Ignore the Leavers’ tantrums — it’s time to build Brexit Britain

The trajectory of the spirit of Brexit has all the characteristics of a tantrum — they wanted to leave the European Union (EU) and the desire was indivisible from the rage that accompanied it. They prevailed, but the anger didn’t abate. United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) leader Nigel Farage’s victory speech was as splenetic as his war cry. Next, they wanted an end to the single market and an end to that well-known liberal conspiracy: The customs union. They wanted an end to parliamentary sovereignty, and before long, an end to the rule of law. They wanted everybody who tried to reason with or moderate them, from Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, to Sir Terence Etherton, the Head of Civil Justice, to just shut up.

This was entirely predictable. A tantrum cannot be reasoned with. Meeting its demands only makes it worse. It isn’t asking for satisfaction, it is asking for a boundary. This is the urgent task of the rest of the nation, whether regretful remainer or sane, puzzled leaver: to stop reacting to the outbursts and set some meaningful boundaries. It is no doubt possible, but I have so far found it extremely difficult, to engage with what a post-Brexit Britain should look like.

Refusing to accept that Brexit is happening makes it very difficult, but the vote for Brexit has happened. Its particulars could range from the merely destructive to the outright disastrous, and depend on many more variables than the qualities and decisions of our own politicians (it is paradoxical that we have never been more reliant on the kindness of the continent than when we try to assert our independence from it).

It is possible, as many have pointed out, that when the full consequences start to emerge, we will find parliamentary means to water them down. But nobody — not former British prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, not former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, not any of these once-vilified figures who periodically pop up as a voice of reason — is going to act the saviour here. No technicality will be found to stop Brexit, nobody will snap their fingers and wake us up.

It’s not enough to point to looming catastrophes and say what we don’t want; it’s not enough to concentrate on what Britain may lose. Britain needs to consider what could be better, in a Brexited Britain. That is dauntingly open-ended until the UK establishes whose and which interests it wants to press: They needn’t be exclusive.

On workers’ rights, Britain can tackle problems such as zero-hours, contracts and Sports Direct-esque hyper-surveillance. Last week, the Fabian Women’s Network launched a charter to protect the rights whose loss would have the maximum impact on women. There were five clusters: Maintaining workplace rights; replacing European Social Fund (ESF) money; tackling hate crimes; protecting reproductive autonomy and freedom from violence; and pushing for better female representation at the highest levels of British politics and business.

Initially, I thought it was a mistake to set any limit — even the broad limit of one entire gender — when conceiving what “better” would look like, in the context of what will amount to a constitutional remodelling. In fact, each sectional interest, rather than being a limit, is more like a guy rope holding up the whole.

Sticking with a feminist agenda, what could Britain push for beyond the language of “safeguarding” and “protection”? Are there new ways of discussing old issues — the role of occupational segregation in pay inequality, for example — that would take us beyond simply upholding the law? At a practical level, all organisations whose income partly depends on the ESF have to come together and build a detailed picture of what they need from the Brexit negotiations, as well as a plain, unified argument explaining why they need it. This should be fruitful, as the pressure of the coming crisis forces a new articulation of shared aims and values. And what of workers’ rights? If Britain is building a new framework for employee rights, it can do more than ensure that leaving the EU doesn’t intensify inequality. Britain can tackle head-on the conditions that have made people’s lives worse, from zero-hours contracts to Uber-style non-contracts to Sports Direct-esque hyper-surveillance .

Britain can determine what decency means, in the relationship between employer and employee, and find a way to iterate it, rather than sliding into neo-serfdom, pausing only for some periodic outrage against British entrepreneurs Philip Green or Mike Ashley. Environmental legislation was always one of the strongest arguments in the EU’s favour, the exemplification of all that was long-term, constructive and democratic in its activity, the place you could go to rebut the quite reasonable charge that union was technocratic and overloaded with bureaucracy. It was unwieldy, it was slow, but once it made legislation, it stayed made. Once it decided that beaches should be clean, they stayed clean. Britain categorically does not need to take a vote to leave as a mandate to re-toxify everything, especially given that the Brexiters scarcely mentioned the environment.

The pressing danger is that environmental matters simply slide off the agenda, on a slope of anti-science innuendo and deliberate avoidance. That is a risk we can only take on by establishing a green agenda that is not a bare minimum, but an audacious maximum.

What is extraordinary about the Brexit tantrum is that those having it often dismiss national prosperity — usually as a secondary concern, behind controlling borders, but occasionally even as an irrelevance, a detail that only pessimists and sore losers talk about. It is not an irrelevance, and the fears of businesses, the financial sector in particular, are real.

Creating the blueprint for a workable Brexit that serves the national interest is more than a chance to unite complementary progressive agendas. It can reunite voices that should never have been separated: Employers and employees, businesses, equality campaigners, greens. It has served the interests of far-right conservatives to claim that businesses and workers are implacably opposed: The first creating wealth, the second draining it. It was never true — profit is a thin motivator, most businesses think of themselves as working for the social good — and those extremists’ interests have been indulged long enough.

If one positive thing has come out of the past week, indeed, out of the entire referendum fiasco, it is clarity: The hard Brexiters can never be satiated, they know no restraint. The territory of reason, constructiveness, modernity and credibility will take work to describe, but will be easily taken. Those in power have left it undefended.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.