Leaving the EU is the start of a liberal insurgency – The Guardian

Nigel Farage with Donald Trump. Brexit means that power can be dispersed outward and downwards. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

What is Nigel Farage so cross about? We won the EU referendum, for goodness sake. Since 23 June, Ive been walking on sunshine. My mood has been a state of Zen-like bliss.

Alongside Boris Johnson, David Owen, Gisela Stuart and all of those involved in the official Vote Leave campaign, I spent the referendum arguing that leaving the EU would be an opportunity to make Britain more open, outward-looking and globally competitive. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that this is where Brexit is going to take us.

Far from heralding a retreat into insularity, Brexit is shaping up to be the beginning of a liberal revolution. Having taken back control of our country, we will at last be able to tackle some of the public policy failures that have festered under successive governments for more than a generation.

Yes, we will see an end to the free movement of people between European Union member states and the United Kingdom. But I suspect we will see a sensible policy that will allow labour mobility, with parliament controlling the total numbers of migrants each year. It is perfectly possible to imagine a scenario under which UK firms would be allowed to hire EU nationals provided they paid them enough to preclude the possibility that they might claim in-work benefits. Doing so would help rebalance the low-wage, low-productivity economic model that the UK has by default come to depend upon.

Ministers seem to be feeling their way towards a new national consensus on issues where the leave and remain sides were once at odds; universities must continue to be able to collaborate with institutions across the EU, drawing on the brightest and best brains.

From telecoms to intelligence gathering, we need to ensure that we continue to cooperate with the rest of Europe, despite not being in the EU.

The great repeal bill, which will convert all existing EU legislation into UK law, might be better described as the great transfer bill. It will not of itself remove many regulations, but enable us to decide if we wish to retain or reform such rules and free ourselves from some of the constraints various legal rulings over the past 40 years have imposed on our ability to make our own law. Doing all that might initially change little, but it will awaken within our democracy the idea dormant for so long that we mightdo things better. In the run up to the next general election, we might see parties publish manifesto that give us real choice, not more tweedledumb versus tweedledee options. Any genuinely insurgent politician or party ought to revel in the possibility of meaningful change that leaving brings with it. Brexit is often bracketed alongside the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the new radical populist movements in many western countries. But to me the EU referendum result was a safety valve. Trump or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is where you end up when you ignore legitimate public concerns and there isnt a safety valve.

Throughout history oligarchy has emerged in societies in which power was previously dispersed: in the late Roman republic, and in early modern times in the Venetian and then the Dutch republics. Each time, the emergence of oligarchy was always accompanied by an anti-oligarch insurgent reaction.Many of todays new radical movements arent oligarchs, but an anti-oligarchy insurgency. Trump is no American Caesar about to cross some constitutional Rubicon.

Yet such insurgents often ended up unwittingly assisting the oligarchs. In Rome the Gracchi brothers, with their Trump-like concern about cheap migrant labour, caused so much civil strife that an all-powerful emperor seemed a better bet. In Venice, the anti-oligarch rebel Bajamonte launched an unsuccessful coup and in doing so gave the elite a pretext to create a new, superpowerful executive arm of government, the Council of Ten. Created to respond to the crisis for six weeks, it ran the republic for the next 600 years.The Dutch anti-oligarch De Witt was so inept, he paved the way for the return of a strong stadtholder, or king.

So, too, today. If chaotic, angry insurgents such as Frances Marine Le Pen and the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany party are the alternative, then being governed by remote, unaccountable elites sitting in central banks and Brussels doesnt seem so unattractive after all. But Brexit isnt anything like that. It is the beginning of a liberal insurgency. Brexit means that we take back control from the supranational elite. Power can be dispersed outward and downwards. Those who make public policy might once more answer to the public.

Cheer up it might even mean that there is less space for anger in our politics too.

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Leaving the EU is the start of a liberal insurgency - The Guardian