DiEM25's first official stance on Brexit was debated and decided in this and this all-member vote in autumn 2016. With that vote, DiEM25 supported the view that the result of the June 2016 referendum to leave the EU should be respected and that debate should concentrate on an outcome (amongst the many conceivable Brexits) that kept Britain as close to the EU as possible. DiEM25 should fight for the kind of Brexit that would give the British people the maximum power to decide what future relations between their country and the EU should look like, a decision raising major constitutional and other issues none of which had been decided by the stark binary referendum. DiEM25 adopted the position that Article 50 should be triggered in order to achieve a Norway-style (EEA) agreement.
In the event, support for a Norway-style agreement has only emerged late on in the process of negotiation, its treatment as a serious alternative circumvented at every turn hitherto by the Tory Government. This was for three reasons. The main reason was because Theresa May sought to push through a deal which would unite her bitterly divided Tory party and at the same time, exclude the Labour party and other parliamentarians from any substantial participation in the settlement. This meant appeasing the European Research Group and the DUP – both of whom are happier with a No Deal or what has been referred to as a ‘hard Brexit’ than any other option. Early on May committed to leaving the customs union and single market and curtailing freedom of movement as her red lines, and any questioning of such assumptions was simply drowned out by her oft-reiterated phrase, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ Writing in the week after the March 29 supposed guillotine on the UK’s departure from the EU, the debate over these red lines has not yet taken place. Finally on April 1, such an attempt by parliamentarians, with or without Theresa May, to find such a compromising majority will begin to be made.
The second reason for failure to grasp the UK’s best chance to unite around a holding operation that could ultimately lead to the strengthening of democracy, was the increasingly polarising attitude of those campaigning for Remain. Remainers refused to recognise the need to move away from a winner-take-all logic that has done them no favours, and the damage that would be inflicted on UK and UK–EU relations by attempting to annul the referendum result. They also failed to acknowledge deep-seated democratic impulses behind the Leave vote. These included a profound dissatisfaction with the era of austerity presided over by both the UK and the EU since the financial crisis, and what was felt as a loss of sovereign powers of self-determination. Leavers were caricatured as idiots for criticising an EU that seemed to those campaigning for Remain to have overnight shed its own profound democratic limitations and growing signs of disintegration. They were fools for believing what they were told after the referendum, when both government and parliament insisted that its outcome was to be decisive.
