ignore every word of the utter rubbish we have been hearing from the Leave ultras since about five minutes after the referendum result was declared about how only a "no deal" Brexit would honour the result - of course we didn't hear a word of that from most of them before the votes were cast - would have been as completely legitimate as trying to actually set the referendum result aside was illegitimate. 

If the House of Commons had voted to stay in the Customs Union or EEA they could have produced a whole host of pre-referendum quotes from the likes of Nigel Farage and Dan Hannan about how much better off Britain would be under a Norway-style regime to fire back at those who accused such an arrangement of being "Brexit in name only." 

There should have been a majority in the House of Commons for a more pragmatic outcome than we have ended up with, and I believe that would have better reflected the votes cast in our deeply divided society. But instead we had a battle of competing fundamentalisms. 

I have no doubt that this piece will annoy hardliners on both sides who have not learned a thing from the events of the last four years and continue to see any attempt to reach an honourable compromise as a betrayal. We will not be able to even start to heal the wounds of Brexit and begin to rebuild until we can move past that kind of attitude.

I imagine those who actually want a "no deal" Brexit are killing themselves with laughter at the disarray among remainers. Enjoy it while it lasts. I suspect we may be about to get a demonstration of the meaning of the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for."