Clueless confessions of a ridiculous Brexit fanatic

Not only has Brexit hardman Steve Baker now declared the 2016 EU referendum a mistake, he’s bringing his unique lack of insight to bear on Northern Ireland, writes Tom Peck

Steve Baker, Northern Ireland minister and Brexit purist (PA)

Having, by his own admission, completely failed to understand the horrors that the EU referendum would unleash on the politics of the United Kingdom, it is partly grimly ironic, but mainly just grim, that self-described Brexit hardman Steve Baker is now bringing to bear his unique brand of absolutely no wisdom whatsoever to the political sensitivities of Northern Ireland.

Now that Brexit has directly led to the distinct possibility of Irish reunification, precisely because people like Baker had no idea what they were doing, Baker, now a minister in the Northern Ireland office, has pronounced that a referendum on the issue – just like Brexit – would be a terrible idea.

Baker has claimed that, with the power of hindsight, the 2016 EU referendum vote should have had a requirement of a “super-majority” of 60 per cent, and that, therefore, any similar reunification poll in Northern Ireland should do the same.

Baker has had many finest hours, but this is almost certainly his finest. It takes quite breathtaking skill to have been so utterly wrong about Brexit, for so many years, and then to seek to ameliorate that wrongness by admitting it was a bad idea but being wrong about that, too.

Brexit has broken politics in Northern Ireland not because of the lack of any kind of super-majority, but because no one bothered to listen to the warnings of how it could never possibly work.

To have a super-majority requirement in a referendum that was, for very clear legal reasons, only ever advisory would be quite mad

If 60 per cent of the people of the UK had voted for Brexit, the Northern Ireland problem would still be unsolvable. You can’t have an open border between two different customs unions, just because 60 per cent of people think you can, instead of 52 per cent.

In April 2019, when Tory MPs came close to voting for Theresa May’s deal – the one that actually did try to make concessions to the European Union in order to preserve the United Kingdom – Baker threatened to ally with Jeremy Corbyn to bring down his own government. He was so angry, that he said he wanted to bulldoze the House of Commons into the Thames – all because the Brexit offered wasn’t “pure” enough for him.

It is necessary therefore, though not entirely tempting, to wonder how he might have responded, on the morning of 24 June 2016, if 59 per cent of his fellow countrymen had voted to leave the European Union but were being told, by David Cameron: “Sorry, no you can’t.”

Whatever demons were unleashed that morning frankly do not bear comparison with what Baker now thinks would have been a better idea. Would Nigel Farage and co have just quietly accepted, to take but one example, the ongoing free movement of people after nearly 20 million people had voted against it, and won by miles, but been told they’d lost?

Cameron’s referendum was badly designed, in the sense that it was only designed to be won, not lost, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t contain safeguards. To have a super-majority requirement in a referendum that was, for very clear legal reasons, only ever advisory, would be quite mad. With almost no exception, super-majority referendums involve laws that are fully formed, fully codified and fully drawn – and then the people vote on whether or not to move them on to the statute book.

The EU referendum was, quite correctly, only the first stage in the process. The second stage – making sure it wasn’t a disaster, that it could definitely be done, that a suitable form of Brexit could be found – was the job of MPs.

During that stage, Baker made sure that his particular role in the process was organising the hardest of hard-Brexit MPs into a wingnut union to make sure no compromise was possible – that the purity of Brexit was never diluted. Brexit wasn’t a mistake because there was no super-majority requirement. Brexit was a mistake because it was a terrible idea to begin with, and made even more terrible by the way in which people like Baker behaved.

What the people of Northern Ireland who did not vote for Brexit need to hear from Baker is a straight-up apology

Baker has become wearied by what the Brexit process has done to UK politics. But even the most ardent remainer, if they actually understand anything at all about politics, should be able to see that the most damaging outcome for politics, by far, would have been one in which the people voted to leave the European Union but were kept in it by Cameron. Cameron, with hindsight, did not understand very much about what he was doing, but he managed to work that out in advance. Baker has taken seven years to get it wrong.

What the people of Northern Ireland who did not vote for Brexit need to hear from Baker is not his mad ideas about how to damage their politics even further, but just a straight-up apology, for the damage he has done, because he didn’t understand what he was doing.

One of the most interesting aspects of Brexit, especially in the May years, was watching the battle-hardened politicians of Northern Ireland, who have been doing difficult politics for decades compared to the easy lives lived by Conservatives, eat their interlocutors from the mainland alive.

It will not have taken them more than half a second to work out how ridiculous Baker is. It is remarkable, really, that anyone who has ever even been to Belfast could look at Brexit and advocate for a super-majority referendum there. There are people in Northern Ireland who have used as a pretext for a return to violence, the prospect of having to fill out phytosanitary certificates to ship daffodil bulbs from Birkenhead to Belfast. And yet Baker reckons it would be fine to let them vote on the rather sensitive subject of reunification, and should 59 per cent of them vote yes, then tell them, sorry, you’re wrong.

What is more remarkable is that anyone can arrive at that uniquely terrible idea as a consequence of having been directly responsible for the political miseries of Brexit. Remarkable, yes, but not surprising.

Even in finally conceding that Brexit has been a disaster, Baker has found a way to show that he never understood it in the first place – and to carry on being entirely wrong.