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In today’s Britain, compromise is spurned in a bid for brutal victories

‘You may not like to admit it but Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are British liberalism’s last best hopes.’
‘You may not like to admit it but Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are British liberalism’s last best hopes.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Politics before the crash was based on the understanding that you couldn’t have it all. The free-market right had won the economic war, ran the cliche of the time, while the left had won the culture war. Centre-left governments were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, said Peter Mandelson, “as long as they pay their taxes”. Not only leftish politicians, however, but many on the centre-right were not remotely relaxed about racism, sexism and homophobia. On these issues at least, cultural conservatives, as we so euphemistically call them, had to accept that the world had changed.

Now Britain is a country where political movements believe they need not accept any limits on their ambitions. They do not just want to beat their opponents – they want to crush them. They do not just want to win – they yearn for the religious ecstasy of victories achieved without compromise. It is barely noticed that centrists are just as likely as the extremists of the Brexit right and far left to turn into Cosmo girls and demand to have it all. The people’s vote movement believes, with ample reason, that the Leave campaign was a confederacy of charlatans that sold the public a pack of lies. Reasonably and patriotically, it is trying to protect the country by reversing the damage. It is not a criticism of an idea with which I have every sympathy to say that it has turned away from compromise.

After the referendum, there was talk of making the best of Brexit by campaigning to keep Britain in the single market and customs union. It would protect living standards and maintain peace in Ireland, while accepting some EU laws and freedom of movement in return.

The “Norway option” is what compromises are meant to be: a deal that fully satisfies no one. It might have won over tepid supporters of Leave, who were not prepared to have their futures sacrificed on the altar of British nationalism.

Norway vanished into the Scandinavian mists months ago. When journalists talk to anti-Brexit campaigners, they say the choice in a second referendum should be between May’s deal with the EU (assuming she can escape from the Tories’ make-believe world for long enough to cut one), crashing out with no deal and staying in. The barely concealed desire is that Remainers will win second time around without the need to make concessions to the 17 million who voted Leave. The barely understood danger is that a significant section of the electorate will revolt against what they see as a rigging of the system and vote accordingly.

Only the imperiousness of a Tory right, whose ambition has left it unhinged, allows Remainers to dream of a rematch. You may not like to admit it but Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are British liberalism’s last best hopes. If their zealotry ensures nothing gets through the Commons, then the case for a second referendum goes from being the wishful thinking of the defeated to a plausible strategy.

Self-interest should make the right compromise. Before 2016, Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan and the rest of the Brexit gang were happy to accept that, in the words of Russia’s favourite British oligarch, Arron Banks, “the Norway option looks the best for the UK”. Now the chance of a complete break with the continent leaves them giddy. They want everything: no customs union, no single market, no role for the European court of justice, no co-operation with any institution with the satanic mark of Europe upon it. They are terrified that, if they moderate their demands, “the establishment” will snatch away their one chance to live the fantasy of recreating the glorious isolation of Victorian Britain in the 21st century.

The same mixture of elation and paranoia powers the far left. Any candid friend should be able to tell Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters that they risk losing an election if they purge Labour of heretics. A McCarthyism of the left will drive away centrist voters, and all but compel dissidents to create a new party. If any friends are speaking uncomfortable truths, the far left isn’t listening. The Labour conference will be dominated by procedural trickery to extend the far left’s control of the party rather than such trivial matters as – oh, I don’t know – the future of the country. Like the Brexiters, like Trump, like so many others who have triumphed when received wisdom said they would fail, Corbyn is high on the vanity unexpected success generates.

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given,” said St Matthew. “But whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” He might have been describing modern Britain, where all sides believe the winner should take it all. Their voracity stems from the collapse of the received wisdom of the boom years. As it turned out, the free-market right did not win the economic war. Commentators, who still condemn or praise “neo-liberalism”, do not understand that it died a decade ago when governments had to provide fantastic sums to save the banking system. Globally, countries are moving towards protectionism and state capitalism.

As for the left’s victory in the culture war, the new right finds it easier to win elections on the cultural battlefield than by making economic promises electorates stopped believing years ago. Meanwhile, the supposedly triumphant cultural left thought in its complacency it could ban rivals, rather than beat them in argument and had no coherent response to the revival of nationalism and white backlash politics in Europe and the US.

In these circumstances, everything can appear up for grabs: the economy, culture, sovereignty and national identity. With so much at stake, it is no wonder politicians and their acolytes are greedy. Let us hope they overreach themselves. Settlements reached by compromise may not satisfy absolutists but they tend to last because all sides have a stake in them. Turn your opponents into enemies, humiliate and abuse them and, when you slip, they will take their revenge.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist