No more Remoaners. No more Saboteurs. No more Citizens of Nowhere. No more We Are The 48%.

A tweet by Alexander Clarkson caught my eye this morning:

As long as Remainers reproduce an inaccurate "citizens of somewhere" with a class subtext they will simply keep playing on Brexiter terms

— Alexander Clarkson  (@APHClarkson) October 30, 2017

Once in a while you read something that crystallises your thinking, articulates something that has been nagging at you but you have not been able to state. So it was with Alexander’s tweet.

These terms that anti-Brexit people often wear as badges of honour – Remoaners, Saboteurs, Citizens of Nowhere, We Are The 48% – were perhaps useful for group formation in the months after the Brexit referendum, for an initial feeling of not being alone. But now they urgently need to be ditched.

Why?

Because the frame that they continue to emphasise is the negative, defensive nature of resistance to Brexit. That the Remain side lost. That the Remain side moans. That they are a minority. That they have no identity.

Enough of that rubbish.

No. Resistance to Brexit is vital. It’s imperative. It’s important. It’s to stop the UK going off a cliff. It’s to defend real people’s lives and livelihoods.

What we now know about Brexit – the economic damage it will cause, the almighty mess it will cause in Ireland, the nature of connections between pro-Leave Campaigns and the alt-right and Russia, that there will be no £350m a week for the NHS – means it is time to move on from re-fighting the referendum, and making a case for what happens next.

How that is to be done is going to need to be pluralistic and differentiated. This tweet by Mike Hind illustrates the point:

https://twitter.com/MikeH_PR/status/924954800067940353

You are never going to get me describing myself as a patriot. That word is for me a complete turn off. But people like Mike and I ultimately share more in common than separates us.

Alexander also makes a link between Brexit and regionalist movements:

Also look at how Catalan and Scottish unionists frame their identity. Local patriots, fiercely loyal to union and enthusiastic Europeans

— Alexander Clarkson  (@APHClarkson) October 30, 2017

My sympathy for Scottish independence was not borne out of nationalism, but out of civic decentralisation. But there were nationalists and patriots on the Yes side too. So it must be for Brexit – if someone wants to make a patriotic case for the Brexit resistance (Best for Britain‘s whole branding does precisely this for example) then by all means. But there are other ways too. Emphasise what matters to you and to people like you, and look forward with confidence and determination.

Want to know how and why? Get yourself a copy of Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”, learn the lessons from “The Debunking Handbook“, and then rename your Twitter accounts, websites and Facebook pages, and look forward to the next stage of the Brexit battle, rather than defensively looking backwards at previous fights and using the frames of your opponents.